V
Early the next morning Trotter was back at the bank corner, like a guard at his sentry-box. He kept watch there, with that pertinacious alertness peculiar to the idler, until he had the satisfaction of witnessing Heeney's early departure from the cellar, with a tool kit under his arm.
Five minutes later Trotter was descending the stairs that led to the plumber's shop. Once there, he took out his key, fitted it to the lock, opened the door, stepped quietly inside, and locked the outer door after him. Before venturing to open the inner door he pressed an ear flat against the wooden partition and stood there listening. The silence was unbroken.
He stepped to the side of the shop and caught up a plumber's thick-bodied tallow candle. Then he softly opened the second door, stepped inside, and as softly closed the door after him.
He found himself in perfect darkness. But he stood there, waiting, before venturing to move forward, before daring to strike a light. He knew, as he peered about the blackness that engulfed him, that he was now facing more than an indeterminate responsibility. He was confronting actual and immediate danger. Even as he stood there, sniffing at the air, so heavy with its smell of damp lime and its undecipherable underground gases, a sudden fuller consciousness of undefined and yet colossal peril sent a telegraphing tingle of nerves up and down his body.
The only thing that broke the silence was the faint sound of footsteps on the laundry floor above him, together with the steady thump of irons on the ironing table. There was something fortifying, something consoling, in those neighborly and sedentary little noises.
Trotter struck a match and lighted his candle. He waited without moving for the flame to grow. Then he thrust the candle up before him. As he did so, his hand came in contact with the rough surface of what at first he took to be a stone wall. But as he looked closer he saw that it was not masonry. It was nothing more nor less than a carefully piled mass of stone and brick. Each fragment had been carefully placed on top of its fellow, each interstice had been carefully filled with rubble.
The pile extended from floor to ceiling. It filled the entire cellar. It left only space enough for a man to pass inward from the opened door. It was nothing more than the dump of a mine, the rock and brick from a tunnel, not flung loosely about, but scrupulously stowed away.
Holding the candle in front of him, Trotter bent low and groped his way in through the narrow passage. Everything was as orderly and hidden as the approach to a wild animal's lair. Everything was eloquent of a keen secretiveness. No betraying litter met his eye. Each move had been calmly and cautiously made. Each step of a complicated campaign had been quietly engineered. Trotter could even decipher a series of electric wires festooned from the little tunnel's top. He could see where the passage had gone around obstacles, where it had curled about a dishearteningly heavy buttress base, where it had dipped lower to underrun a cement vault bed, where it had sheered off from the tin-foiled surface of a "closed-curcuit" protective system, and where it had dipped and twisted about to advance squarely into a second blind wall at right angles to the first.
A portion of this wall had been torn away. With equal care an inner coating of cement had been chiseled off, exposing to view an unbroken dark surface.
As Trotter held the candle closer, he could see this dark surface marked off with chalk lines, sometimes with crosses, sometimes with figures he could not decipher. On it, too, he could see a solitary depression, as round and bright as a silver coin, as though a diamond drill had been testing the barrier.
He knew, even before he touched the chill surface with his hand, that it was a wall of solid steel, that it was the steel of the bank vault itself, the one deep-hidden and masonry-embedded area which stood without its ever-vigilant closed-circuit sentry. And he knew that Heeney had grubbed and eaten and burrowed his way, like a woodchuck, to the very heart of the First National Trust's wealth.
It was only then that the stupendousness of the whole thing came home to Trotter. It was only then that he realized the almost superhuman cunning and pertinacity in this guileless-eyed cellar plotter called Heeney. He could see the hours of patient labor it had involved, the days and days of mole-like tunneling, the weeks and weeks of gnome-like burrowing and carrying and twisting and loosening and piling, the months of ant-like industry which one blow of the Law's heel would make as nothing.
It rather bewildered Trotter. It filled him with an ever-increasing passion to get away from the place, to escape while he still had a chance. It turned the gaseous underground tunnel into a stifling pit, making his breath come in short and wheezing gasps. It brought a tiny-beaded sweat out on his chilled body.
Then he stopped breathing altogether. He wheeled about and suddenly brought his thumb and forefinger together on the candle flame, pinching it out as one might pinch the life out of a moth.
For on his straining ears fell the sound of a door slammed shut. There was no mistake, no illusion about it. Some one had entered the shop. Then came the sound of a second door. This time it was being opened. And it was the door leading into the tunnel.
Trotter could see the momentary efflorescence of pale light at the bend in the passage before him. And he realized that he was unarmed. He had not even a crowbar, not even a chisel or wrench, with which to defend himself. He knew he stood there trapped and helpless.
He shrank back, instinctively, without being conscious of the movement. He heard the sound of steps, shuffling and short. Then came an audible grunt, a grunt of relief. This was followed by the thump of a heavy weight dropped to the brick floor. Then came the sound of steps again, still shuffling and short.
Trotter leaned forward, listening, waiting, with every nerve strained. He concentrated every sense on the blur of light along the tunnel wall before him.
As he peered forward, scarcely daring to breathe, he was conscious of the fact that the light had suddenly withered. It vanished from the refracting tunnel sides, as though wiped away by an obliterating black sponge. Even before the truth of the thing had come home to him, he heard the sound of a quietly closed door.
Heeney had gone. He had merely crept into his tunnel mouth, dropped some tools, and then quietly crept out again.
It was not until he heard the slam of the outer door, a moment or two later, that Trotter felt sure of his deliverance. It was not until he knew his enemy was up the steps that he let his aching lungs gulp in the fetid tunnel air.
Then he crept forward cautiously, obsessed by one impulse, the impulse of escape, the passion to reach the open, to find air and light and space once more about him. He did nothing more than feel hurriedly over the bundle that lay in his path. It seemed an instrument of steel tied up in a cloth. He could feel strand after strand of wires, ductile and cloth-covered wires. He could also decipher a disk through which ran a piece of metal, like a blade through a sword guard. He felt sure it was an electrode of some sort, a tool to convert stolen electricity into a weapon of offense and assault. But he neither waited to strike a light nor stooped to puzzle over the bundle.
He paused for a minute to listen at the closed partition door. The only sound that came to his ears was the shuffle of feet and the thump from the ironing board above him. Yet when he opened this partition door he did so noiselessly, cautiously, slowly, inch by inch. Still screened in shadow, he studied the shop, the steps, the wire-blurred window, the street above him. Then he took a deep breath, crossed to the shop door, unlocked it, stepped outside, relocked it after him, and, pocketing the key, climbed the steps to the sidewalk.
His face, as he came out to the light, was almost colorless. His eyes were wide and staring with wonder. He kept telling himself that he must walk slowly, that he must in no way betray himself, that he must appear indifferent and offhand and inconspicuous to every one he chanced to pass. He felt the necessity of guarding himself, for he was now a person of importance. He was an emissary of destiny, an agent entrusted with a vast issue.
The streets through which he passed no longer frowned down at him from their inhospitable skylines. He was no longer an unattached and meaningless unit in the life that throbbed and roared all about him. He meant something to it. He was part of it. He was its guardian. And it would acknowledge him, in the end, or he would know the reason why.