Phantom Wires Part 29

Turning to his tool-bag and scooping out his bar of soap, he kneaded together enough of the nitroglycerine from one of the stout rubber bags to make a mixture of the consistency of liquid honey. This he quickly but carefully worked into the crack of the obstructing door. Then he attached his detonator, and shortened and lighted his fuse, scuttling back to the momentary shelter of the outer pa.s.sage, making sure to be beyond the deadly "feathered radius" of the nitro.

There he waited behind the steel-bound door for the coming detonation.

The sound of it smote him like a blow on the chest, followed by a rush of air and a sudden feeling of nausea.

But he did not wait. He groped his way in, relocked the pa.s.sage door and crawled on all fours through the smoke and heavy, malodorous gases.

The remnants of the blasted door hung, like a tattered pennon, on one twisted hinge, and his way now lay clear to the ladder of grilled ironwork leading to the floor above. But here the steel trapdoor again barred his progress. One sharp twist and wrench with his steel lever, however, tore the bolt-head from its setting, and in another half-minute he was standing on the closed door above, shutting out the noxious smoke from the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Between him and the stairway stood still another fortified door, heavier than the others. He did not stop to knead his paste, for already he could hear the crash of gla.s.s and the sound of sledges on the door at the rear of the cigar-shop. Catching up a strand of what he knew to be the most explosive of all guncottons--it was cellulose-hexanitrate--he worked it gently into the open keyhole and again scuttled back to safety as the fuse burnt down.

He could feel the building shake with the tremor of the detonation, shake and quiver like a s.h.i.+p pounded by strong head seas. A remote window splintered and crashed to the floor, sucked in by the atmospheric inrush following the explosion-vacuum. He noticed, too, as he mounted the narrow stairs before him, that he was bleeding at the nose. But this, he told himself, was no time for resting. For at the head of the second stairway still another sheet of armored steel blocked his pa.s.sage, and still again the hurried, hollow detonation shook the building. The ache in his head, behind and above the eyes, became almost unbearable; his stomach revolted at the poisonous gases through which he was groping. But he did not stop.

As he twisted and pried with his steel lever at the lock of the trapdoor that stood between him and the open air of the housetop, he could already hear the telltale splintering of wood and sharp orders and m.u.f.fled cries and the approaching, quick tramping of feet. He fought at the lock like a madman, for by this time the trampling feet were mounting the upper stairs, and doors were being battered and wrenched from their hinges. He had at least made their work easy for them; he had torn open the heart of Penfield's stronghold; he had blazed a path for those officers of the law who had bowed before the inaccessibility of the building he had disrupted single-handed!

"Good!" he cried, in his frenzied delight. "Give it to them good!

Wreck 'em, once for all; put 'em out of business!"

Then he gave a sudden relieving "Ah!"--for the sullen wood had surrendered its bolts, and the door swung open to his upward push. The night wind, cold and damp and clean, swept his hot and grimy face as he pulled himself up through the opening.

Even as he did so he heard the gathering sounds below him growing clearer and clearer. He squatted low in the darkness, and with a furtive eye ever on the dismantled trapdoor, groped his way, gorilla-like, closer and closer to the wall against which he knew the janitor's ladder to be still leaning.

Then he dropped flat on his face, and wormed his way toward the nearest chimney, not twelve feet from him, for a wet helmet had emerged from the trap opening. A moment later a lantern was flas.h.i.+ng and playing about the rainy roof.

"We've got 'em! Quick, Lanigan; we've got 'em!" cried the helmeted head exultantly, from the trapdoor, to someone below.

The next moment Durkin, p.r.o.ne on his face, heard the crack of a revolver and the impact of the ball as it ricochetted from the roof-tin, not a yard from his feet.

He no longer tried to conceal himself, but, rolling and tumbling toward the eave-cornice, let himself over, and hung and clung there by his hands, while a second ball whistled over him.

He felt desperately along the flat brick surface, with his kicking feet, wondering if he had misjudged his direction, sick with a fear that he might be dangling over an open abyss. He s.h.i.+fted the weight of his body along the cornice ledge, still pawing and feeling, feverishly and ridiculously, with his gyrating limbs. Then a joy of relief swept through him. The ladder was there, and his feet were already on its second step.

As he ran, cat-like, across the lower apartment-house roof, he knew that he stood in full range of his pursuers above, and he knew that by this time they were already crowding out to the cornice-ledge. There was no time for thought. He did not pause to look back at them, to weigh either the problem or the possible consequences in his mind; he only remembered that that afternoon he had noticed five crowded lines of was.h.i.+ng swinging in multi-colored disarray at the back of that many-familied hive of life. He hesitated only once, at the sheer edge of the roof, to make sure, in the uncertain half-light, that he was above those crowded lines.

"Let him have it--there he goes!" cried a voice above, and at that too warning note his hesitation took wing.

Durkin leaped out into s.p.a.ce, straddling the first line of sodden clothes as he fell. Even in that brief flight the thought came to his mind that it would have been infinitely better for him if the falling rain had not weighted and flattened those sagging lines of was.h.i.+ng.

Then he remembered, more gratefully, that it was probably only because of the rain that they still swung there.

As his weight came on the first line it snapped under the blow, as did the second, which he clutched with his hands, and the third, which he doubled over, limply, and the fourth, which cut up under his arm-pit.

But as he went downward he carried that ever-growing avalanche of cotton and woolen and linen with him, so that when his sprawling figure smote the stone court it fell m.u.f.fled and hidden in a web of tangled garments.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE STRAITS OF CHANCE

How his flight ended Durkin never clearly remembered. He had a dim and uneasy memory of the lapse of time, either great or little, the confused recollection of waking to his senses and fighting his way free from a smothering weight of wet and clinging clothes. As he struggled to his feet a stab of pain shot through his left hand, and up through his forearm. It was so keen and penetrating that he surmised, in his blank and unreasoning haste, that he must have torn a chord or broken a bone in his wrist. But on a matter like that, he felt, he could now waste no time.

If he had, indeed, been unconscious, he concluded, it had been but momentary. For as he groped about in search of his hat, dazed and bruised, he found himself still alone and unmolested. Creeping through the apartment-house cellar, and out past the door of the snoring and still undisturbed janitor, he crouched for a waiting moment or two behind an overloaded garbage-can, in the area.

Hearing nothing, he staggered up the narrow stairs to the level of the sidewalk, wet and ragged and disheveled, blackened and soiled and begrimed. The street seemed deserted.

He felt sick and faint and shaken, but he would not give up. He half-stumbled, half-staggered along, splas.h.i.+ng through little pools of rain held in depressions of the stone sidewalk, supporting himself on anything that offered, hoping, if this were indeed the end, that he might crawl away into some dark and secluded corner of the city, to hide the humiliating ignominy of it all.

In front of a Chinese laundry window he saw that he could go no further. His first impulse was to creep inside, and make an effort to bribe his way to secrecy, although he knew that within another quarter of an hour the tightening cordon of the police would entirely surround the block.

As he swayed there, hesitating, he heard the thunder of hoofs and the rumble of wheel-tires on the soggy asphalt. His first apprehensive thought was that it would prove to be a patrol-wagon, with police reserves from some neighboring precinct. But as he blinked through the darkness he made out a high-platformed Metropolitan Milk Company's delivery-wagon swinging down toward him.

He staggered, with a slow and heavy wading motion, out to the centre of the street, a strange and spectral figure, with outstretched arms, uttering a sharp and halting cry or two.

The driver pulled up, thirty long and dreary feet past him.

"What in h.e.l.l d'you want?" he demanded irately, raising his whip to start his team once more, as he caught a clearer view of the seemingly drunken figure.

"I'll give you a fiver," said Durkin thickly, "if you'll gi' me a lift!"

He held the money in his hand, as he stumbled and panted to the wagon-step. That put an end to all argument.

"Climb in, then--quick!" cried the big driver, as he caught his pa.s.senger by a tattered coat sleeve and helped him up into the high-perched seat.

"But for the love o' G.o.d, who's been doin' things to you?" he went on, in amazement, as he saw the bruised and bleeding and ash-colored face.

"They threw me out o' their d.a.m.ned dope shop!" cried Durkin, with an only half-simulated thickness of utterance, as he jerked a shaking thumb toward the lights of the Chinese laundry. "And I guess--I'm--I'm a bit knocked out!"

For he felt very weak and faint and weary, though the cold rain and the open night air beat on his upturned face with a sting that was gratefully refres.h.i.+ng.

"They certainly did make a mess o' you!" chortled the unmoved driver, as they rumbled westward and took the corner with a skid of the great wheels that struck fire from even the wet car-tracks. He tucked the bill down in his oil-coat pocket.

"Feelin' sick, ain't you?"

"Yes!"

"Where d'you want to go?" he asked more feelingly.

"Where d'you go?" parried Durkin.

"Hoboken Ferry, for th' Lackawanna Number Eight!"

"Then that'll do me," answered the other weakly.

He leaned back in his high and rocking seat, grasping the back rail with his right hand. He felt as if the waves of a troubled and tumultuous sea were throwing him up, broken and torn, on some island of possible safety. He felt dizzy, as though he were being tossed and plunged forward to some narrow bar of impending release and rest. He did not ask of himself just what seas boomed and thundered on the opposing side of that narrow stretch of promised security. He knew that they were there, and he knew that the time would soon come when he must face and feel them about him. He had once demanded rest; but he knew that there now could be no rest for him, until the end. He might hide for a day or two, like a hunted animal with its hurt, but the hounds of destiny would soon be at his heels again. All he asked, he told himself, was his man's due right of momentary relapse, his breathing spell of quietness. He was already too stained and scarred with life to look for the staidly upholstered sanctuaries, the padded seclusions of simple and honest wayfarers. He was broken and undone, but his day would come again.

He looked at his limp and trailing left hand. To his consternation, he saw that it dripped blood. He tried to push back his coat sleeve, but the pain was more than he could endure. So with his right hand he lifted the helpless arm up before his eyes, as though it were something not his own flesh and blood, and for the first time saw the splinter of bone that protruded from the torn flesh, just below the wrist-joint.

He felt for his handkerchief, dizzily, and tried to bandage the wound.

This he never accomplished, for with a sudden little gasp he fainted away, and fell p.r.o.ne across the oil-skinned lap of the big driver.