“Here, you see, is what I set up business with,” he soliloquized, as he studied the litter they made on the floor. He looked up quickly, as she drew her little table out from the wall and lifted the transmitter up on the empty electric-fan shelf. “Er—before I forget it,” he said, absently, his eyes still on his widely strewn apparatus, “have you got everything you want away from here?”
She had; though she hated to leave her show-case, she said. Some day she might like to take up fancy sewing again. “But before we do another thing,” she insisted, “we ought to have dinner. Breakfast, this morning, was our last meal, I know!”
And to his utter astonishment, Durkin remembered that he was famished.
It was a hurried and humble little meal they ate together in the failing light,—a meal of sandwiches washed down with bottled milk. Their thoughts as they ate, however, were on other things, grappling with impending problems, wondering when and under what circumstances their next meal would be eaten, almost glorying in the very uncertainty of their future, tingling with the consciousness of the trial they were to undergo, of the hazard they essayed. Then Durkin, as he smoked, laid out his final plan of action, point by premeditated point.
CHAPTER XII
At twenty minutes to eleven, slipping off his shoes, Durkin climbed cautiously through the transom opening out on the roof. Creeping as carefully from chimney tier to chimney tier, he found himself face to face with a roof-fence of sharpened iron rods. He counted down this fence to the eighteenth rod, then carefully lifted on it. The lead that sealed it in the lower cross-piece, and into the stone beneath that again, had been strangely fused away, and the loosened rod slid up through the top horizontal bar very much like a miniature portcullis. Squeezing through this narrow opening, he carefully replaced the rod behind him. With a flattened piece of steel, once used for a furnace poker, and looking very much like a gigantic tack-drawer, he slowly and gently forced the bolt that held shut the transom on the Ottenheimer building. This he replaced, after passing through, paying out with him as he went, two coils of rubber-coated wire, in appearance not unlike a large size of incandescent lamp cord.
From the photographer’s studio in which he found himself, nothing but a draw-bolt kept him from an outside hallway. Making sure that the building was deserted, and everything safe, he worked his way slowly down, like a diver, stair by stair, to the basement. Here he made a careful study of the little tunnel of electric wires at the back of the lower hall, probing, testing, measuring, and finally, with cool deliberation, “bridging” the necessary portion of the burglar-alarm connection, which he knew to be operated on a closed circuit. This circuit he diverted as a miner diverts a troublesome stream. Then, holding before him his little two-candle incandescent lamp, scarcely bigger than his thumb nail, he groped toward the iron covered door that divided one-half of the building from the other.
Here he directed his thin shaft of light into the crack between the heavy door and its studding, and his squinting eyes made out the iron lock-bar that held him out. From his vest pocket, where they stood in a row like glimmering pencils, he took out one of the slim steel drills, adjusted it noiselessly in the drill-flange, and snapped shut his switch. There was the quick spit of a blue spark, and of a sudden, the inanimate thing of steel throbbed and sang and quivered with mysterious life. As he glanced down at it, in its fierce revolutions, he realized that once more he had for an accomplice that old-time silent, and ever-ready assistant which for years had been a well-tested and faithful friend. The mere companionship with so familiar a force brought back to him his waning confidence.
He forced the whirling drill through the door-crack and in against the bar. It ate through the soft iron as though it had been a bar of cheese. Eight carefully placed perforations, side by side, had severed the end of the lockshaft. He shut off the current, confidently, and swung open the heavy door. The falling piece of iron made a little tinkle of sound on the cement flooring, then all was silence again. He had at least, he told himself, captured the enemy’s outposts.
Cautiously he felt his way across the warm cellar, up the steps, and at last faced his one definite barrier, the door of solid steel, abutted by even more solid masonry. The builders of that door had done their best to make it forbidding to men of his turn of mind, Durkin ruminated, as he felt and sounded and tested despondently over its taciturn painted surface.