Phantom Wires Part 22

A new and strange paralysis of all his emotions seemed to have crept over Durkin, as he watched the cab door slammed shut and the horses go plunging and curveting out through the crowd.

"You'd better get away as quiet as you can!" said the policeman, in an undertone, for Durkin had slipped a ten-dollar bill into his unprotesting fingers. "You'd better slide, for if the colonel happens along I can't do much to help you out!"

Then, with his hand on Durkin's cab door he said, with unfeigned bewilderment: "Say, what's the game of your actress friend, anyway?"

Durkin turned away in disgust, without answering. She was no longer his friend; she was his enemy, his betrayer! He had lived by the sword, and by the sword he should die! He had triumphed through crime, and through crime he was being undone! He had led her into the paths of duplicity; he had taught her wrong-doing and dishonor; and with the very tools he had put in her hand she had cut her way out to liberty, and turned and defeated him!

Then he remembered the scene on the _Slavonia_, and her pa.s.sionate cry for him, for his love. In the wake of this came the memory of still earlier scenes and still more pa.s.sionate cries for what he had so scantily given her.

Then suddenly he smote his knees with his clenched fists, and said aloud:

"It can't be true! It can't be true!"

CHAPTER XIX

THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST

Any pa.s.sion so neutral and negative as jealousy soon burned itself out in an actively positive brain like Durkin's. And it left, as so often had happened with him, manifold gray ash-heaps of regret for past misdeeds. It also brought with it the customary revulsion of feeling, and a prowling hunger for some amendatory activity. Yet with that hunger came a new and disturbing sense of fear. He was realizing, almost too late, the predicament into which he and Frank had stumbled, the danger into which he had pa.s.sively permitted his wife to drift.

It was not until after two hours of fierce and troubled thought, however, that Durkin left the Bartholdi, and taking a hansom, drove down that man-crowded creva.s.se where lower Broadway flaunted its Semitic signboards to the world, directly to the Criminal Courts building in Centre street.

Once there, he made his way to the office of the district-attorney. As he thoughtfully waited for admission into that democratized court of last appeal there pa.s.sed through his mind the dangers and the chances that lay before him. The situation had its menaces, both obvious and unforeseen, but the more he thought it over the more he realized that the emergency called for action, at once decisive and immediate. He had already bungled and hesitated and misjudged. Blind feeling had warped his judgment. Until then he had blocked out his path of action only crudely; there had been little time for the weighing of consequences and the antic.i.p.ation of contingencies. He had acted quickly and blindly. He had both succeeded and been defeated.

Still again the actual peril hanging over his wife came home to him.

In the dust and tumult of battle, and in the black depths of the jealous vapors that had so blinded and sickened him, he had for the moment forgotten just what she meant to him, just how handicapped and helpless he stood without her.

If the thought of their separation touched him, because of more emotional reasons, it was already too early in his mood of reaction to admit it to his own shamefaced inner self. Yet he felt, now, that through it all she was true gold. It was only when the tie stood most strained and tortured that the sense of its actual strength came home to him.

As these thoughts and feelings swept disjointedly through his busy head word was sent out to him that he might see the district-attorney.

The office he stepped into was curtain-draped and carpeted, and hung with framed portraits, and strewn with heavy and comfortable-looking leather arm-chairs. Durkin had expected it to look like an iron-grilled precinct police-station, and he was a little startled by the sense of luxury and well-being pervading the place.

Tilted momentarily back in a leather chair, behind a high-backed hardwood desk, the visitor caught a glimpse of one of those nervously alert, youngish-old figures which always seemed to him so typically American.

The man behind the high-backed desk paused in his task of checking a list of typewritten names, and motioned Durkin to a seat. The visitor could see that he was with an official who would countenance no profligate waste of time. So he plunged straight into the heart of his subject.

"This office is at present carrying on a campaign against Richard Penfield, the poolroom operator and gambler."

The district-attorney put down his paper.

"This office is carrying on a campaign against every lawbreaker brought to its attention," he corrected, succinctly. Then he caught up another type-written sheet. "How much have you lost?" he asked over his shoulder.

"I'm not a gambler," retorted Durkin as crisply. His earlier timidity had faded away, and more and more he felt the relish of this adventure with the powers that were opposing him.

"I suppose not--but how much were your losses?"

"I've lost nothing!" Durkin was growing impatient of this curtly condescending tone. It was the ponderosity of officialdom, he felt, grown playful, in the face of a pa.s.sing triviality.

The district-attorney turned over the card which had been brought in to him, with a deprecating uplift of the eyebrows.

"Most of the people who come here to talk about Penfield and his friends come to tell me how much they've lost." He leaned back, and sent a little cloud of cigarette smoke ceilingward. "And, of course, it's part of this office's duty to keep a fool and his money together--as long as possible. What is it I can do for you?"

"I want your help to get a woman out of Penfield's new downtown house!"

"What woman?"

"She is--well, she is a very near friend of mine! She's being held a prisoner there!"

"By the police?"

"No, by certain of Penfield's men."

"What men?"

"Mac.n.u.tt, the wire tapper, is one of them!"

"And you would like us to get after Mac.n.u.tt?"

"Yes, I would!"

"On the charge of wire tapping?"

"That should be one of them!"

"Then I can only refer you to the decision of the Court of Appeals in the McCord case, and the Appellate Division's reversal of the 'green-goods' conviction of 1900! In other words, sir, there is no law under which a wire tapper can be prosecuted."

"But it's not a conviction I want, as much as the woman. I want to save _her_."

"Is she a respectable woman?"

Durkin felt that his look was answer enough.

"Is she a frequenter of poolrooms?"

Durkin hesitated, this time, and weighed his answer.

"I don't think so."

"She's not a frequenter?"

"No!"

"Some rather nice women are, you know, at times!"

"She may have been, once, I suppose, but I know not recently."