As a result of her midnight conference with Durkin, Frances Candler learned many things. One of these was the fact that the life into which she had flung herself was proving a captor that already threatened to extort a cruelly impossible ransom. Another was the discovery that Durkin stood even deeper than she did in those conspiratorial quicksands from which she tore one limb only to be engulfed by another. For all along, she saw, he had been a quiet observant intrigant, conspiring against a new field of activity toward which she had not even thought to glance.
For after that hurried midnight talk she knew that the Secretary of Agriculture, at Washington, from time to time received sealed mail reports from the South as to the condition of the cotton crop. She also learned that there had been a series of startling and disastrous “leaks” from these confidential government reports, and that a private wire now connected the office of the Department with Savannah and New Orleans. Durkin had already ascertained that over this wire, on the last day, or the last “market” day, of each month, until the leakage had been stopped, would pass those despatches and figures on which the Department of Agriculture would verify and base its monthly report of the cotton outlook.
“That system is going to be kept up,” Durkin had explained to her, “until the Secretary finds out who is stealing the figures and doing the manipulating on them in the New York Cotton Exchange. At any rate, I know he’s going to keep this wire in use until the decent brokers stop bombarding him and the Census Bureau with their telegrams about collusion and fraud. But here’s the point that interests us. If this present wire report turns out to be favorable, the feverish way the market stands now, it means, of course that there’s going to be a pretty serious break in Cotton Exchange trading. But, on the other hand, if this short-cut official report carries the news of a shortage, it’s as plain as day that Curry and all the other New York bears will have a lever to pry up the price of cotton with, high as it stands already.”
“And what is it we want to know?” she had asked.
“We’ve got to find out which way that report goes—whether it’s good or bad. I’ll be here in New York, waiting to get your cipher message over a Postal-Union wire. Whichever way it goes, I’ll govern myself accordingly, jump into the market with every penny I have, and do precisely what three hundred highly respectable brokers have been doing for the last two months. The only thing that makes me hot is that I haven’t a few thousand, instead of a paltry few hundred, to fling into it!”
Her instructions were brief, but explicit. While he waited in New York, ready to act on word from her, she was to hurry to Washington, and from Washington go on to the somnolent little Virginia town of Leeksville. This town, Durkin had already made sure, lay on the route of the Department of Agriculture’s New Orleans wire.
On the main street of the little town through which this wire ran stood a ramshackle, three-storied wooden hotel. From the top floor of this hotel every wire that went humming like a harp of haste through that avenue of quietness was easily accessible. Any person enlightened and audacious enough to pick it out from among its companions and attach to it a few feet of “No. 12” and a properly graduated relay would find the rest of his task astoundingly easy. As Durkin had pointed out, already knowing what they did, the one great problem lay in getting unsuspected into the third-floor room of that wooden Leeksville hotel.
With a jointed split-bamboo fishing-pole, neatly done up in a parasol cover, and with her complete wire-tapping outfit as neatly packed away in a dress-suit case, Frances Candler ten hours later registered at that ancient and unsavory-looking hostelry. A weary and bedraggled theatrical company, which had just made the late “jump” from Fredericksburg, preceded her, and she made it a point to approach the desk at the heels of a half-a-dozen noisy chorus girls.
There she asked for a top-floor room.
The over-gallant clerk insisted that she should go anywhere but on the top floor. There would be no difference in the cost of the rooms, to her. He would make that, indeed, a personal matter.
“But I prefer the top floor,” she maintained, biting her lip and giving no other sign of her indignation.
The clerk insisted that the climb would be too much for her; and most of the floor, he explained, was given over to the servants.
She began to despair.
“But I sleep lightly—and I must have seclusion!”
The perturbed clerk protested that in Leeksville noises were unknown by day, much less by night. A circle of rotunda idlers now stood behind her, taking in the scene. A flash of inspiration came to her.
“I’ve got to go up to the top, I tell you!” she cried, impatiently. “Can’t you see I’ve got asthma!”
And the angry asthmatic woman in the heavy veil was finally surrendered to the loneliness and discomfort of her southwest corner room on the barren and carpetless third floor.
There she quietly unpacked her suit-case, jointed her pole of split bamboo, attached and graduated her relay, and fingered noiselessly through the tangle of wires beneath her window for that one and essential thread of metal along which was to flash the departmental cotton reports, between New Orleans and Washington.
There, hour after hour, she sat and waited and watched; and it was late in the next morning that, white and worn-out, she detached the unobserved wire, hurried off her brief despatch in cipher, ordered breakfast up to her room, and even before undressing fell into a long and restless slumber.
That day, in her narrow little corn-husk bed, she dreamed that she and Durkin had tunnelled under the Potomac River and had carried away the last ounce of gold from the United States Treasury. How many millions they had taken it was beyond them even to count. But she knew they were escaping in submarines and were being breathlessly pursued by the entire North Atlantic fleet. And her one great fear, during all that agonized and endless pursuit, seemed not that she was destined either to final capture, or to final suffocation, but that, in some way, she might become separated from Durkin.
Durkin waited, with the receiver at his ear. Once more the signal-bell shrilled and cluttered its curtly hurried warning. A vague yet nasal and half-impatient voice murmured brokenly out of somewhere to some one: “You’re connected now—go ahead.”
Then came a grating rasp and drone, a metallic click or two, and out of the stillness there floated in to his waiting ear the space-filtered music of an anxious “Hello”—flute-like, mellow, far-away.
It seemed to him there, under the stress of his passing mood, that an incorporeal presence had whispered the word to him. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, the miracle of it all came home to him, the mystery and magic of that tenuous instrument, which could guide, and treasure, and carry in to him through the night the very tone and timbre of that one familiar voice, flashing it so many miles through star-hung forest and hill and valley, threading it on through sleeping towns and turbulent cities, winging it through wind and water unerringly home to his waiting ear.
“Hello!” the anxious contralto was asking again.
“Hello?” cried Durkin, pent in the little bald speaking-closet, yet his face illuminated with a wonderful new alertness. “Hello! Is that you, Frank?”
A ripple of relieved laughter ebbed out of the wire.
“Oh, Jim,” sounded the far-away voice in his ear, sighingly. “It seems so good!”
“Where are you?”
“In Washington, at the Arlington office.”
He chuckled a little, as though the accomplishment of the miracle, the annihilation of so many miles of space, was a matter of his own personal triumph.
“Here we’re talking together through three hundred miles of midnight!” he boasted to her.
“Yes, I know; but I wish it wasn’t so far! Did you recognize my voice there?”
“I’d know that voice in—in Hell!” he answered, with a sudden grim but inadequate earnestness. He had hoped to say something fitting and fine, but, as always seemed to happen to him in such moments, his imagination foundered in the turbulence of his emotions.
“You may have to some day, my poor Orpheus!” she was laughing back at him.
But the allusion was lost on Durkin, and he cut in with a curt, “What’s happened?”
“I want to come home!” It must have been a good night for ’phoning, he felt, as he heard those five cogent words, and an inconsequential little glow suffused him. Not an ohm of their soft wistfulness, not a coulomb of their quiet significance, had leaked away through all their hundreds of miles of midnight travel. It almost seemed that he could feel the intimate warmth of her arms across the million-peopled cities that separated them; and he projected himself, in fancy, to the heart of the far-off turbulence where she stood. There, it seemed to him, she radiated warmth and color and meaning to the barren wastes of life, a glowing and living ember in all the dead ashes of unconcern. And again it flashed through him, as the wistful cadence of her voice died down on the wire, that she was all that he had in life, and that with her, thereafter, he must rise or sink.
“I want to come home,” she was repeating dolefully.
“You’ve got to come, and come quick!”
“What was that?”
“I say, risk it and come,” he called back to her. “Something has happened!”
“Something happened? Not bad news, is it?”
“No—but it will open your eyes, when you hear it!”
“Everything at my end has been done, you know.”
“You mean it came out all right?”
“Not quite all right, but I think it will do. Is it safe for me to tell you something?”
“Yes, anything in reason, I guess.”
“Curry’s men in New Orleans are working against him!”
“Let me add something to that. Green and his men are trying to break Curry, and Curry all the time is laying a mine under every blessed one of them!” and Durkin gave vent to a triumphant chuckle, deep down in his throat.
“Where did you find this out?” the unperturbed and far-away contralto was demanding.
“You could never guess.”
“Talk faster, or this telephoning will break us!” she warned him.
“Oh, I don’t care—it’s worth the money.”
“Hello—Hello! Oh, all right. Go on!”
“You heard about the fire in the Terminal Room of the Postal-Union? No—well, some dago with a torch got a little too careless in a P. U. conduit, and set fire to a cable-splicer’s pot of paraffin down on lower Broadway, not much more than a hundred yards from Wall Street itself. Then the flames caught on the burlap and the insulating grease and stuff round the cables—can you hear me? There was the dickens to pay, and in about ten minutes they looked more like a cart-load of old excelsior than the business wires of a few thousand offices!”
“Yes, go on!”
“Well, it stopped nine thousand telephones, and put over two hundred stock-tickers out of business, and cut off nearly five hundred of the Postal-Union wires, and left all lower New York without even fire-alarm service. That’s saying nothing of the out-of-town wires, and the long distance service,—did you get all that?”
“Perfectly.”
“Well, there’s a lot more to tell, but it will keep—say till Thursday night. You may be able to imagine just what it is, from what I’ve told you; but listen: I think I can open your eyes, when you get here!” he repeated, slowly and significantly.
“All right—even a Great Western wire might have ears, you know!” she warned him.
“Quite so, but how about your Savannah information? There’s nothing new?”
“Nothing. But you saw the newspaper stories?”
“The Herald yesterday said the Secretary of Agriculture had demanded from the Savannah Cotton Exchange the name of a wire-house that bulletined a government crop report thirty minutes ahead of the official release.”
“Yes, that’s Dunlap & Company. They are frantic. They still declare there was no leak, and are fighting it out with the department here at Washington. In the meantime, luckily for us, they are, of course, sending out press-statements saying it was all a coincidence between their firm’s private crop-estimate and the actual government report. I couldn’t give you much of a margin of time to work on.”
“That thirty minutes just gave me time to get in on the up-town quotations. I missed the lower office, of course.”
“Hadn’t we better hold this over?”
“Yes; I rather forgot—it’ll wait until you get here.”
“Then Thursday night, at eight, say, at the Grenoble!”
“No, no; make it nine forty-five—I don’t get away until then.”
“What would the Grenoble people say?”
“That’s so—you had better go to the Ralston. It’s free and easy. Yes, the Ralston,” he repeated. “The Ralston, at nine forty-five, Thursday. Good-bye!”
A moment later he could hear the frantic signal-bell again.
“Hello! Hello! What is it?”
“Hello, New York! Not through yet,” said the tired and nasal voice of the operator.
“You forgot something!” It was the contralto voice this time, reproachful and wounded. Durkin laughed a little as he leaned closer to the mouth-piece of his transmitter.
“Good-bye, dearest!” he said.
“Good-bye, my beloved own!” answered the wire, across its hundreds of miles of star-strewn midnight.
Durkin hung up his receiver with a sigh, and stopped at the office to pay his bill. All that was worth knowing and having, all that life held, seemed withdrawn and engulfed in space. He felt grimly alone in a city out of which all reality had ebbed. It seemed to him that somewhere a half-heard lilt of music had suddenly come to a stop.
A spirit of restless loneliness took possession of him, as he stepped out into the crowded solitudes of Broadway. His thoughts ran back to the day that he had first met Frances Candler, when, half unwillingly joining forces with MacNutt, he had followed that most adroit of wire-tappers to his up-town house. He remembered his astonishment as the door swung back to MacNutt’s secret ring, and Frank stood there in the doorway, looking half timidly out at them, with her hand still on the knob. How far away it seemed; and yet, as the world went, it could be counted in months. He had thought her a mere girl at first, and he recalled how he imagined there had been a mistake in the house number, as he saw the well-groomed figure in black, with its wealth of waving chestnut hair, and the brooding violet eyes with their wordless look of childish weariness. It was only later that he had taken note of the ever betraying fulness of throat and breast, and the touch of mature womanhood in the shadows about the wistful eyes. He remembered, point by point, the slow English voice, with its full-voweled softness of tone, as she answered MacNutt’s quick questions, the warm mouth and its suggestion of impulsiveness, the girlishly winning smile with which she had welcomed him as her partner in that house of underground operating and unlooked-for adventure, the quick and nervous movements of the muscular body that always carried with it a sense of steely strength half-sheathed in softness.
Bit by bit he recalled their tasks and their perils together.
What touched him most, as he paced the odorous, lamp-hung valley of the Rialto, was the memory of this wistful woman’s sporadic yet passionate efforts to lead him back to honesty. Each effort, he knew, had been futile, though for her sake alone he had made not a few unthought of struggles to be decent and open and aboveboard in at least the smaller things of life.
But the inebriation of great hazards was in his veins. They had taken great chances together; and thereafter, he felt, it could be only great chances that would move and stir and hold them. Now he would never be content, he knew, to lounge about the quiet little inns of life, with the memory of those vast adventures of the open in his heart and the thirst for those vast hazards in his veins.
As he turned, in Longacre Square, to look back at that turbulent valley of lights below him, he remembered, incongruously enough, that the midnight Tenderloin was the most thoroughly policed of all portions of the city—the most guarded of all districts in the world. And what a name for it, he thought—the Tenderloin, the tenderest and most delectable, the juiciest and the most sustaining district in all New York, for the lawless egotist, whether his self-seeking took the form of pleasure or whether it took the form of profit!
A momentary feeling of repugnance at what was unlovely in life crept over him, but he solaced himself with the thought that, after all, it was the goodness in bad people and the badness in good people that held the mottled fabric together in its tight-meshed union of contradictions.
Then his spirit of loneliness returned to him, and his thoughts went back to Frances Candler once more. He wondered why it was that her casual woman’s touch seemed even to dignify and concentrate open crime itself. He felt that he was unable, now, to move and act without her. And as he thought of what she had grown to mean to him, of the sustaining sense of coolness and rest which she brought with her, he remembered his first restless night in New York, when he had been unable to sleep, because of the heat in his stifling little bedroom, and had walked the breathless, unknown streets, until suddenly on his face he had felt a cool touch of wind, and the old-time balm of grass and trees and green things had struck into his startled nostrils. It was Central Park that he had stumbled on, he learned later; and he crept into it and fell placidly asleep on one of the shadowy benches.
His memory, as he turned to take a last look down the light-hung cañon of the Rialto, was of the evening that he and his desk-mate, Eddie Crawford, had first driven down that luminous highway, in a taxi, and the lights and the movement and the stir of it had gone to his bewildered young head. For he had leaned out over those titanic tides and exclaimed, with vague and foolish fierceness: “My God, Eddie, some day I’m going to get a grip on this town!”
It was not until night had settled down over the city that Durkin opened the back window of his little top-floor room and peered cautiously out.
There was, apparently, nothing amiss. A noise of pounding came to him from the shipping-room of a lace importer below. A few scattered shafts of light glimmered from the windows opposite. A hazy half-moon slanted down over the house-tops.
When Durkin leaned out of the window for the second time he held in his hand something that looked peculiarly like a fishing-rod. From it dangled two thin green wires, and with the metal hook on the end of it he tested and felt carefully up among the slovenly tangle of wires running out past the overhanging eave.
It was a silly and careless way of doing things, he inwardly decided, this lazy stringing of wires from house-top to house-top, instead of keeping them in the tunnels where they belonged. It was not only violating regulations, but it was putting a premium on “lightning-slinging.” And he remembered what Frances had once said to him about criminals in a city like New York, how the careless riot of wealth seemed to breed them, as any uncleanness breeds bacteria; how, in a way, each was only a natural and inevitable agent, taking advantage of organic waste, seizing on the unguarded and the unorderly. She had even once argued that the criminal could lay claim to a distinct economic value, enjoining, as he did, continual alertness of attention and cleanliness of commercial method.
Yet the devil himself, he had somewhere read, could quote Scripture for his purpose; and his fishing-pole moved restlessly up and down, like a long finger feeling through answering strings. For each time, almost, that his hook rested on one of the wires the little Bunnell relay on the table behind him spoke out feebly. To the trill and clatter of these metallic pulsations Durkin listened intently, until, determining that he had looped into the right wire, he made secure his switch and carefully drew down the window to within an inch of the sill.
Then he gave his studious attention to the little Bunnell relay. Its action was feeble and spasmodic. It was doing scant justice to what Durkin easily saw was a master-hand toying with the rubber button at the far-distant end of the wire. It was not unusually quick operating, but, as the dots and dashes flew on and on, the interloper for a moment or two forgot the meaning of the messages in the clear-cut, crisp, and precise beauty of the sender’s Morse.
“That man,” commented the admiring craftsman in Durkin, “is earning his eight dollars an hour!”
Then, adjusting his rheostat, he slowly and cautiously graduated his current, until new life seemed to throb and flow through the busy little piece of clicking metal. A moment later it was speaking out its weighty and secret messages, innocently, authoritatively, almost triumphantly, it seemed to the eavesdropper, bending over the glimmering armature lever.
A quietly predaceous smile broadened on Durkin’s intent face. He suddenly smote the table with an impetuous little rap of the knuckles, as he sat there listening.
“By heaven, this will open her eyes!” he cried, under his breath.
And he repeated the words more abstractedly, as he lifted his telephone transmitter out on the table and threw open a switch on the wall, well-concealed by the window curtain.
He then adjusted the watch-case receiver to his ear, and settled quietly down in his chair. Striking a match, he held it poised six inches away from the cigar between his teeth. For the sounder had suddenly broken out into life once more, and strange and momentous things were flashing in to him over that little thread of steel. The match burned away and fell from his fingers. He shook himself together with an effort.
Then he snatched up a pencil, and with the watch-case receiver still at his ear and the Bunnell sounder still busy before him, he hurriedly wrote notes on the back of an envelope.
He felt like a lean and empty wharf-rat that had tunnelled into a storehouse of unlimited provision. The very vastness of it amazed and stupefied him. He had been grubbing about for a penny or two, and here he had stumbled across a fabulous-figured banknote.
Then, as item by item he was able to piece his scattered shreds of information together, his mind became clearer and his nerves grew steadier.
He looked at his watch. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. As he had expected, and as had happened every night since Curry had installed the private wire in his Madison Avenue residence, the operator on the up-town end of the line switched off. The sounder grew still, like a clock that had run down. The telephone wire still carried its occasional message in to him, but he knew that he could wait no longer.
It took him but a minute or two to detach his looping wire from the Curry private line. Then he threw back the switch of his telephone, concealed his transmitter, and caught up his hat and coat.
Five minutes later he was careering up Fifth Avenue in a taxi-cab. A new interest, submerged in the sterner tides of life, drifted in on him as he drew nearer the Ralston and Frances Candler. He began to meditate on how much he had been missing out of existence of late, and even how empty all triumph and conquest might be, if unshared by or with another. Some vague and gently disturbing inkling of just how much a woman could become to a man, however preoccupied, crept into the quieter backgrounds of his consciousness. And with a man of his walk in life, uncompanioned, isolated, migratory, this muffling and softening element was doubly essential.
He sent his card up to Frances, with an unreasonably beating heart. Word came down to him, in time, that she was engaged, but that she would see him in twenty minutes.
“But I must see her, and at once!” he told the impassive clerk.
It would be possible in twenty minutes, was the second message that came down to him.
Frances engaged—and not able to see him! The very idea of it startled and enraged him. Who had the right to stand between them?—he demanded of himself, with irrational fierceness. And out of the very midst of his soft and consuming eagerness to see her sprang up a mad fire of jealousy and uncertainty. Who was there, he again demanded of himself,—who was there that could come in this way between Frances Candler and himself, at such a time and under such circumstances? After all, her career was one of open and continuous deception. There was MacNutt! And Ottenheimer! And a dozen more! She made it her business to deceive and dupe others, so artfully, so studiously, so laboriously—why would she not use her tools on him as well? Was she, indeed, as open and candid as he had taken her to be?—she, with all her soft little feline graces, and with all that ambiguous and unknown past of hers!
And yet he remembered how she had held out against him, how he, with his laxer code, had often hurt and wounded every feeling of her sensitive nature. Even before this he had tried to argue that crime in one phase of life implied moral weakness in all other phases of that same career. Yet there she obdurately though pantingly stood, unyielding, stanch, clean of mind and life, a woman of stern honor—and through it all an adventuress and a robber! A black-leg with the conscience of a schoolgirl!—and he laughed inwardly and bitterly at the cheap irony of it all.
His icy and exacting scrutiny of her, as he stepped into her private room, sapped all the warmth out of her greeting. She had thrown on a loose-fitting dressing-gown of pale blue, which showed the white fulness of her arms and throat and darkened the violet of her brooding and seemingly unsatisfied eyes. She was more than beautiful, Durkin had told himself, with a little gulp of anguish. But why had the corroding poison of criminal inclination been poured into a glass so tinted and fragile and lovely to the sight! For there, as he looked at her with still angry and suspicious eyes, he realized, for the first time, just what she was to him, just how completely and implacably she had subjugated him.
“What is it?” she demanded, with a sudden little flutter of fear, standing halfway across the room.
“Who was in this room with you?” he demanded.
She studied his face for a moment or two, slowly shaking her head from side to side. He noticed the tumbled wealth of her glinting chestnut hair, here and there almost a golden red, and again a gulp of anguish swelled at his throat. It was no wonder that MacNutt had good use for her.
“Who has been up here with you?” he repeated miserably, but inexorably.
She seemed to sigh a little, and then her slow English laugh melted out through the room. It was a quiet and sorrowful little laugh, but it shattered the tragedy from the overstrained moment.
“You foolish boy!” she said, half-sorrowfully, as she turned to put the belittered room to rights. “It was the dressmaker I sent for, as soon as I got here. I haven’t a rag! You know that! And you know how often you have said that persons in our sort of business ought to dress well.”
The mad wave of doubt that still tumbled him back and forth ebbed suddenly away, as a woman of forty, short and stolid, stepped briskly and quietly out of the inner bedroom. She bowed a businesslike good night to them as she passed out into the hallway, carrying a handbag.
“And this is the way you welcome me back!” reproved Frances, as she drew away from him and fell to studying his face once more. “Well, we can at least talk business,” she added bitterly, on the heels of his awkward silence. “And that, I know, will appeal to you!”
Durkin bowed to the stroke, and even made belated and disjointed efforts of appeasement. But the petals seemed to have fallen from the shaken flower; a teasing sense of her aloofness from him oppressed his mind. In fact, it had always been in the full hue and cry of their adventures with the grim powers of the law that she had seemed nearest to him.
The thought came to him, with a quick sense of terror, of how he might suffer at a time or in a situation not so ridiculously transparent as the present. If, indeed, she ever did give him actual cause for jealousy, how it would rend and tear those roots which had pierced so much deeper than he had ever dreamed! And for a passing moment he felt almost afraid of himself.
“Then it wasn’t so difficult, after all?” commented Durkin, as Frances ended a description of her three days in Leeksville.
“No, it wasn’t the trouble so much—only, for the first time in my life, I felt so—so cruelly alone!” She found it hard to explain it to him adequately. She wondered why it was she should always shrink from undraping any inner corner of her soul to him, why, at times, she should stand so reluctant to win any of the more intimate touches of comradeship from him.
“That’s the drawback,” he remarked, wide of her mood and thought, “that’s the drawback in doing this sort of thing by oneself!”
“We really ought to hunt in pairs, don’t you think, like timber wolves?”
She turned and looked at him, with a still mocking and yet a warmer light coming into her eyes. Some propulsion, not of mind, but of body, seemed to drive her involuntarily toward him—like a ship on a lee shore, she felt—as she sniffed delicately at his cigar-scented gloves, so anomalously redolent of virility, of masculinity, of something compelling and masterful, where they lay in her nervously toying fingers. She tried to laugh at herself, with chastening scorn; but she could not.
“And out of it all,” he went on, “when brokerage fees and other things are counted, we have made just three hundred and sixty-seven dollars!”
“Only that?”
“I had no more than the thirty minutes, you see, for a margin to work on!”
She pushed back her hair with a languid hand.
“But why cry over spilt milk?” she asked, wearily. Firmer and firmer, she felt, this mad fever of money-getting was taking hold on him.
“Especially when we seem about to wade knee-deep in cream!”
She made a last effort to fall in with his mood of ruthless aggression.
“Yes; what’s this you were going to open my eyes with?”
The final vestige of his clouded restraint slipped away from Durkin’s mind.
“I had better start right at the beginning, hadn’t I?” he queried, cigar in hand, while she nodded comfortably to the silent question as to whether or not he might smoke.
“I suppose you know that Curry was once a New Orleans cotton broker. It was a little over two years ago that he first came to New York, with about a million and a half of his own, and an available three or four million belonging to a pool that was to back him through thick and thin. This they did, when he became a member of the Cotton Exchange. Then step by step he began to plan out his campaign, patiently and laboriously plotting and scheming and manipulating and increasing his power, until the newspaper-men dropped into the habit of speaking of him as the Cotton King, and the old home pool itself got a little afraid of him, and held a few secret meetings to talk things over.”
“But how did this campaign end?”
“It has not ended. Of just how it will end only two men, outside of Curry and his confidential old head-broker down on the Exchange floor, have any inkling.”
“Who is the other man?” asked Frances quietly.
Durkin smiled covertly, with a half-mockingly bowed “Thanks!”
“The other man, of course, not counting myself, is the operator, or, rather, the private secretary, he keeps at the home end of the wire he has had put into his house, for carrying on his collateral manipulations, as it were.”
“I understand,” said Frances.
“And then comes myself,” he added confidently.
The woman settled back in her leather-lined arm-chair, locking her slender white fingers together above her head. The clustered lights of the chandelier threw heavy shadows about her quiet eyes, and for the first time Durkin noticed the tender little hollow just under her cheek-bones, lending an indescribable touch of tragedy to the old-time softer oval of her face.
“Now this is what our friend Curry has been doing, in a nutshell. For months and months he has been the acknowledged bull leader of the Exchange. Point by point, week by week and day by day, he has managed to send cotton up. Where it was at first 11 and 12 and perhaps 13 cents, he has shouldered, say, August cotton up to 16.55, and July up to 17.30 and May up to 17.20. Day before yesterday July cotton advanced to 17.65 in New Orleans. Some time, and some time mighty soon—if not tomorrow, then the next day, or perhaps even the next—every option is going to go still higher. And this man Curry is the imperial dictator of it all. He is known to have interests behind him that amount to millions now. And this is the point I’m coming to: this present week is to see the rocket go up and burst.”
Durkin was on his feet by this time pacing up and down the room.
“The first, but not the final, climax of all this plotting is twenty-cent cotton.”
“Has it ever been that before?”
“Never! It has not been above seventeen cents, not since 1873!” declared Durkin, excitedly. “But here is the important part of it all, the second climax, as it were. When it strikes nineteen his old home pool are going to abdicate. They are going to turn traitor on him, I mean, and suddenly stand from under. Then here is the third and last climax: Curry knows this fact; he knows they’re making ready to crush him. And when they get ready he’s going to turn and smash ’em, smash ’em and sling ’em down, even though he goes with them in the crash. Which he won’t, if he’s the Curry I take him to be. In other words, Frank, at the right moment he is going to abdicate from the bull movement absolutely, before it is publicly realized.”
“It all seems vague and misty to me—but I suppose you know.”
“Know? Why, I’ve been rioting through his holy of holies for two days now. I’ve been cutting in and reading his own private wire. He firmly intends to forsake this bull movement, which, apparently, he has spent so much time and toil in building up. But in reality, out of the crash that comes with a collapsing market—and it must collapse when he stands from under!—he is to sit and see a million or two rain down into his lap.”
“But can he, one solitary man, do all this—I mean do it unmistakably, inevitably?”
“Yes, he can. I firmly believe that nothing short of a miracle can now upset his plan. Today he is not only the leader of the cotton pit; he is both openly and tacitly the supreme dictator of the market—of the world’s market. Why, last week, when he publicly announced that he was going down to Lakewood for a couple of days, the market fell back to 12.85 for an hour or two, and he had to jump in and start buying, just to give a little order to things. Somebody even said that when his wife and an actress friend of hers visited the Exchange gallery he asked them if they’d like to see a little panic on the floor. The actress said she’d love to see cotton go up a few points if he wouldn’t mind. Curry said all right, to watch out for some real acting. So he started down into the pit and pulled the strings until his puppets danced to their hearts’ content.”
Frances nodded her appreciation of the scene’s dramatic values, and waited for Durkin to continue.
“And one minor result of that was that one hour later a well-known cotton merchant was found in his chair, with a slowly widening stain of red on his shirt front, as the evening papers put it. He had shot himself through the heart—utterly ruined by that last little capricious rise in our Cotton King’s market.”
“Who, after all, is not much better than a wire-tapper!” exclaimed the woman, with her mirthless little laugh of scorn.
“There’s a difference—he thinks in big figures and affairs; we, up till now, have worked and worried and fretted over little things. This man Curry, too, is a sort of Napoleon. ‘You have to smash the eggs to make your omelet,’ was all he said when he heard that a big brokerage firm had closed its one hundred and twenty-five offices because of his bull operations. Why, this week he’s making his clerks eat and sleep right in the offices—he’s turned one of the rooms into a sort of dormitory, and has their meals sent up to them. And outside of all this he’s manipulating his own underground movement, doing that over his home wire, after his regular office hours.”
“And this is the wire you have tapped?”
“Yes, that’s the wire that has been giving me my information—or, rather, little scattered shreds of it. But here, mind, is where the difficulty comes in. Curry has got to let his partner, Green, down in New Orleans, in on the last movement of his campaign, so that the two can strike together. But he is wise, and he isn’t trusting that tip to any open wire. When the time comes it’s to be a cipher message. It will read, ‘Helen sails’—then such and such a time on such and such a day. That message Curry’s confidential operator will send out over the wire, under the protection of a quadruplex, from his Wall Street office. And that is the message I have to intercept.”
She was moving her head slowly up and down, gazing at him with unseeing eyes.
“And you have some plan for doing it?”
“Precisely,” replied Durkin, wheeling nervously back and forth. “This is where I’ve got to run the gauntlet of the whole Postal-Union system, cut in on their double-guarded wires, and get away with my information without being caught.”
“But you can’t do it, Jim. It’s impossible.”
“Oh, but it is possible, quite possible!” he said, halting for a moment before her. “Here’s where the climax comes to my story—the one I started to tell you over the ’phone. You see, just at the time of that little conduit fire the Postal-Union Company was having trouble with the Electrical Workers’ Union. I happened to be laying in the supplies for that up-town loop of mine when I found they were offering two dollars an hour for expert work. I jumped on a Broadway car, and took the plunge.”
“What plunge, Jim?”
“I mean that I applied for work, down there, as a cable-splicer.”
“Wasn’t it dangerous work—for you, I mean?”
“Yes, a trifle so, I suppose. But none of the inside men were on the force. No one knew me there, from Adam. And it was worth it, too!”
“You mean, of course—?”
“I mean that a certain cable-splicer has the entrée to that conduit, that he has a hand-made chart as to its wire-disposition, and—well, several other things!”
He waited for some word of appreciative triumph from her. As she remained silent, he went on again.
“And I mustn’t forget to tell you that I’ve leased a little basement place not far from Pine Street. I’m going to do commercial printing and that sort of thing. I’ve got a sign out, and the power all ready, only my presses are slow in coming!”
“And will be still further delayed, I suppose?”
“Yes, I’m afraid they will.”
Some mysterious touch of his excitement at last communicated itself to the listening woman, almost against her will. She was as fluctuant, she told herself, as the aluminum needle of a quadrant electrometer. No, she was more like the helpless little pith-ball of an electroscope, she mentally amended, ever dangling back and forth in a melancholy conflict of repulsion and attraction. Yet, as she comprehended Durkin’s plot, point by point, she began to realize the vast possibilities that confronted them, and, as ever before, to fall a victim to the zest of action, the vital sting of responsibility. Nor did she allow herself to lose sight of the care and minuteness of the continued artfulness and finish, so teeming with its secondary æsthetic values, with which he had reconnoitered his ever-menacing territory and laid his mine. And added to this, she saw, was the zest of stalking the stalker: it carried with it an ameliorating tang of dramatic irony, an uncouth touch of poetic justice.
As often happened with her in moments of excitement, the expanded pupils of her violet eyes crept over and all but blotted out the iris, until out of the heavy shadows that hung under her full brow, they glowed faintly, in certain lights, with an animal-like luminousness. “Those eyes—they look as though a halo had melted and run down into them!” Durkin had once cried, half wonderingly, half playfully, as he turned her face from shadow to light and back to shadow again.
He had looked for some word of disapproval from her, for he could remember how often, with her continuous scruples, she had taken the razor-edge off his enthusiasm, when he stood on the brink of adventuring with something big and momentous. So he studied her face abstractedly, his own alight with an eager and predaceously alert look which only his half-whimsical, half-boyish smile held above the plane of sheer vulpine craftiness.
“Why, this man Curry,” he went on, still standing in front of her, “has got such a grip on the market that he can simply juggle with it. Before this boom you or I could buy a bale of cotton on a dollar margin. Today, most of the brokerage houses insist on a four dollar margin, some of them demanding a five, and it’s said that a ten dollar margin can still be looked for.”
“But still, I don’t see how one man can do this, and keep it up!”
“It’s mostly all the natural outcome of his own, individual, long-headed plot. Beyond that, it’s a mere infection, a mania, an operation of mob-law, the case of sheep following a sheep. Curry, all along, is crying out that the demand has outgrown the supply, and that the commercial world has got to get used to the idea of twenty-cent cotton. In the old days it used to sell away down around six cents, and ever since then mills have been increasing their spindles,—in ten years, Curry’s papers claim, the mills have added more than seventeen million spindles to swell this tremendous cry for cotton. That’s his argument, to tide him along until he kicks the post out, and the drop comes. Then of course, he and the rest of his bull pool have been buying, buying, buying, always openly and magnificently, yet all the while, selling quietly and secretly.”
“And they call this legitimate business?” she demanded, with the familiar tinge of scorn in her voice.
“Yes, they call it high finance. But it’s about as legitimate, on the whole, as the pea and thimble game I used to watch up at the county fairs in Canada. In other words, Frank, when we carry on our particular line of business cleanly and decently, we are a hanged sight more honest than these Exchange manipulators.”
“But not recognized!” she cut in, for she knew that with this unction of comparison he was salving a still tender conscience.
“That’s because we are such small fry,” he went on heatedly. “But, by heavens, when we get this thing going, I guess we’ll rather count a little!”
“And what is to keep us from getting it going?”
He wheeled on her suddenly.
“One thing, and one hard thing!”
“Well?”
“Within twenty-four hours we have got to have ten thousand dollars!”