Stories from Everybody's Magazine

by Various

It was a very rhythmical piece of fine writing, and he had his coat off and was working in his shirt sleeves before he had advanced six pages into it. Then he veered about to the story itself. He enlarged on the amount of wealth harbored by a national bank. He explained how this vast wealth was hoarded and protected, the massive walls, the steel vaults, the steam flood pipes, the ever-watching attendants, the tangle of articulate wires that a touch would make garrulous, the time locks, the floors of cement and railway iron, the contact mats which reported the slightest footfall of the trespasser.

Then he told how an idea had come to the mind of an idle yegg named "Missouri" Horton. He told how this wary and cunning and romantic-spirited outlaw had planned his attack, how he had hired the cellar next to the granite-walled citadel of opulence, how he had learned the location of the vaults, how he had figured out the thickness of the masonry, how he had slowly and quietly prepared for his lonely and Promethean attack.

Trotter's sallow young face grew chalkier as he wrote, though he was unconscious of either effort or weariness. They brought him luncheon, in due time, on a napkin-covered tray. He lifted the napkin peevishly, took a disdainful look at the food, gulped down a cup of black coffee, and pushed the mess away from him. He had serious work in hand.

He wrote on, unconscious of time. His mind seemed to sway, hypnotically, with the reverberations of his own rhetoric. He tossed in a classical allusion or two; here and there he left an Old Testament phrase to coruscate along the fringe of his text; he even called back one of his copy carriers, to revise an unelaborated figure of speech.

Then he told how the tunnel was begun, how brick by brick and stone by stone a passage was grubbed through every obstacle. He expatiated on the infinite patience of such a man as Horton, how Monte Cristo paled beside him, how vast difficulties had to be overcome, how every stone had to be stowed carefully away in the back of the cellar, how in time the mortar and cement had to be ground to a powder and carried secretly away. He told how the tunnel was pushed forward, foot by foot; how the bank was attacked in its one and only vital spot, precisely as a porcupine curled defensively up in the snow is seized by the fisher-marten, not through open attack, but by artfully tunneling up under the quill-less belly.

Then he retailed how the vast business of this great banking institution went tranquilly and ponderously on, how millions were handled and changed and stowed away while all the time the unknown enemy was inch by inch crawling nearer.

When a note came up from the Advance office signed by the managing editor—the managing editor who had never been known to praise one of his men in all his twelve-year regime—Trotter took it as a matter of course. "Your story is great," this note had read. "Keep it up." Trotter merely gave the scrawl a second hurried glance. It did not excite him; it did not intoxicate. He was already drunk with the wine of creation, as delirious as a whirling dervish. And he knew he still had work to do.

A white-whiskered gentleman wearing a pearl-buttoned white waistcoat stepped quietly up to the office door and peered guardedly in over his glasses. Then he tip-toed away unseen, with a condoning smile on his astute and thin-nosed old face. Trotter had no thought or memory of his surroundings. It was his Story; the Story of his life. He sat there, entangled and locked together with it, unconscious of what it was doing to him, oblivious of how, like a blood-sucking vampire, it was draining the vigor of his youth from him.

He was now in the very vortex of his story. He told how he had posted Tiernan at the head of the steps leading down into the plumber's shop. He cunningly enlarged on the huge Irishman's bewilderment, his incredulity, his blasphemously reiterated demand to know what it was all about. He told how he himself had silently entered the shop, how he had crept through to the second door, how he had waited for a moment to take out his revolver. He described the hot and reeking air of the tunnel as he crept into its mouth. He pictured the sudden glare of light at the shaft end where Horton stood burning away an outer vault wall with an electrode. He told how the heat and the fumes of that little underground hell bewildered him, how he stood gaping at the scene, watching the white-hot tongue of fire hissing and licking at its last barrier of steel. He did not neglect to paint how the hardened metal, under the electrolyzing current eroding its surface, became as chalk, decomposing into a charry mass which one blow of a hammer might penetrate.

He told how he crept up on the man, step by step, with his revolver in his hand. He told how he could see the safe-breaker's face shining with sweat, how he could smell scorching clothing, how his eyes began to ache with the light-glare until he threw up a forearm to protect them. He explained how it had been his intention to creep up on the criminal and seize him bodily, and how he was defeated in this by a sudden and unlooked-for movement on the part of his unsuspecting enemy.