Phantom Wires Part 28

For out of the quiet and shadowy south side of the street, where it had been silently patrolling under lowered speed, swerved and darted a wine-colored, surrey-built touring car with a cape top. Durkin recognized it at a glance; it was Penfield's huge machine. Its movement, as it swung in toward the startled woman, seemed like the swoop of a hawk. It appeared to stop only for a moment, but in that moment two men leaped from the wide-swung tonneau door. When they clambered into it once more Durkin saw that Frank was between them.

And one of the men was Mac.n.u.tt, and the other Keenan.

He heard the one sharp scream that reverberated down the empty street, followed by the fading pulsations of the departing car, when with an oath of fury, he was already working his arms up through the narrow manhole. As he did so he heard a second, hoa.r.s.er cry, succeeded by the heavy tramp of hurrying feet, and then a peremptory challenge.

Turning sharply, he caught sight of a patrolling roundsman, bearing down on him from the corner of Broadway; and he saw that the officer was drawing his revolver as he charged across the wet pavement.

It was already too late to free himself. With an instinctive movement of the hands he caught up the manhole cover, shield-like. As he did so he saw the glimmer of the polished steel and heard the repeated challenge. But he neither paused nor hesitated. He let his knees break under him, and as he fell he saw to it that the rim of the manhole dropped into its waiting circular groove. Then he heard the sound of a shot, of a second and a third, from the policeman's pistol.

But as he secured the cover with its chainlock, and dropped down into the tunnel below, the reports seemed thin and m.u.f.fled and far away to Durkin.

A moment later, however, he heard the ominous and vibrant echo of the officer's night-stick, on the asphalt, frenziedly rapping for a.s.sistance.

CHAPTER XXV

THE RULING Pa.s.sION

Beyond that first involuntary little cry of terror Frances Durkin uttered no sound, as she found herself in the hooded tonneau, wedged in between Mac.n.u.tt and Keenan. That first outcry, indeed, had been unwilled and automatic, the last reactionary movement of an overtried and exhausted body.

A wave of care-free pa.s.sivity now seemed to inundate her. She made no attempt to struggle; she nursed no sense of open resentment against her captors. The battery of her vital forces was depleted and depolarized.

She experienced only a faintly poignant sense of disappointment, of indeterminate pique, as she realized that she was no longer a free agent. Leaning back in the cushioned gloom, inert, impa.s.sive, with her eyes half-closed, she seemed to be drifting through an eddying veil of gray. The voices so close beside her sounded thin and far off. An impression of unreality clung to her, an impression that she was floating through an empty and rain-swept world from which all life and warmth had withered.

"It's not _her_ I want--it's Durkin!" Mac.n.u.tt was saying, with an oath, as they swung around the corner into the blinking and serried lights of Eighth avenue. "It's that d.a.m.ned groundhog I'm goin' to dig out yet!"

"Well, you can't go back _there_ after him!" protested Keenan.

"Can't I? Well, I'm goin' back, and I'm goin' to get that man, and I'm goin' to fry him in his own juices!"

He pushed the woman's inert weight away from him, and leaned out from under the cape, with a sharp word or two to Penfield's chauffeur. Then he suddenly whistled and waved his arm.

"What are you doing that for?" Keenan demanded of him.

Keenan had caught the drooping figure, and was making an effort to support it. His face, for some unknown reason, was almost as colorless as the face that lay so pa.s.sively against his rain-soaked shoulder.

"I'm goin' back!" declared Mac.n.u.tt.

"Is it worth while--now?" demurred the other.

"I'm goin' to get my hooks on Durkin, even if I have to wade through every raidin' gang in the precinct!"

"And then what?" deprecated Keenan.

"Then I'll meet you at Penfield's house, uptown, and the show will come to a finish!"

"And what am I expected to do?" demanded Keenan, impatiently. For the approaching four-wheeler had come to a standstill beside them, and Mac.n.u.tt was already out in the rain.

"You take care o' _that_!" he pointed a contemptuous finger toward the motionless woman, "and mighty good care!"

"But how's all this going to help us out?"

"I'll show you, when the time comes. Here's the key for Penfield's house. You'll find it nice and quiet and secluded there, and if I _do_ bring Durkin back with me, by heaven, you'll have the privilege o'

seein' a lurid end to this uncommonly lurid game!"

He tossed the key into the tonneau. Keenan picked it up in silence.

They heard the clatter of the horses' hoofs on the wet asphalt, the sharp closing of the cab door, the rattle of the wheel-tires across the steel car-tracks, and he was gone. A moment later they were dipping up the avenue between two long rows of undulating lights, with the rain drifting in on their faces.

Then Keenan turned and looked down at the woman beside him. During several minutes of unbroken silence Frank nursed the dim consciousness of his keen and scrutinizing glance. But her mind seemed encaged in a body that was already dead; she had neither the will nor the power to look up at him.

Then, with no warning word or gesture, he stooped down and kissed her on her heavy red mouth.

At any other time, she knew, she would have fought against that tainting touch; every drop of red blood in her body would have risen to combat it. But now she neither repulsed it nor responded to it. She seemed submerged and smothered in a tide of terrible indifference. She even found herself weighing the meaning of that affront to all that was not ign.o.ble in her.

She even caught at it, with an inward gasp of enlightenment. It meant more than she had at first seen. It brought a new scene to the shifting drama; it meant a new turn to the hurrying game. It meant that if she only waited, and could be wise and wary and calculating, she still might hug to her breast some tattered hope for the impending end.

She knew that Keenan was still watching her; she knew that he was, in some manner, being torn between contending feelings, that some obliterating impulse was falling between him and that grim concert of forces of which he was a member. It was the shadow of pa.s.sion falling across the paths of duty--it was the play and the problem as old as the world.

And what was she, then? That was the question she asked herself, with a little sobbing gasp--what was she, trading thus, even in thought, on her bruised and wearied body? What had she fallen to, what was it that had deadened all that was softer and better and purer within her, that she could thus see slip away from her the last solace and dignity of her womanhood?

There, she told herself bitterly, lay the degradation and the ultimate danger of the life she had led. It was there that the grimmer tragedy came into her career. The surrender of ever greater and greater hostages to expediency, the retreat to ever meaner and meaner instruments of activity, the gradual induration of heart and soul, the desperate and ever more desperate search for self-deceiving extenuations, for self-blinding condonement, for pitiful and distorting self-propitiation--in these lay the inward corruption, more implacably and more terribly tragic than any outward blow! She had once deluded herself with the thought that a life of crime might lose at least half of its evil by losing all of its grossness. She had even consoled herself with the thought that it was the offender against life who saw deepest into life. It was but natural, she had always argued with herself, that the thwarted consciousness, that the erring and suffering heart, should yield deeper insight into the dark and complicated ranges of spiritual truth than could the soul forever untried and unshaken.

The tempted and troubled heart, from its lonely towers of unhappiness, must ever see further into the meaning of things than could those comfortably normal and healthy souls who suffered little because they ventured little. She had ventured much, and she had lost much. She had thought to hold some inmost self aloof and immune. She had dreamed that some inward irreproachability of thought, some light-hearted tact of open conduct, might leave still untainted that deeper core of thought and feeling which she had long thought of as conscience, while some deceiving and sophistical trans.m.u.tation of values whispered to her adroitly that in some way all good might be bad, and that all bad might in some way be good.

But that, she now knew, was a mockery. She was the sum of all that she had thought and acted. She was a disillusioned and degraded and unscrupulous woman, steeped in enormities so dark that it appalled and sickened her even to recall them. She was only the empty and corroded sh.e.l.l of a woman, all that once aspired and lived and hoped in her eaten away by the acid currents of that underground world into which she had fallen.

Yet rather than it should end in that slow and mean and sordid inner tragedy of the spirit, she told herself fiercely, she would fling open her last a.r.s.enal of pa.s.sion and come to her end in some ironic blaze of glory that would at least lend sinister radiance to a timelessly base and sorry eclipse. So she lay back in Keenan's clasp quiescently, unresistingly, but watchfully. For she knew that the end, whatever it might be, was not far away.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CROWN OF IRON

Durkin's first feeling, as he scrambled to his feet and half-stumbled, half-groped his way along the narrow, tunnel-like pa.s.sage, was an untimely and impotent and almost delirious pa.s.sion to get out into the open and fight--fight to the last, if need be, for all that narrowing life still held for him. This feeling was followed by a quick sense of frustration as he realized his momentary helplessness and how comprehensive and relentless seemed the machinery of intrigue opposing him.

Yet, he told himself with that lightning-like rapidity of thought which came to him at such moments of peril, however intricate and vast the machinery, however carefully planned the line of impending campaign, the human element would be an essential part of it. And his last forlorn hope, his final fighting chance, lay in the fact that wherever the human element entered there also entered weakness and pa.s.sion and the possibility of accident.

What now remained to him, he warned himself as he hurriedly locked and barred the two steel doors which shut off the first and second pa.s.sageway, was to think quickly and act decisively. Somewhere, at some unforeseen moment, his chance might still come to him.

As for himself, he felt that he was safe enough, for the time being.

The officer who had detected him in the manhole would be sure to follow up a case so temptingly suspicious. The police, in turn, could take open advantage of an intrusion so obviously unauthorized and ominous as his own, and find in it ample excuse for investigating a quarter which for many months must have been under suspicion. But, under any circ.u.mstances, well guarded as that poolroom fortress stood, its resistance could be only a matter of time, and of strictly limited time, once the reserves were on the scene.

Durkin's first thought, accordingly, was of the roof, for, so far as he knew, all escape from the ground floor was even then cut off. Yet the first door leading from the vault chamber he found to be steel-bound and securely locked. He surmised, with a gasp of consternation, that the doors above him would be equally well secured. He remembered that Penfield never did things by halves, and he felt that his only escape lay in that upward flight.

So he saw that it was to be a grim race in demolition; that while he was to gnaw and eat his way upward through steel and brick, like a starving rat boring its pa.s.sage up through the chambers of a huge granary, his pursuers would be pounding and battering at the lower doors in just as frenzied pursuit.

He no longer hesitated, but moved with that clear-thoughted rapidity of action which often came to him in his moments of half-delirium.