As these thoughts ran through Durkin’s busy mind, some vague idea of the power which reposed in his own knowledge of how great the current was to become, and just what turn it was to take, once more awakened in him. He had none of that romantic taint, he prided himself, which somewhere or at some time invariably confused the judgment of the gambler and the habitual criminal—for they, after all, he often felt, were in one way essentially poets in spirit, though dreamers grown sour through stagnation. Yet he could see, in the present case, how gigantic his opportunities were. Properly equipped, with a very meagre sum, millions lay before him, inevitably. But the stain of illegitimacy clung to his methods, and as it was, his returns at best could be only a paltry few thousands—fifty or sixty or even a hundred thousand at most. With Curry it would be millions.
Durkin remembered his frugal train-despatching days at the barren little wooden station at Komoka Junction, where forty dollars a month had seemed a fortune to him. He lighted a Carolina Perfecto, and inhaled it slowly and deliberately, demanding to know why he ought not to be satisfied with himself. In those earlier days he used to eat his dinner out of a tin pail, carried each morning from his bald and squalid boarding-house. Today, he remembered, he was to take luncheon with Frances at the Casa Napoleon, with its exquisite Franco-Spanish cookery, its tubbed palms, and its general air of exotic well-being.
His luncheon with Frances, however, was not what he had looked for. He met her in front of the West Ninth Street restaurant as she was stepping out of her taxi-cab. She seemed unusually pale and worried, though an honestly happy smile flitted across her lightly veiled face as she caught sight of him.
In a moment again her manner changed.
“We are being watched,” she said, in a low voice.
“Watched! By whom?”
Their eyes met and he could see the alarm that had taken possession of her.
“By MacNutt!”
Durkin grew a little paler as he looked down at her.
“He has shadowed us for two days,” she went on in her tense, low, quick tones. “He followed me out of our own building, and I got away from him only by leaving my taxi and slipping through a department store.”