When the wounded woman had made sure that she was alone—she had been afraid to move where she lay, fearing a second shot—with a little groan or two she tried to rise to her knees. She felt that there might still be time, if she could only crawl to the ’phone. But this, she found was beyond her strength. The left sleeve of her waist, she also saw, was wet and sodden with blood. She looked at it languidly, wondering if the wound would leave a scar. Already she could hear footsteps below, and again and still again she struggled to shake off her languor, and told herself that she must be ready when Durkin came, that he, at least, must not be trapped. She, as a mere pool-room stenographer, had little to fear from the law. But as she tried, with her teeth and her free arm, to tear a strip from her skirt, the movement, for all her tight-lipped determination, was too much for her. She had a faint memory of hearing footsteps swarming about her, and then of ebbing and pulsing down through endless depths of what seemed to her like eider-downed emptiness.
When she came to, one of Doogan’s men was leaning over her, with a glass of water in his hand. She could feel some of it still wet on her chin and waist-collar. She looked up at him, bewildered, and then from him to the other four men who stood about her. Then the events of the afternoon came back to her.
She closed her eyes again, vaguely wondering if some teasing, indeterminate mishap, which she could not quite remember, had yet come about. At first, she could not grasp it, as she lay there moaning with pain, the breeze from the open window blowing on her face. Then the truth came to her in a flash.
It was Durkin. He was coming back; and they were watching there, waiting to trap him. Again she told herself that she must keep her head, and be cool.
Without moving her head, she let her roving eyes take in the five men about her in the room; three of them, she knew, were plain-clothes men from the Central Office, the other two were Doogan’s agents. If Durkin came while they were still there—and now he could not be long!—they would let him in, and of course say nothing, and there they would have him, like a rat in a trap.
She grew hysterical, and cried out to them that she was dying, yet waiting all the time for the sound of Durkin’s step, trying to think how she might save him. At last, to her sudden joy, she remembered that he was to bring from her rooms her own handbag, filled with a few things she had gathered up to take away with her. He would surely carry that bag in with him when he came; that was her salvation.
She fell to shrieking again that she was dying, demanding shrilly why her doctor had not come. Through her cries, her alert ears heard the sound of voices at the street-door. It was Durkin, at last; he had spoken a word or two with the two plain-clothes men, who, she knew, would readily enough let him pass.
“Doctor!” she screamed, as she heard his steps on the stair. “Doctor! I’m dying, doctor! Are you never coming!”
She wondered, in her agony of mind and body, if he would be fool enough not to understand. Would he be fool enough?
Doogan’s agents and the three plain-clothes men gathered about her silently, as they saw the intruder hurry in and drop on his knee beside the woman. “Is it you, doctor?” she wailed, with chattering teeth, shaking with an on-coming chill.