“What has he ever been to you, then?”
“He is a cruel and cunning and bitterly vindictive man,” she said, evading the question. “And if he determined to crush a person, he would do it, although it took him twenty years.”
“Then I certainly will kill him!” declared Durkin, shaken with a sudden unreasoning sweep of white passion.
It was not until he had half finished his luncheon that his steadiness of nerve came back to him. Here he had been shadowing the shadower, step by step and move by move, and all along, even in those moments when he had taken such delight in covertly and unsuspectingly watching his quarry, a second shadow had been secretly and cunningly stalking his own steps!
“It will be a fight to the finish, whatever happens!” he declared belligerently, still harping on the string of his new unhappiness.
CHAPTER XXIV
Durkin, bending restlessly over his relay, and dreamily cogitating on the newly discovered fact that Morse was a language as harmonious and mysterious and subtly expressive as music itself, sat up with a sudden galvanic jerk of the body.
“Helen sails at one tomorrow!” thrilled and warbled and sang the little machine of dots and dashes; and the listening operator knew that his time had come. He caught up the wires that ran through the gas-pipe to the conduit, and bracing himself against the basement wall, pulled with all his strength. They parted suddenly, somewhere near the cables, and sent him sprawling noisily over the floor.
He hurriedly picked himself up, flung every tool and instrument that remained in the dingy basement into his capacious club bag, and carefully coiled and wrapped every foot of telltale wire. As little evidence as possible, he decided, should remain behind him.
Five minutes later he stepped into Robinson & Little’s brokerage offices. It was, in fact, just as the senior member of the firm was slipping off his light covert-cloth overcoat and making ready for a feverish day’s business.