Part 25 (2/2)
”But I can't!” she moaned.
”Oh, yes; you'll stand it, and you'll see it, too! You'll be right here, where you can take the whole show in, this time! It won't be a case o' foolin' the old man, like it was last time!”
”I will be here?” she gasped.
”You'll be right on the spot--and you'll see the whole performance!”
She drew her hands down, shudderingly, over her averted face, as though to shut something even from her imagination.
”And do you know what'll be the end of it all?” Mac.n.u.tt went on, in his frenzied mockery. ”It'll all end in a little paragraph or two in the _Morning Journal_, to the effect that some unknown safecracksman or other accidentally came in contact with a live wire, and was shocked to death in the very act of breaking into a pious and unoffendin'
cigar-store vault! And you'll be the only one who'll know anything different, and I guess you won't do much squealin' about it!”
She wheeled, as though about to spring on him.
”I will! I will, although I wither between gaol walls for it--although I die for it! I'm no weak and foolish woman! I've known life bald to the bone; I've fought and schemed and plotted and twisted all my days almost, and I can die doing it! And if you kill this man, if you murder him--for it is murder!--if you bring this dog's death on him, I will make you pay for it, in one way or another--I'll make you mourn it, David Mac.n.u.tt, as you've made me mourn the first day I ever saw your face!”
She was in a blind and unreasoning pa.s.sion of vituperative malevolence by this time, her face drawn and withered with fear, her eyes luminous, in the dungeon-like half-lights, with the inner fire of her hate.
”Keep cool, my dear, keep cool!” mocked Mac.n.u.tt, without a trace of trepidation at all her vague threats. ”Durkin's not dead yet!”
She caught madly at the slender thread of hope which swung from his mockery.
”No! No, he's _not_ dead yet, and he'll die hard! He's no fool--you've found that out in the past! He will give you a fight before he goes, in some way, for he's fought you and beaten you from the first--and he'll beat you again--I know he'll beat you again!”
Her voice broke and merged into a paroxysm of sobbing, and Mac.n.u.tt looked at her bent and shaken figure with meditative coldness.
”He may have beaten me, once, long ago--but he'll never do it again.
He won't even go out fightin'! He'll go with his head hangin' and his nose down, like a sneak! And you'll see him go, for you'll be tied there, with a gag in your pretty red mouth, and you'll neither move nor speak. And there'll be no light, unless he gets so reckless as to strike a match. But when the light does come, my dear, it'll be a flash o' blue flame, with a smell o' something burnin'!”
The woman covered her face with her hands, and swayed back and forth where she stood.
Then Mac.n.u.tt held back his guttural laugh, suddenly, for she had fallen forward on her face, in a dead faint.
CHAPTER XXII
THE ENTERING WEDGE
It was at least four o'clock in the afternoon--as the janitor of the building later reported to the police--when a Postal-Union lineman, carrying a well-worn case of tools, made his way up through the halls and stairways of one of those many Italian apartment houses just south of Was.h.i.+ngton Square and west of Broadway.
This lineman worked on the roof, apparently, for some twenty minutes.
Then he came down again, chatted for a while with the janitor in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and giving him a cigar, borrowed an eight-foot step-ladder, for the purpose of scaling some twelve feet of brick wall, where the adjoining office building towered its additional story above the apartment-house roof.
If the janitor had been less averse to mounting his five flights of stairway, or less indifferent as to the nature of the work which took the busy telegraph official up to his roof, he might, that afternoon, have witnessed both a delicate and an interesting electrical operation.
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