Phantom Wires Part 31

A sound of voices floated out to them and Mac.n.u.tt tightened his grip on the other's arm, as they stood and listened, for it was Frances Durkin and Keenan talking together, hurriedly, impetuously, earnestly.

"But does it make any difference what I have been, or who I am?" the woman's voice was asking. "I did my part; I did my work for you. Now you ought to give me a chance!"

Still holding the other back, Mac.n.u.tt circled sidewise, until they came into the line of vision with the unsuspecting pair in the other room.

Keenan, they could see, held one heavy hand on the woman's shoulder, intimately; and she, in turn, looked up into his face, in an att.i.tude as open and intimate.

"You know, now, what I have known before you!" whispered Mac.n.u.tt, into the ear of the tortured Durkin.

"You lie!" murmured Durkin's lips, but no sound came from them, for his staring eyes were still on the scene before him.

"Listen then, you fool!" was all his tempter whispered back. And they stood together, listening.

"But I _am_ giving you a chance," Keenan next replied, and his long, melancholy Celtic face was white and colorless with emotion. "I'm giving you the only chance that life holds for both of us!"

"I know it!" said the woman.

Keenan's arms went out to her, and she did not draw back. Instead, she reached up her own seemingly wearied and surrendering arms, without a word, and held him there in her obliterating embrace. He swayed a little, where he stood, and for a moment neither moved nor spoke.

Mac.n.u.tt, narrowly watching the shadowy face of Durkin, saw pictured on that pallid and changing countenance fear and revolt, one momentary touch of despairing doubt, and then a mounting and all-consuming pa.s.sion of blind rage.

In that drunken rage seemed to culminate all his misgivings, his suspicions, his apparent betrayals of the past. He trembled and shook like a man in a vertigo; the fingers of his upraised right hand opened and closed spasmodically; his flaccid lips fell apart, vacuously, insanely.

"I'll kill her!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed under his breath. Mac.n.u.tt knew that his moment had come.

Without a spoken word he caught his revolver up from his coat pocket.

Then he thrust it, craftily, into the other man's hand.

The insane fingers closed on the handle of it, the glaring and expressionless eye peered along the steadying barrel. Mac.n.u.tt held his breath, and waited. It must be soon, he knew, before the moment of madness had burnt itself out.

The woman under the white light of the electrolier drew back from Keenan, with her eyes still on his face, so that her head and shoulders stood out, a target of black against the white fore-ground. Then she drew one hand quickly across her forehead, and, wheeling slowly, let her puzzled glance sweep the entire circle of the room, until once more her eyes rested upon the expectant eyes of Keenan.

Durkin, through all his rage, shut his teeth on a sudden sob. It was all over. It was the end.

A change suddenly swept across the woman's face, a light of exaltation leaped into her dilated pupils, and her hand went up to her heart.

Was it some small sound or movement that she had heard, or was it some minute vibration of floor that she had felt?

"_Jim, it's you_!" she shrilled out suddenly, into the heavy silence, in a tense and high soprano, with a voice not like her own.

"_Jim, where are you_?" she called pa.s.sionately, as she beat Keenan impotently back with her naked hands. "Help me, quick! Can't you see I need you? Can't you see this is _killing me_?"

Keenan fell back before her, aghast.

"You fool, you weak fool!" she shrieked at him madly. "Do you think I meant that? Do you dream I could respect or care for an animal like you! Do you imagine I would endure the touch of your hands, if it wasn't to save me till this? Do you dream----?"

She stopped suddenly, for with one sweep of his advancing arm Durkin tore the heavy portiere from its curtain-rings, and he stood before them, in the flat white light of the electrics.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE LAST DITCH

Durkin advanced into the room quickly, the revolver in his right hand.

It was a short-barreled bull-dog gun of heavy caliber, ugly and menacing as it swung from his out-thrust wrist, held low, with the right elbow pressed close in to his side. In the doorway stood Mac.n.u.tt. His eyes were staring, his bullock head thrown back, bewildered at the sudden change that one sweep of an arm had brought to the scene.

As Durkin edged craftily round, with his back to the side wall, so that his eye commanded the silent trio before him, Frank made a movement to draw away from Keenan, who stood grotesquely petrified, his lean jaw fallen, the melancholy Celtic face touched more with wonder than with fear.

"Don't move!" commanded her husband, as he saw the motion. "Stay where you are!"

She looked at him, as bewildered as the others.

"That man, you'll find, is armed."

"You lie--you fool!"

"That man, I say, is armed!"

Keenan laughed, scoffingly.

"Take his revolver from him!" commanded Durkin.

A momentary hesitation held her back.

"Take it, I say! And, by G.o.d, if he so much as moves a finger, I'll blow the top of his head off!"

The woman confronted Keenan once more, but he fell back a step or two.

"There's no need of that," he broke in angrily. "If you want the gun, I'll give it to you!"

And as he spoke his arm swung down and back to his hip pocket.

"Stop that!" cried Durkin sharply, as he saw the movement. "Keep those hands up, or, by heaven, I'll let you have it!"

His arm, by this time, was tense and rigidly out-stretched, and his steady pistol-barrel pointed just between the other man's ludicrously blinking eyes. In the silence that followed the woman reached back, and without further hesitation drew the revolver from the motionless man's pocket.

It was a formidable, long-barreled "Colt," which, with one sharp motion of the fingers, she promptly unlimbered, exposing the breech. In each cylinder chamber, she saw, lay a loaded cartridge. Once a.s.sured of this, she snapped shut the breech and balanced the gun in the purposeful embrace of her fingers.

"Now what?" she asked, with her eyes turned to her husband. But the triumph suddenly died out of her face.

She was only in time to hear Durkin's sharp cry of anger, and to see his quick spring through the wide door-way, as the guard-door of the elevator closed and the cage shot up into s.p.a.ce.

"We've missed him!" he gasped, with a cry of rage, as he ran to the door through which Mac.n.u.tt, in that moment of excitement, had disappeared.

Frank kept her eyes on Keenan. She, too, began to feel the sense of some vast finality in their moves and actions that night.

Keenan laughed. It was a dry and joyless laugh, but it was discouraging.