“Nope!” said Durkin. “Three minutes down here ought to do me!”
“You people are gettin’ too dam’ careless about these things,” rebuked the officer. “It’s me gets the blame, o’ course, when a horse sticks his foot in there!”
“Oh, cover the hole, then!” retorted Durkin genially, as he let himself down.
Once safely in the covered gloom of the conduit, he turned on his light and studied a hurriedly made chart of the subway wire-disposition. The leased Curry wires, he very well knew, were already in active service; and the task before him was not unlike the difficult and dangerous operation of a surgeon. Having located and cut open his cables, and in so doing exposed the busy arteries of most of Wall Street’s brokerage business, he carefully adjusted his rheostat, throwing the resistant coils into circuit one by one as he turned the graduated pointer. It was essential that he should remain on a higher resistance than the circuit into which he was cutting; in other words, he must not bleed his patient too much, for either a heavy leakage or an accidental short-circuiting, he knew, would lead to suspicion and an examination, if not a prompt “throwing it into the quad,” or the reversal to the protection of some distant and indirect wire.
When his current had been nicely adjusted and his sensitive little polarized relay had broken into a fit of busy and animated chattering, he turned his attention to the unused and rusted end of gas-pipe which careless workmen, months, or even years, before, had hurriedly capped and left protruding a good quarter-inch into the conduit. On this cap he adjusted a pair of pocket pipe-tongs. It took all his weight to start the rusted pipe-head, but once loosened, it was only a minute’s work to unscrew the bit of metal and expose the waiting ends of the wires which he had already worked through from the basement end of the pipe. He then proceeded with great deliberation and caution to make his final connections, taking infinite care to cover his footsteps as he went, concealing his wire where possible, and leaving, wherever available, no slightest trace of interference.
When everything was completed, it was nothing more than an incision made by a skilled and artful surgeon, a surgeon who had as artfully dressed the wound, and had left only a slender drainage tube to show how deep the cutting had been.
Durkin then repacked his tools in his spacious double-handled club bag of black sea-lion, put out his light, emerged whistling and dirt-soiled from his manhole, and having rounded the block, slipped into his basement printing-office and changed his clothes.
What most impressed and amazed Durkin, when once his quadruplex had been adjusted and pressed into service, was the absolute precision and thoroughness with which the Curry line of action had been prearranged. It was as diffusedly spectacular as some great international campaign. This Machiavellian operator’s private wires were humming with messages, deputies throughout the country were standing at his beck and call, emissaries and underlings were waiting to snatch up the crumbs which fell from his overloaded board, his corps of clerks were toiling away as feverishly as ever, Chicago and St. Louis and Memphis and New Orleans were being thrown into a fever of excitement and foreboding, fortunes were being wrested away in Liverpool, the Lancaster mills were shutting down, and still cotton was going up, up, point by point; timid clerks and messenger boys and widows, even, were pouring their pennies and dollars into the narrowing trench which separated them from twenty cent cotton and fortune.
Yet only two men knew and understood just how this Napoleon of commerce was to abandon and leave to its own blind fate this great, uncomprehending, maddened army of followers. Speculators who had made their first money in following at his heels were putting not only their winnings, but all their original capital, and often that of others, on the “long” side of the great bull movement, waiting, always waiting, for that ever alluring Fata Morgana of twenty cent cotton. Even warier spirits, suburban toilers, sober-minded mechanics, humble store-traders, who had long regarded ’Change as a very Golgotha of extortion and disaster, had been tainted with the mysterious psychologic infection, which had raced from city to town and from town to hamlet. Men bowed before a new faith and a new creed, and that faith and creed lay compactly in three pregnant words: Twenty Cent Cotton.
Yet this magnetic and spectacular bull leader, Durkin felt, was infinitely wiser and craftier than any of those he led. Curry, at heart, knew and saw the utter hopelessness of his cause; he realized that he was only toying and trifling with a great current that in the end, when its moment came, would sweep him and his followers away like so many chips. He faced and foresaw this calamity, and out of the calamity which no touch of romanticism in his nature veiled to his eyes, he quietly prepared to reap his harvest.