A wave of care-free passivity now seemed to inundate her. She made no attempt to struggle; she nursed no sense of open resentment against her captors. The battery of her vital forces was depleted and depolarized. She experienced only a faintly poignant sense of disappointment, of indeterminate pique, as she realized that she was no longer a free agent. Leaning back in the cushioned gloom, inert, impassive, with her eyes half-closed, she seemed to be drifting through an eddying veil of gray. The voices so close beside her sounded thin and far off. An impression of unreality clung to her, an impression that she was floating through an empty and rain-swept world from which all life and warmth had withered.
"It's not her I want—it's Durkin!" MacNutt was saying, with an oath, as they swung around the corner into the blinking and serried lights of Eighth avenue. "It's that damned groundhog I'm goin' to dig out yet!"
"Well, you can't go back there after him!" protested Keenan.
"Can't I? Well, I'm goin' back, and I'm goin' to get that man, and I'm goin' to fry him in his own juices!"
He pushed the woman's inert weight away from him, and leaned out from under the cape, with a sharp word or two to Penfield's chauffeur. Then he suddenly whistled and waved his arm.
"What are you doing that for?" Keenan demanded of him.
Keenan had caught the drooping figure, and was making an effort to support it. His face, for some unknown reason, was almost as colorless as the face that lay so passively against his rain-soaked shoulder.
"I'm goin' back!" declared MacNutt.
"Is it worth while—now?" demurred the other.
"I'm goin' to get my hooks on Durkin, even if I have to wade through every raidin' gang in the precinct!"