“Whoever laid that wire didn’t waste any time,” Riley said.
They lost it in a clump of brush, but found it again. Every man of them was wet to the waist now from breaking through the drifts of snow, but their enthusiasm was not dampened.
“We’ve been half an hour already!” Muggs protested. “How far does this thing run?”
No one took the trouble to answer him. They had crossed the unimproved block at last and reached another street. Once more the wire sprang to the crosspiece of a telephone pole, and across the street to another. Now it ran along the edge of a private park to a narrow alley, and there it followed the roof line of sheds.
They began exercising some caution now, for there was no telling where the wire would end, or when, and they did not care to stumble on the retreat of the Black Star unprepared for a clash. Muggs, some paces ahead of the others, strained eyes and ears to detect the presence of a foe. Muggs didn’t feel sure they had done right in following the wire, but he realized that the tip from the unknown woman was one that could not have been ignored.
At the end of the alley, the wire ran in the direction of a cross street. Here it was suspended from the trees again, but higher, and there was difficulty in following it. It took half an hour to reach the next corner, and there the wire turned back toward Verbeck’s house.
“’Tis a quarter after one,” Riley said. “There’s been no alarm from headquarters, or we’d have had the man coming after us in the roadster. But where the deuce does this wire run?”
Down the street a block, around the corner, went the wire, from tree to tree, now high in the air and now looped low. To the alley again, and down it in the black night! Here, their torches flashing, they followed it from shed to shed, and finally came to where it ran down the side of a garage and so reached the ground. Muggs dug frantically with his hands until the snow had been thrown to one side. The wire ran beneath a board, and half a dozen men scraped snow away until the board could be raised, Verbeck and Riley working frantically and urging on the others.
The board ended at the edge of an iron manhole, and Riley, with a muttered curse, got up from his knees.
“Into the sewer!” he exclaimed. “Into the sewer! Think o’ that!”