"Tell me—now!" demanded Durkin.
"When you fainted MacNutt reached back for the revolver. He would have shot you, only Keenan called for him. He cried down the shaft that he was dying. He—he must have pushed the button as he fell. MacNutt was still on the floor of the cage, leaning out to take aim at us. Then the steel of the shaft-door and the steel of the elevator cage as it went up came to—oh—I can't tell you now!"
Durkin came to a stop, swaying against her.
"You mean the cage worked automatically, that it went up, with MacNutt still leaning out?"
"Yes!" gasped the woman brokenly; and Durkin felt the shiver of the tortured body on which he leaned.
He was silent as they swung into the open street. His exhausted and uncoördinating brain was idly busy with some vague impression of the poignant irony of that end, of how that uncomprehending yet ineluctable power with which this man had toyed and played and sinned had, at the ultimate moment, established its authority and exacted its right.
He pulled himself up with a fluttering gasp, weak, sick, overcome, and was wordlessly grateful for the sustaining arm at his side.
For, once in the open, they were walking eastward, without a sense, momentarily, of either direction or destination.
Above the valley of the mist-hung street a thin and yellow light showed where morning was coming on, tardily, thickly. The boy whistling "Tammany" passed out of hearing.
"Thank God! oh, thank God!" Frank suddenly sobbed out, tossed and exalted on a wave of blind gratitude.