“And one minor result of that was that one hour later a well-known cotton merchant was found in his chair, with a slowly widening stain of red on his shirt front, as the evening papers put it. He had shot himself through the heart—utterly ruined by that last little capricious rise in our Cotton King’s market.”
“Who, after all, is not much better than a wire-tapper!” exclaimed the woman, with her mirthless little laugh of scorn.
“There’s a difference—he thinks in big figures and affairs; we, up till now, have worked and worried and fretted over little things. This man Curry, too, is a sort of Napoleon. ‘You have to smash the eggs to make your omelet,’ was all he said when he heard that a big brokerage firm had closed its one hundred and twenty-five offices because of his bull operations. Why, this week he’s making his clerks eat and sleep right in the offices—he’s turned one of the rooms into a sort of dormitory, and has their meals sent up to them. And outside of all this he’s manipulating his own underground movement, doing that over his home wire, after his regular office hours.”
“And this is the wire you have tapped?”
“Yes, that’s the wire that has been giving me my information—or, rather, little scattered shreds of it. But here, mind, is where the difficulty comes in. Curry has got to let his partner, Green, down in New Orleans, in on the last movement of his campaign, so that the two can strike together. But he is wise, and he isn’t trusting that tip to any open wire. When the time comes it’s to be a cipher message. It will read, ‘Helen sails’—then such and such a time on such and such a day. That message Curry’s confidential operator will send out over the wire, under the protection of a quadruplex, from his Wall Street office. And that is the message I have to intercept.”
She was moving her head slowly up and down, gazing at him with unseeing eyes.
“And you have some plan for doing it?”
“Precisely,” replied Durkin, wheeling nervously back and forth. “This is where I’ve got to run the gauntlet of the whole Postal-Union system, cut in on their double-guarded wires, and get away with my information without being caught.”
“But you can’t do it, Jim. It’s impossible.”
“Oh, but it is possible, quite possible!” he said, halting for a moment before her. “Here’s where the climax comes to my story—the one I started to tell you over the ’phone. You see, just at the time of that little conduit fire the Postal-Union Company was having trouble with the Electrical Workers’ Union. I happened to be laying in the supplies for that up-town loop of mine when I found they were offering two dollars an hour for expert work. I jumped on a Broadway car, and took the plunge.”