Phantom Wires: A Novel

by Arthur Stringer

  CHAPTER XXIX

  THE LAST DITCH

  Durkin advanced into the room quickly, the revolver in his right hand.It was a short-barreled bull-dog gun of heavy caliber, ugly andmenacing as it swung from his out-thrust wrist, held low, with theright elbow pressed close in to his side. In the doorway stoodMacNutt. His eyes were staring, his bullock head thrown back,bewildered at the sudden change that one sweep of an arm had brought tothe scene.

  As Durkin edged craftily round, with his back to the side wall, so thathis eye commanded the silent trio before him, Frank made a movement todraw away from Keenan, who stood grotesquely petrified, his lean jawfallen, the melancholy Celtic face touched more with wonder than withfear.

  "Don't move!" commanded her husband, as he saw the motion. "Stay whereyou are!"

  She looked at him, as bewildered as the others.

  "That man, you'll find, is armed."

  "You lie--you fool!"

  "That man, I say, is armed!"

  Keenan laughed, scoffingly.

  "Take his revolver from him!" commanded Durkin.

  A momentary hesitation held her back.

  "Take it, I say! And, by God, if he so much as moves a finger, I'llblow the top of his head off!"

  The woman confronted Keenan once more, but he fell back a step or two.

  "There's no need of that," he broke in angrily. "If you want the gun,I'll give it to you!"

  And as he spoke his arm swung down and back to his hip pocket.

  "Stop that!" cried Durkin sharply, as he saw the movement. "Keep thosehands up, or, by heaven, I'll let you have it!"

  His arm, by this time, was tense and rigidly out-stretched, and hissteady pistol-barrel pointed just between the other man's ludicrouslyblinking eyes. In the silence that followed the woman reached back,and without further hesitation drew the revolver from the motionlessman's pocket.

  It was a formidable, long-barreled "Colt," which, with one sharp motionof the fingers, she promptly unlimbered, exposing the breech. In eachcylinder chamber, she saw, lay a loaded cartridge. Once assured ofthis, she snapped shut the breech and balanced the gun in thepurposeful embrace of her fingers.

  "Now what?" she asked, with her eyes turned to her husband. But thetriumph suddenly died out of her face.

  She was only in time to hear Durkin's sharp cry of anger, and to seehis quick spring through the wide door-way, as the guard-door of theelevator closed and the cage shot up into space.

  "We've missed him!" he gasped, with a cry of rage, as he ran to thedoor through which MacNutt, in that moment of excitement, haddisappeared.

  Frank kept her eyes on Keenan. She, too, began to feel the sense ofsome vast finality in their moves and actions that night.

  Keenan laughed. It was a dry and joyless laugh, but it wasdiscouraging.

  "What's on the floor above?" demanded Durkin, wheeling on him.

  "The floor above," slowly responded the other, "is Richard Penfield'sprivate offices, where his safe is, and where your friend, no doubt, isnow depositing his valuables, behind a burglar-proof time-lock!"

  "Oh, that's it, is it!" cried Durkin. He turned to the woman sharply.

  "Frank, quick! Leave Keenan to me!"

  "Yes!" she answered, with coerced attention.

  "MacNutt must not get out of this house! We must stop him before hegets down this shaft. You go down by the stairs, quick, to the lowestbasement. You'll find the motor operating the elevator. What you mustdo is to get to the switch, and shut off the power before this car canget past us! Quick!"

  He still faced Keenan, but his eye followed her to the door.

  "If he does come, kill him; shoot him down, I say, like a dog--_orhe'll kill you_!"

  He could hear, through those silent hallways, the muffled rustling ofher skirts and the sound of her flying feet on the waxed and polishedwood. Then the silence suddenly became oppressive.

  It was the unseen foe that he was afraid of, the undiscerned force thathe feared. His uneasy and alert mind struggled to grasp the problem ofhow and where MacNutt would strike, if strike he did, out of thedarkness of that silent and deserted house.

  Durkin decided that above all things he must render impossible thedescent of the elevator cage. But for a moment he could think of nobar that might be flung across the path of that complex and almostirresistible machinery, once awakened into its full power. Then thesolution of the riddle came to him.

  Still menacing the silent Keenan with his revolver, he flung over, withone quick and reckless push of his foot, the heavy mahogany table thatstood in the centre of the room.

  Then he turned to Keenan.

  "Push that table out into the elevator shaft!" he ordered. The otherman did not move. And time was precious; every second was precious!

  Durkin repeated his command.

  "Furniture-moving is not my vocation!" answered Keenan, folding hisarms.

  As Durkin sprang forward, there was no mistaking his meaning.

  "I'll count ten," he said, white-lipped. "Unless the table goes out,_you_ go out!" And he began counting, silently, numeral by numeral.

  "Well, if you insist!" said Keenan, with a shrug.

  Even as Keenan, at the menace of his reiterated command to hurry, threwopen the guard door, Durkin was wondering, in his feverish activity ofmind, just how soon MacNutt's next move would come, and just how andwhere he would strike.

  The answer to that question came more quickly than he had expected.And it came grimly, and in a manner most unlooked for.

  For even as the reluctant Keenan stooped over the heavy table, not tenfeet from the shaft, the elevator cage descended. It flashed by theopen door without stopping on its hurried course. But as it wingedpast that square of open light a revolver shot rang out and reechoedthrough the room.

  Durkin, peering across the curling smoke, saw Keenan pitch forward onhis hands, struggle and thrash to his feet once more, like a woundedrabbit. Then he fell again, prone on his face, close beside the shaftdoor. There he lay, breathing in little gurgles.

  Durkin, with little beads of sweat on his pallid face, realized what itmeant. That flying shot had been intended for _him_. MacNutt, in thatdesperate and hurried and unreasoning last chance, had delivered hisblow, but had been mistaken in his man!

  This knowledge flashed through his mind with the rapidity of akinetoscope plate, and a moment later was obliterated by still anotherhurrying impression. For, through the deserted house rang two shortand terrified screams, high-pitched and piercing. They were a woman'sscreams, and he knew they could come from no one but Frank.

  He turned and hurled himself down the stairway, without even waiting torecover the revolver that had fallen a minute before from his startledfingers. He was conscious only of flinging the weight of his slidingbody on the flume-like surface of the smooth balustrade, with his feetclattering on the polished steps as he went. He turned and dashed onto the head of the next stairway, and in the same manner flung himselfto the floor beneath, and then to the next, and the next, until he wasin the gloom of the basement itself.

  Breathless and panting, he groped his way through the darkness, towhere a glimmer of light came from what he hurriedly took to be theengine-room.

  There, as he darted through the narrow doorway, into the circle of dimlight from the one tinted globe in the lowered elevator cage, a strangesight met his eyes. It shocked and flung him into a second or two ofblank indecision, of volitionless and thoughtless inactivity. For onemoment of ominous calm it smote and held him there, before the suddenblind, cyclonic rush of brain and body which the vision gave rise to.

  For at the door of the open cage MacNutt and Frank fought and struggledand panted together. The man was inside, on the bottom of the cage,the woman was outside it. Her huddled but still resisting body waslocked and jammed halfway across the narrow door. One of heropponent's great, ape-like strangling arms was about her neck. But thefingers at the end of it were caught between her strong whitecarnivo
rous teeth; and they became stained with blood as, in herfrenzy, she fought and bit and struggled, with the blind fury of somefinal despair. Her revolver she had been unable to use; it lay out ofher reach, behind them on the floor of the cage.

  MacNutt, as he strained and tore at her resisting body, was fightingand edging his way with her back into the cage, to where that waitingrevolver lay. He himself was already well within the narrow opening,sprawled out red and disheveled and Titanesque on the cage floor. Butshe was resisting him, inch by inch, fighting desperately, like acornered cat, for her very life, yet knowing there could be only oneend to that uneven conflict.

  Durkin, after one comprehending glance, followed his first animalimpulse of offense, and descended on MacNutt, beating at the prone,bull-like head, with its claret-colored bald spot, across which ran onelivid scratch. He pounded on the clustered fingers of the gorilla-likehand, crushing and bruising them against the gilded iron grill-work,through which was interwoven the Penfield triple crescent.

  The clutching arms relaxed, but only for a moment. In that moment,however, Durkin had stooped and with the one hand that remained withhim to use, struggled to tear Frank away from the deadly clutch. Thishe would surely have done had not MacNutt seen his chance, and with hisfree hand suddenly caught at the wounded wrist that hung stained andlimp at his enemy's side. That sudden, savage torture of the laceratedflesh was more than the weak and exhausted body of Durkin could endure.He emitted one little involuntary cry; then every protesting nerve andsinew capitulated, a white light seemed to flash and burn at the baseof his very brain, and then go out. He fell fainting on the hard maplefloor.

  For a moment or two, like a defeated prize-fighter, he panted andstruggled, ludicrously yet pathetically, to rise to his feet, but theeffort was futile.

  It was as he found himself ebbing down through some soft and featheryemptiness that he seemed to hear a pitiful and imploring voice callthinly out, "_Mack_!" Still fainter he seemed to hear it, "_Mack_!_Come up_! _I'm dying_!" He remembered, lazily, that it sounded likethe distant voice of Keenan--but where was Keenan?

  Then he seemed to hear the purr and murmur of distant machinery,followed by a gentle puff of sound and what he hazily dreamed was thesmell of powder smoke. Then he remembered no more.

  * * * * * *

  Just how or at what juncture he lost consciousness he could neverclearly remember. But his first tangible impression was the knowledgethat his wife was once more pouring brandy down his throat andimploring him to hurry. Then the sound of muffled blows echoed fromabove.

  "Quick, Jim, oh, quick, or it will be too late. No, not that way. Wecan't go by the front--that's cut off. By the back--this way--I've goteverything open!"

  "But what's the noise?" asked Durkin weakly.

  "That's the police, with a fireman's axe, breaking in the front door.But, see, it's not too late! These steps take us up to the back court,and this iron gate opens on a lane that runs from the supply departmentof the hotel there, right through to the open street!"

  He shambled after her, white and tottering.

  "Quick, Jim, quick!" she reiterated, as she supported him through thelow gate, and kept her arm in his as they passed down the dark lane,with its homely smells of early cookery and baking bread. Only onepassion possessed them--the blind and persistent and unreasoningpassion for escape, for freedom.

  "But MacNutt--where's MacNutt?" demanded Durkin, coming to a stop.

  "No--no--quick!" gasped Frank, tugging at his arm.

  "I tell you I've got to have it out with that man!" protested thepitiably dazed but dogged combatant at her side.

  "You can't, Jim!"

  "But I've got to!"

  "You can't--you can't," she moaned, "for he's dead!"

  A sudden sickening fear crept through his aching bones, seeming toleave them fluid, like wax.

  "You--you did it?" he asked unsteadily. The face he gazed into lookedaged and worn and pallid in the dim half-light of the breaking morning.A sudden great pity for her tore at his heart.

  "No," she cried fiercely. "No--not me!"

  But she was still tugging insanely at his obdurate arm. "I tell you,Jim, you must hurry, or it will be too late!"

  "Thank God!" he gasped, scarcely hearing her pleadings.

  They were skirting three early delivery-wagons, waiting to unload atthe supply door of the hotel. A boy passing in the street beyond wasshrilly whistling "Tammany."

  "Tell me--now!" demanded Durkin.

  "When you fainted MacNutt reached back for the revolver. He would haveshot you, only Keenan called for him. He cried down the shaft that hewas dying. He--he must have pushed the button as he fell. MacNutt wasstill on the floor of the cage, leaning out to take aim at us. Thenthe steel of the shaft-door and the steel of the elevator cage as itwent up came to--oh--I _can't_ tell you now!"

  Durkin came to a stop, swaying against her.

  "You mean the cage worked automatically, that it went up, with MacNuttstill leaning out?"

  "Yes!" gasped the woman brokenly; and Durkin felt the shiver of thetortured body on which he leaned.

  He was silent as they swung into the open street. His exhausted anduncooerdinating brain was idly busy with some vague impression of thepoignant irony of that end, of how that uncomprehending yet ineluctablepower with which this man had toyed and played and sinned had, at theultimate moment, established its authority and exacted its right.

  He pulled himself up with a fluttering gasp, weak, sick, overcome, andwas wordlessly grateful for the sustaining arm at his side.

  For, once in the open, they were walking eastward, without a sense,momentarily, of either direction or destination.

  Above the valley of the mist-hung street a thin and yellow light showedwhere morning was coming on, tardily, thickly. The boy whistling"Tammany" passed out of hearing.

  "Thank God! oh, thank God!" Frank suddenly sobbed out, tossed andexalted on a wave of blind gratitude.

  "God?" moaned the defeated and unhappy man at her side, draggingpainfully on with his bruised and bitter body. "What has God to dowith all this--or with us?"

  She could not answer. She saw only a wide and gloomy vista of tangledcrime and offense, stretching back into the past, as the tumbled andhuddled waves of a sea run out to its crowding skyline. But it was thesea that had delivered them.

  Broken, frustrated and defeated, hunted and homeless, withoutconsolation for her Yesterday or respect for her Today, she looked upat the slowly wakening morning with a feeling that seemed to fuse andblend into the fiercest of joy.

  Then the momentary exaltation died out of her weary body. They hadlife--but life was not enough! A sense of something within her fallingand crumbling away, a silence of dark questioning and indecision, tookpossession of her.

  Then out of her misery she cried still again, passionately,persistently, as she clutched and clung to him, her mate for whom andwith him she was once destined to be a wanderer over the face of theearth:

  "There must be a God! I tell you, there _must_ be a God. He has letus escape!"

  The man looked at her, questioningly.

  "Don't you understand? This is the last?"

  "The last?"

  "Yes--yes, the last! You said it would be never again, if once youescaped from this!"

  He had forgotten. But the woman at his side, holding him up, hadremembered.

  "Come!" she said. And they went on again.

  CHAPTER XXX

  ONE YEAR LATER--AN EPILOGUE

  Frances waited for her husband, walking slowly up and down under the rowof pallid city maples. She preferred the open light of the Square to thegloom of the street that cut like a canyon between the toweringoffice-buildings on either side of it. There was a touch of autumn inthe air, and a black frost of the night before had left the sidewalkscarpeted with the mottled roans and yellows and russets of the fallenleaves.

  Summer was over and gone. And all life, in
some way, seemed to have agedwith the ageing of the year. There was something mournful, to the earsof the waiting woman, in the very rustle of the dry leaves under herfeet, as she paced the Square. The sight of the half-strippedtree-branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind with the thoughtof skeletons. The smell of the dying leaves made her heart heavy. Theyseemed to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at the mutability ofall things that lived and breathed. And she had so wanted always to liveand exult in living; she had so trembled at the thought of these creepingchanges and the insidious passing away of youth and all it meant to her!"I hate autumn, most awfully," she had confessed to her husband thatmorning, dolefully.

  She went on, passing from under the shadow of the trees, grateful for thereassuring thin sunshine of the late afternoon, that touched the roofsand the tree-tops with gilt, and bathed the more toweringoffice-buildings in a brazen glory of light, and left the street-dustswimming in a vapor of pale gold. The city noises seemed muffled andquiescent. A sense of fulfillment, of pensive maturity, of tranquillityafter tumult, lay over even the urban world before her. She scarcelyknew why or how it was, but it left her melancholy, lonely, homesick forthings she could not name.

  The waiting woman looked up, and saw her husband. Suddenly, with onedeep breath, all the emptiness of life was a thing, if not of the past,at least of the background of consciousness.

  He was quite close to her by this time, and as she stood there, waiting,she swept him with her quick and searching gaze. He appeared before her,in that fleeting moment of impersonal vision, strangely objective, ascompletely and acutely visualized as though she had looked upon him forthe first time.

  Something in his face wrung her heart, foolishly, something in thewordless, Rembrandt-like poignancy with which it stood out, through thecold autumn sunlight of the late afternoon, in its mortal isolation ofsoul, its sense of being detached and denied the companionship of itskind. He looked old and tired. He, too, was voyaging towards somemelancholy autumnal maturity, some sorrowful denudation of youth, thatleft him pitiful to her impotently aching heart. He, too, stood in wantof some greater love than even she could ever bring to him, as surely asshe still cried out for the solace of some companionship, not closer thanhis, but of a different fiber. She had found herself, of late, vaguelyhungering for some influence less autumnal, less vesper-like, to hold andwall her back from those grayer hours of retrospection which crept intoher life. Yet this was a secret she had kept always locked in her ownholy of holies. For even in the face of that indeterminate feeling, itstill stabbed her like a knife to think of any thought or life comingbetween her and her husband.

  She hurried to him, with her habitual little throaty cry, and caught hisarm in hers. The gesture was almost a passionate one.

  "Jim, you're working too hard!" she said, as they went on again, arm inarm.

  He studied her upturned face. The pale oval under the great heavy crownof glinting chestnut seemed paler than usual, the violet eyes seemed moreshadowy. There clung to her a puzzling and unfamiliar sense of fragility.

  "What is it?" he asked, coming to a stop.

  "I'm worried about _you_!" she cried. "This is the fourth, almost thefifth month, you've shut yourself up with that transmitter!"

  "But it's _work_!" he answered, unmoved.

  "Yes, I know, but work without a holiday, without rest----"

  "But think what it's going to be to us! All I've got to do now is to getmy selenium cell simplified enough for commercial purposes! And anothermonth will do it!"

  "But eight months ago you said that!"

  "There's nothing left to stick us _now_. Once I get this cell the way Iwant it, we'll start manufacturing, for all we're worth. In less thansix months we'll be filling contracts here in America. Two months laterwe'll be introducing into seven different countries in Europe a fullyprotected and patented transmitting camera as far ahead of theold-fashioned photophone as a Bell telephone is ahead of a tinspeaking-tube."

  "I know, Jim; but you must be more careful! You must, in some way, stopworking so hard!"

  "Who could help it, at this sort of work?" he protested, contentedly.She felt that he, too, had stumbled upon that timeless and mysteriousparadox of existence, that incongruous law which ordains that as onesurrenders and relinquishes and gives, so one shall live the richer anddeeper.

  "I tell you, Frank," her husband was saying, "the more I know ofelectricity the more I bow down before it, in wonder, the prouder I am tobe mixed up in its mysteries! Just think of what it's come to be, thisthing we call Electricity, since the day primitive man first rubbed apiece of amber and beheld the puny miracle of magnetic attraction! Why,today it harnesses tides and waterfalls, and tames and orders force, andleaves power docile and patient, swinging meek and ready from a bit ofmetal thread! It lightens cities, at a turn of the wrist; it hurls yourvoice half way round the world, it guides sailors and measures and weighsthe stars; it threads empires together with its humming wires; it's theshuttle that's woven all civilization into one compact fabric! It's thelight of our night-time, and the civilizer of our world. It explodesmines, and heals sickness. It creeps as silent as death through athousand miles of sea, and yet it's the very tongue of our world! Itprints and carves and beautifies; it rises to the most stupendous tasks,and then it stoops to the most delicate work!"

  "And it lets me ring you up, my beloved own, and hear your voice, yourliving voice!" Even beyond her laughter he could catch the rapt note asshe spoke. He responded to that note by catching at her gloved hand, andkeeping it in his gratefully.

  "Yes, but it does even more than annihilate space and turn wheels anddespatch trains. Think what it's doing with wireless alone! And _that_is only the beginning! Why, the whole world is alive and athrob withenergy, with stored-up power aching to be used--and some day it will beelectricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! Asyet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless,invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown--as unknown as God!--andalmost as mysterious!"

  "Oh!" she reproved.

  "I've sometimes wondered if those lightning flashes and those terrifyingthings that used to fill the temples in the Eleusinian Mysteries didn'tsimply mean that those old priests of Apollo knew more about electriccurrents than we imagine."

  "And even Jove's bolts were only electricity, weren't they?" sheassented. "So you're right, in a way--their god and their power _were_electricity! Perhaps it was electricity Prometheus stole!"

  "No, it's older than Prometheus, it's older than Adam, it's mixed up insome way with the very origin of life itself! It's the most mysteriousthing in the world--and the most beautiful!" he concluded, with solemnconviction.

  They walked on in silence for a moment or two. A dead leaf fell anddrifted between them. The afternoon deepened into twilight.

  "O, Jim, not the most beautiful!" said Frank, suddenly, thrilled andshaken with some wayward passion of gratitude, as acute as it wasunheralded.

  He looked down at her, puzzled.

  "Oh, I'm glad, Jim; glad!" she cried, irrelevantly.

  "Glad for what?"

  "For this--for you--for everything!"

  His face clouded a little, for a moment, with the shadow of the past thatcould and would not be altogether past.

  "I thought we'd decided to let that--stay closed?" he said. There was anote of reproof in his voice.

  "Do you know what _I_ think is the most beautiful thing in all the world,Jim?" she went on, as irrelevantly as before, but holding his arm stillmore tightly entangled in hers. "I think it's Redemption!"

  "Redemption?"

  "Yes--I think there's nothing ever done, or made, or written of, or sungof by poets, more beautiful than a soul, a poor, unhappy human soul,coming into its own once more! Oh, I don't believe I can ever make youfeel it as I feel it--but I don't believe there's an adventure or amovement in all life more beautiful than the rehabilitation--that's theonly word I can use!--of a
man's heart, or a woman's! Think of it,Jim!--what can be lovelier than the restoration of sanity and beauty andmeaning to a suffering and tortured life? Health after sickness islovely, and so is healing after disease, and quietness after unrest, andpeace after struggle. But that, Jim, is only for the body. It's onlyfor something of a day or two, or a year or two. When a soul isredeemed, it's something that leaves you face to face with--withEternity!"

  Again he studied her rapt and mournful eyes, at sea, wondering to whatnew turn the sacrificial instinct of her sex was leading her.

  "What has made you think of all this?" he demanded of her, a littleunhappily, a little afraid of the old wounds that were healing so slowly."Why should you remind me of how hard it is, and how little I've beenable to do?"

  She was silent for several minutes again, as they walked on, slowly,under the spectral autumn trees, with the rustling dead leaves at theirfeet. She found it hard to answer him.

  "'The saints are only the sinners who kept on trying!'" she quoted tohim, for the second time in their lives. Then she came to a full stop.

  "Oh, Jim, I need you so much, now!" she cried out, at last, pitifully,and still again he could not bridge the abyss that lay between onethought and another.

  "Need me?"

  "Yes, need you!"

  Again a dead leaf fluttered and drifted between them.

  "What is it?" he asked, more gently.

  She put her hand on his shoulder, and when she spoke her voice was littlemore than a whisper.

  And he, the man who had spoken of trivial mysteries, bowed before thatsupremest mystery which broods and centres in the thought of motherhood.

  "We'll have to be good now--terribly good!" she wailed. And she tried tolaugh up at him, with a touch of her old bravery, in a futile effort tomake light of her tears.

  "30"