CHAPTER XI
In the paling afternoon, with a pearl-mist of fine rain thinly shrouding the city, Frances Candler waited for Durkin impatiently, with her watch open before her. As the frail steel hand, implacable as fate, sank away toward the half-hour mark, her own spirits sank with it. It was not often Durkin was late. Another ten minutes would make him forever too late. She debated within herself whether or not she should risk her own voice over the wire to Ottenheimer’s office, while there was yet time, or wait it out to the last. Then she remembered, to her sudden horror, that the transmitter still stood in its perfectly-adjusted and normal condition, that there could be no muffling, incompetent mechanism to disguise the tones of her voice.
She was still beating despairingly through a tangle of dubious possibilities when the reassuring two-three ring of the door-bell sounded out, through the quiet of the lonely twilight, with startling clearness. A minute later Durkin came panting into the room. He was clean-shaven, immaculate, and most painfully out-of-breath.
“Is there time?” he gasped, putting down a heavy suit-case and peeling off his coat as he spoke.
“It’s twenty-one minutes after five. If Phipps is punctual, that gives you only four minutes.”
By this time Durkin had the suit-case open. In another half-minute he had the casing off the transmitter. Then a deft turn or two with his screw-driver, a tentative touch or two on the electrode, and in another half minute the casing was restored, and he was gently tapping on the diaphragm of the transmitter, with the receiver at his ear, testing the sound.
“Just a minute, now, till I cool down, and get my breath! I had endless trouble getting my drill apparatus—at one time I thought I’d have to take a dentist’s tooth-driller, or some such thing. But I got what I wanted—that’s what kept me. Anything new?”
He turned with the receiver still at his ear, and for the first time looked at her closely. Her face seemed pale, and a little weary-looking, against her black street-gown; the shadowy wistfulness about her eyes seemed more marked than ever.
“Yes,” she was laughing back at him, however, “something most prodigious has happened. I have an order for one dozen cotillion-favors, to be done in velvet and crimson satin, and delivered next Saturday afternoon!”
Durkin himself laughed shortly, and faced the telephone once more, asking her how time was.
“You haven’t a second to lose!”
His own face was a little paler than usual as he stood before the transmitter, while Frances, with her watch in her hand, went on saying that, if Phipps was punctual, he would be out and away in one minute’s time.
Durkin took a last look around, said under his breath, “Well, here goes!” and placed the receiver to his ear.
For a moment the woman, watching him, with half-parted lips, was haunted by the sudden impression that she had lived through the scene before, that each move and sound were in some way second-hand to her inner consciousness, older than time itself, a blurred and dateless photograph on the plates of memory.
“Hello! Hello! Is that you, Phipps?” she heard him say, and his voice sounded thin and far-away. There was a pause—it seemed an endless pause—and he repeated the query, louder.
“This is Ottenheimer. Yes, something wrong with the ’phone. Don’t cable Teetzel—I say don’t cable Teetzel, about those canary diamonds, until you see me. Yes, Teetzel. Did you get that? Well,—er—what the devil’s our safe combination? Yes, yes, Ottenheimer!”
“Slower—slower, Jim!” groaned the girl, behind him.
“Combination’s slipped my mind, Phipps. Yes; after dinner; want to run down and look over the books. Louder, please; I can’t hear. Yes, that’s better. To the right three times, to seventy-four—back thirty—on eighty-two—back one hundred and eight—and on seven. Yes. It’s the second last figure slipped me. Better close up now. Better close up, I say. All right,—good-bye!”
The last minute vibration ebbed out of the transmitter’s tingling diaphragm; but still neither the listening man nor woman moved. They waited, tense, expectant, tossed between doubt and hope, knowing only too well that the questioning tinkle of a little polished, nickel bell would sound the signal of their absolute and irreparable defeat.
Second by second, a minute dragged itself away. Then another, and another, and still no call came from Ottenheimer’s office, for Central. The woman moved a little restlessly. The man sighed deeply. Then he slowly put down the receiver, and mopped his moist face and forehead.
“I think he’s safe,” half-whispered Durkin, with his eyes still on the transmitter.
“He may suspect any moment though—when he’s had time to think it over, especially.”
“I rather doubt it. Our voices were nothing but broken squeaks. But if he does ring up Central, we’ll have to risk it and jump in and claim a wire’s crossed somewhere.”
Then he repeated the strange formula: “To the right three times, to seventy-four—back thirty—on eighty-two—back one hundred and eight—and on seven. Can you get it down, Frank?”
She nodded, as she wrote it in pencil, on a slip of paper. This he placed in his waistcoat pocket, and mopped his face once more, laughing—perhaps a little hysterically, as he watched the ’phone and felt the passing minutes drip relievingly, like the softest of balm, on his strained nerves.
“And now what?” asked Frances, sharing his relief, as he went to the window, and breathed the fresh air that blew in through the low-ceilinged little studio.
“Now,” said Durkin, jubilantly, “now we begin our real work!” He opened his suit-case and handed her a heavy, cylindrical, steel implement. Into one end of this odd-looking tool he slipped and clamped a slender, polished little shaft of grooved steel.
“That’s what nearly lost me everything,” he continued, carefully unpacking, as he spoke, a condenser, a tangent galvanometer, a pair of lineman’s-gloves, a Warner pocket battery-gauge, a pair of electrician’s scissors and pliers, two or three coils of wire, a half-a-dozen pony glass insulators, and a handful or two of smaller tools.
“Here, you see, is what I set up business with,” he soliloquized, as he studied the litter they made on the floor. He looked up quickly, as she drew her little table out from the wall and lifted the transmitter up on the empty electric-fan shelf. “Er—before I forget it,” he said, absently, his eyes still on his widely strewn apparatus, “have you got everything you want away from here?”
She had; though she hated to leave her show-case, she said. Some day she might like to take up fancy sewing again. “But before we do another thing,” she insisted, “we ought to have dinner. Breakfast, this morning, was our last meal, I know!”
And to his utter astonishment, Durkin remembered that he was famished.
It was a hurried and humble little meal they ate together in the failing light,—a meal of sandwiches washed down with bottled milk. Their thoughts as they ate, however, were on other things, grappling with impending problems, wondering when and under what circumstances their next meal would be eaten, almost glorying in the very uncertainty of their future, tingling with the consciousness of the trial they were to undergo, of the hazard they essayed. Then Durkin, as he smoked, laid out his final plan of action, point by premeditated point.