“I can capture and tame and control that power, Frank. I can make it my slave, and carry it along with me, almost in my pocket, on a mere thread of copper. I can make it a living, iron-eating otter, with a dozen fangs—in the shape of quarter-inch drills, gnawing and biting and eating through that armor-plate door about the same as a rat would gnaw through a wooden lath. Oh, we’ve got them, Frank! We’ve got them this time!”
“Not until we know that combination, though,” qualified the colder-thoughted woman in the wicker rocker, still not quite understanding how or in what the other had found so potent and so unexpected an ally. And while he leaned out of the window, studying the wire-distribution, she discreetly slipped her watch-case receiver over her head, in case anything of importance should be going through over the telephone.
CHAPTER XI
In the paling afternoon, with a pearl-mist of fine rain thinly shrouding the city, Frances Candler waited for Durkin impatiently, with her watch open before her. As the frail steel hand, implacable as fate, sank away toward the half-hour mark, her own spirits sank with it. It was not often Durkin was late. Another ten minutes would make him forever too late. She debated within herself whether or not she should risk her own voice over the wire to Ottenheimer’s office, while there was yet time, or wait it out to the last. Then she remembered, to her sudden horror, that the transmitter still stood in its perfectly-adjusted and normal condition, that there could be no muffling, incompetent mechanism to disguise the tones of her voice.
She was still beating despairingly through a tangle of dubious possibilities when the reassuring two-three ring of the door-bell sounded out, through the quiet of the lonely twilight, with startling clearness. A minute later Durkin came panting into the room. He was clean-shaven, immaculate, and most painfully out-of-breath.
“Is there time?” he gasped, putting down a heavy suit-case and peeling off his coat as he spoke.
“It’s twenty-one minutes after five. If Phipps is punctual, that gives you only four minutes.”
By this time Durkin had the suit-case open. In another half-minute he had the casing off the transmitter. Then a deft turn or two with his screw-driver, a tentative touch or two on the electrode, and in another half minute the casing was restored, and he was gently tapping on the diaphragm of the transmitter, with the receiver at his ear, testing the sound.
“Just a minute, now, till I cool down, and get my breath! I had endless trouble getting my drill apparatus—at one time I thought I’d have to take a dentist’s tooth-driller, or some such thing. But I got what I wanted—that’s what kept me. Anything new?”
He turned with the receiver still at his ear, and for the first time looked at her closely. Her face seemed pale, and a little weary-looking, against her black street-gown; the shadowy wistfulness about her eyes seemed more marked than ever.