The Wire Tappers

by Arthur Stringer

CHAPTER XXVI

Durkin’s first feeling, incongruously enough, once he was out in the open air, was a ravenous sense of hunger. Through all that busy day his only meal had been a hasty and half-eaten breakfast.

His second thought was at once both to submerge and sustain himself in one of those Broadway basement restaurants where men perch on seats and gulp down meals over a seat-fringed counter.

Then he thought of Frances, of her anxiety, of her long waiting, and he tried to tell himself, valiantly enough, that another hour would make little difference, and that they would take their dinner in state and at their ease, at the Beaux-Arts, or at the Ritz, or perhaps even at the St. Regis.

The thought of her gave a sudden, warm glow to the gray flatness of life, born of his hunger and weariness. He pictured her, framed in the gloom of the open doorway, in answer to his knock, the slender oval of her face touched with weariness, her shadowy, brooding, violet eyes grown suddenly alert, even her two warm, woman’s arms open, like a very nest, to receive and hold him, and her motherly young shoulder to shield him. He laughed to himself as he remembered the time that he had described her as the victim of an “ingrowing maternal instinct”—she had always seemed so ready to nurture and guard and cherish. She was a woman, he said to himself—with a sudden, strange foreboding of he knew not what—who ought to have had children. She was one of those deeper and richer natures, he knew, who would always love Love more than she could love men.

“What is electricity?” he had asked her one quiet night, touched into wonder for the familiar miracle, as they bent together over their relay, while an operator five hundred miles away was talking through the darkness. “We live and work and make life tenser with it, and do wonders with it, but, after all, who knows what it is?”

He remembered how the great, shadowy eyes had looked into his face. “And what is love?” she had sighed. “We live and die for it, we see it work its terrible wonders; but who can ever tell us what it is?”

Durkin had forgotten both his hunger and his weariness as he mounted the stairs to his up-town apartment, where, he knew, Frances was waiting for him. He decided, in his playful reaction of mood, to take her by surprise. So he slipped his pass-key silently into the door-lock and was about to fling the door wide when the unexpected sound of voices held him motionless, with his hand still on the knob.

It was Frank herself speaking.

“Oh, Mack, don’t come between him and me now! It’s all I’ve got to live for—his love! I need it—I need him!”

“The devil you do!” said a muttered growl.

“Oh, I do! I always wanted the love of an honest man.”

“An honest man!” again scoffed the deep bass of the other’s voice, with a short little laugh. It was MacNutt who spoke. “An honest man! Then what were you hanging round Sunset Bryan for?”

“Yes, an honest man,” went on the woman’s voice impetuously; “he is honest in his love for me, and that is all I care! Leave him to me, and I’ll give you everything. If it’s money you want, I’ll get you anything—anything in reason! I can still cheat and lie and steal for you, if you like—it was you who taught me how to do that!”

Durkin felt that he could stand no more of it; but still he listened, spellbound, incapable of action or thought.

“I’ve got to have money!” agreed MacNutt quietly. “That’s true enough!” Then he added insolently, “But I almost feel I’d rather have you!”

“No, no!” moaned the woman, seemingly in mingled horror and fear of him. “Only wait and I’ll get you what money I have here—every cent of it! It’s in my pocketbook, here, in the front room!”

Durkin could hear her short, hard breath, and the swish of her skirt as she fluttered across the bare floor into the other room. He could hear the other’s easy, half-deprecating, half-mocking laugh; and at the sound of it all the long-banked, smoldering, self-consuming fires of jealous rage that burned within him seemed to leap and burst into relieving flame. An invisible cord seemed to snap before his eyes—it might have been within his very brain, for all he knew.

“And now I kill him!” This one idea spun through his mind, the one living wheel in all the deadened machinery of consciousness.

Darting back until he felt the plaster of the narrow hallway behind him, he flung himself madly forward against the door again. He kicked with the solid flat of his boot-sole as he came, against the light pine, painted and grained to look like oak.

It crashed in like so much kindling, and a second later, white to the very lips, he was in the room, facing MacNutt.

In his hand he held his revolver. It was of blue metal, with the barrel sawed off short. It had once been carried by a Chinaman, and had figured in a Mock Duck Street feud, and had been many times in pawnshops, and had passed through many hands.

As he faced the man he was going to kill it flitted vaguely through Durkin’s mind that somebody—he could not remember who—had said always to shoot for the stomach—it was the easiest, and the surest. He also remembered that his weapon had a rifled barrel, and that the long, twisting bullet would rend and tear and lacerate as it went.

“Before I kill you,” he heard himself saying, and the quietness of his voice surprised even his own ears, “before I kill you, I want to know, once for all, just what that woman is to you.”

The other man looked vacantly down at the pistol barrel, within six inches of his own gross stomach. Then he looked at his enemy’s face. A twitching nerve trembled and fluttered on one side of his temple. Only two claret-colored blotches of color remained on his otherwise ashen face.

“For the love of God, Durkin, don’t be a fool!”

MacNutt’s fingers were working spasmodically, and his breath began to come wheezily and heavily.

“I’m going to kill you!” repeated Durkin, in the same level monotone. “But what is that woman to you?”

MacNutt was desperately measuring chance and distance. There was not the shadow of escape through struggle.

“It’s murder!” he gasped, certain that there was no hope.

He could see Durkin’s preparatory jaw-clench.

“You—you wouldn’t get mixed up in cold murder like this!” MacNutt half pleaded, hurriedly and huskily, with his eyes now on the other man’s. “Why, you’d swing for it, Durkin! You’d go to the chair!”

Durkin uttered a foul name, impatiently, and closed out the picture with his shut eyelids as he thrust his right hand forward and down.

He wondered, with lightning-like rapidity of thought, if the blood would stain his hand.

Then he felt a quick bark, and a sudden great spit of pain shot through him.

The gun had exploded, he told himself dreamily, as he staggered to the wall and leaned there weakly, swaying back and forth. But why didn’t MacNutt go down? he asked himself unconcernedly, as he watched with dull eyes where a jet of red blood spurted and pumped regularly from somewhere in his benumbed forearm.

Then he had a thin and far-away vision of Frances, with a smoking revolver in her hand, drifting out from the other room. He seemed to see her floating out, like a bird on the wing almost, to where his own weapon lay, and catch it up, as MacNutt or some vague shadow of him, leaped to put a heavy foot on it.

A hundred miles away, seemingly, he heard her voice in a thin and high treble telling MacNutt to go, or she would shoot him there herself, like a dog.

Succeeding this came a sense of falling, and he found something bound tightly round his arm, and a new dull and throbbing pain as this something twisted and twisted and grew still tighter on the benumbed flesh. Then he felt the weight of a body leaning on his own, where he lay there, and a hand trying to fondle his face and hair.

“Oh, Jim, Jim!” the thin and far-away voice seemed to be wailing, “oh, Jim, I had to do it! I had to—to save you from yourself! You would have killed him. . . . You would have shot him dead. . . . And that would be the end of everything. . . . Don’t you understand, my beloved own?”

Some heavy gray veil seemed to lift away, and the wounded man opened his eyes, and moved uneasily.

“It’s only the arm, poor boy . . . but I know it hurts!”

“What is it?” he asked vacantly.

“It’s only the arm, and not a bone broken! See, I’ve stopped the bleeding, and a week or two of quiet somewhere, and it’ll be all better! Then—then you’ll sit up and thank God for it!”

He could hear her voice more distinctly now, and could feel her hands feverishly caressing his face and hair.

“Speak to me, Jim,” she pleaded, passionately. “You’re all I’ve got—you’re all that’s left to me in the whole wide world!”

He opened his eyes again, and smiled at her; but it was such a wan and broken smile that a tempest of weeping swept over the woman bending above him. He could feel her hot tears scalding his face.

Then she suddenly drew herself up, rigid and tense, for the sound of heavy footsteps smote on her ear. Durkin heard them, too, in his languid and uncomprehending way; he also heard the authoritative knock that came from the hall door.

He surmised that Frank had opened the splintered door, for in the dim sidelight of the hall he could see the flash of metal buttons on the dark blue uniform, and the outline of a patrolman’s cap.

“Anything wrong up here, lady?” the officer was demanding, a little out of breath.

“Dear me, no,” answered her voice in meek and plaintive alarm. Then she laughed a little.

“She is lying—lying—lying,” thought the wounded man, languidly, as he lay there, bleeding in the darkened room, not twelve paces away from her, where the room was stained and blotched and pooled with blood.

“H’m! Folks downstairs said they heard a pistol-shot up here somewhere!”

“Yes, I know; that was the transom blew shut,” she answered glibly. “It nearly frightened the wits out of me, too!” She opened the door wide. “But won’t you come in, and make sure?”

The officer looked up at the transom, wagged his head three times sagely, glanced at the lines of the girl’s figure with open and undisguised admiration, and said it wasn’t worth while. Then he tried to pierce the veil that still hung from her hat and about her smiling face. Then he turned and sauntered off down the stairs, tapping the baluster with his night-stick as he went. Then Durkin tried to struggle to his feet, was stung with a second fierce stab of pain, fell back drowsily, and remembered no more.

Frances waited, pantingly, against the doorpost. She listened there for a second or two, and then crept inside and closed the door after her.

“Thank God!” she gasped fervently, as she tore off her hat and veil once more. “Thank God!”

Then, being only a woman, and weak and hungry and tired, and tried beyond her endurance, she took three evading, half-staggering steps toward Durkin, and fell in a faint over his feet.

The door opened and closed softly; and a figure with an ashen face, blotched with claret-color, slunk into the silent room. Night had closed in by this time, so having listened for a reassuring second or two, he groped slowly across the bare floor. His trembling hand felt a woman’s skirt. Exploring carefully upward, he felt her limp arm, and her face and hair.

Then he came to the figure he was in search of. He ripped open the wet and soggy coat with a deft little pull at the buttons, and thrust a great hungry hand down into the inside breast pocket. The exploring fat fingers found what they were in search of, and held the carefully banded packet up to the uncertain light of the window.

There he tested the edges of the crisp parchment of the bank-notes, and apparently satisfied, hurriedly thrust them down into his own capacious hip-pocket.

Then he crept to the broken door and listened for a minute or two. He opened it cautiously, at last, tip-toed slowly over to the stair-balustrade, and finally turned back and closed the door.

As the latch of the shattered lock fell rattling on the floor a sigh quavered through the room. It was a woman’s sigh, wavering and weak and freighted with weariness, but one of returning consciousness. For, a minute later, a voice was asking, plaintively and emptily, “Where am I?”