“Yes, anything in reason, I guess.”
“Curry’s men in New Orleans are working against him!”
“Let me add something to that. Green and his men are trying to break Curry, and Curry all the time is laying a mine under every blessed one of them!” and Durkin gave vent to a triumphant chuckle, deep down in his throat.
“Where did you find this out?” the unperturbed and far-away contralto was demanding.
“You could never guess.”
“Talk faster, or this telephoning will break us!” she warned him.
“Oh, I don’t care—it’s worth the money.”
“Hello—Hello! Oh, all right. Go on!”
“You heard about the fire in the Terminal Room of the Postal-Union? No—well, some dago with a torch got a little too careless in a P. U. conduit, and set fire to a cable-splicer’s pot of paraffin down on lower Broadway, not much more than a hundred yards from Wall Street itself. Then the flames caught on the burlap and the insulating grease and stuff round the cables—can you hear me? There was the dickens to pay, and in about ten minutes they looked more like a cart-load of old excelsior than the business wires of a few thousand offices!”
“Yes, go on!”