He studied the hinges carefully, through his tiny lamp. They were impregnable. As he had surmised, his only way was to cut out, inch by inch, the three heavy steel shafts, or bolt-bars, which slipped and fitted into steel casings also, apparently, embedded in solid masonry.
Adjusting his drill, he closed the switch once more, and, bracing the instrument’s head against his breast-bone, watched the slender, humming, spinning shaft bite and grind and burrow its way into the slowly yielding bar. From a little pocket-can, every minute or two, he squirted kerosene in on the drill-tip. The pungent smell of the scorching oil, as it spread on the heated steel, rose almost suffocatingly to his nostrils in the furnace-heated warmth of the cellar and for weeks afterwards remained an indistinct and odious memory to him.
When his first hole was bored, and his little drill raced wildly through into space, like the screw of a liner on the crest of a wave, he started a second, close beside the first; then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, slowly honeycombing the thick steel with his minute excavations. Sometimes a drill would snap off short, and he would have to draw a fresh one from his stock. Sometimes it did not bite sharply, and he tried another. And still he stood drilling, directing the power of his silent, insidious, untiring accomplice, whose spirit crooned and burned and sighed itself out through the wire at his feet.
As he worked, he lost all track of time; after he had started what he knew to be the last hole, he stopped and looked at his watch, as casually as he had done often enough after a night of operating the key in a despatcher’s office. To his horror, he saw that it had stopped, stunned with a natural enough electrolytic paralysis. It might not yet be twelve, or it might be four in the morning; time, from the moment he had taken off his shoes in Frances Candler’s little back room, had been annihilated to him. He wondered, in sudden alarm, if she were still maintaining her patrol outside, up and down the block. He wondered, too, as he drove the little drill home for the last time, and cautiously pried open the great, heavy door, if she had sent any signal in from the street front, and he had missed it. He even wondered, quakingly, if daylight would not overtake them at their work—when his startled eyes, chancing to fall on a nearby clock-dial, saw that the hour was only twenty-five minutes to twelve.
Step by step he crept back to the inner offices, followed by the murmurous ticking of a dozen noisy clocks, declaiming his presence. From the door in front of where the safe stood, gloomy, ominous, impregnable-looking, he lifted a seemingly innocent rubber mat. As he thought, it had been attached to a burglar-alarm apparatus. Dropping on one knee, he repeated his formula, number by number, each time listening for the telltale click of the falling ward. Then, turning the nickel lock-knob, he heard the many-barred lock chuck back into place.
The next moment the ponderous doors were open, and Durkin’s little thumb-nail electric lamp was exploring the tiers of inner compartments.
He still carried his drill with him; and, once he had found the private drawer he wanted, the softer iron of the inner fittings offered little resistance to a brutally impatient one-eighth bit. After two minutes of feverish work, he was able to insert the point of his furnace poker into the drawer, and firmly but gently pry it open.
The next moment his blackened and oily fingers were rummaging carelessly through a fortune or two of unset stones—through little trays of different tinted diamonds, through crowded little cases of Ceylon pearls and Uralian emeralds. At last, in a smaller compartment, marked “I. Ottenheimer,” he found a gun-metal case sealed up in an envelope. The case itself, however, was securely locked. Durkin hesitated for one half second; then he forced the lid open with his steel screw-driver.
One look was enough. It held the Blue Pear.
He stooped and carefully brushed up the steel cuttings under his shoeless feet. As carefully he closed the inner drawers of the safe. His hand was on the nickel lock-knob once more, to swing the ponderous outer doors shut, when a sound fell on his ears, a sound that made his very blood chill and tingle and chill again through all his tense body.