Phantom Wires Part 32

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

"The floor above," slowly responded the other, "is Richard Penfield's private offices, where his safe is, and where your friend, no doubt, is now 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.

"Mac.n.u.tt must not get out of this house! We must stop him before he gets down this shaft. You go down by the stairs, quick, to the lowest bas.e.m.e.nt. You'll find the motor operating the elevator. What you must do is to get to the switch, and shut off the power before this car can get 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--_or he'll kill you_!"

He could hear, through those silent hallways, the m.u.f.fled rustling of her skirts and the sound of her flying feet on the waxed and polished wood. Then the silence suddenly became oppressive.

It was the unseen foe that he was afraid of, the undiscerned force that he feared. His uneasy and alert mind struggled to grasp the problem of how and where Mac.n.u.tt would strike, if strike he did, out of the darkness of that silent and deserted house.

Durkin decided that above all things he must render impossible the descent of the elevator cage. But for a moment he could think of no bar that might be flung across the path of that complex and almost irresistible machinery, once awakened into its full power. Then the solution of the riddle came to him.

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

Then he turned to Keenan.

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

Durkin repeated his command.

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

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, threw open the guard door, Durkin was wondering, in his feverish activity of mind, just how soon Mac.n.u.tt's next move would come, and just how and where 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 ten feet from the shaft, the elevator cage descended. It flashed by the open door without stopping on its hurried course. But as it winged past that square of open light a revolver shot rang out and reechoed through the room.

Durkin, peering across the curling smoke, saw Keenan pitch forward on his hands, struggle and thrash to his feet once more, like a wounded rabbit. Then he fell again, p.r.o.ne on his face, close beside the shaft door. There he lay, breathing in little gurgles.

Durkin, with little beads of sweat on his pallid face, realized what it meant. That flying shot had been intended for _him_. Mac.n.u.tt, in that desperate and hurried and unreasoning last chance, had delivered his blow, but had been mistaken in his man!

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

He turned and hurled himself down the stairway, without even waiting to recover the revolver that had fallen a minute before from his startled fingers. He was conscious only of flinging the weight of his sliding body on the flume-like surface of the smooth bal.u.s.trade, with his feet clattering on the polished steps as he went. He turned and dashed on to the head of the next stairway, and in the same manner flung himself to the floor beneath, and then to the next, and the next, until he was in the gloom of the bas.e.m.e.nt itself.

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

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

For at the door of the open cage Mac.n.u.tt and Frank fought and struggled and panted together. The man was inside, on the bottom of the cage, the woman was outside it. Her huddled but still resisting body was locked and jammed halfway across the narrow door. One of her opponent's great, ape-like strangling arms was about her neck. But the fingers at the end of it were caught between her strong white carnivorous teeth; and they became stained with blood as, in her frenzy, she fought and bit and struggled, with the blind fury of some final despair. Her revolver she had been unable to use; it lay out of her reach, behind them on the floor of the cage.

Mac.n.u.tt, as he strained and tore at her resisting body, was fighting and edging his way with her back into the cage, to where that waiting revolver lay. He himself was already well within the narrow opening, sprawled out red and disheveled and t.i.tanesque on the cage floor. But she was resisting him, inch by inch, fighting desperately, like a cornered cat, for her very life, yet knowing there could be only one end to that uneven conflict.

Durkin, after one comprehending glance, followed his first animal impulse of offense, and descended on Mac.n.u.tt, beating at the p.r.o.ne, bull-like head, with its claret-colored bald spot, across which ran one livid scratch. He pounded on the cl.u.s.tered fingers of the gorilla-like hand, crus.h.i.+ng 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 with him to use, struggled to tear Frank away from the deadly clutch. This he would surely have done had not Mac.n.u.tt seen his chance, and with his free hand suddenly caught at the wounded wrist that hung stained and limp at his enemy's side. That sudden, savage torture of the lacerated flesh was more than the weak and exhausted body of Durkin could endure.

He emitted one little involuntary cry; then every protesting nerve and sinew capitulated, a white light seemed to flash and burn at the base of his very brain, and then go out. He fell fainting on the hard maple floor.

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

It was as he found himself ebbing down through some soft and feathery emptiness that he seemed to hear a pitiful and imploring voice call thinly out, "_Mack_!" Still fainter he seemed to hear it, "_Mack_!

_Come up_! _I'm dying_!" He remembered, lazily, that it sounded like the 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 the smell of powder smoke. Then he remembered no more.

Just how or at what juncture he lost consciousness he could never clearly remember. But his first tangible impression was the knowledge that his wife was once more pouring brandy down his throat and imploring him to hurry. Then the sound of m.u.f.fled blows echoed from above.

"Quick, Jim, oh, quick, or it will be too late. No, not that way. We can't go by the front--that's cut off. By the back--this way--I've got everything 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 department of 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 the low gate, and kept her arm in his as they pa.s.sed down the dark lane, with its homely smells of early cookery and baking bread. Only one pa.s.sion possessed them--the blind and persistent and unreasoning pa.s.sion for escape, for freedom.

"But Mac.n.u.tt--where's Mac.n.u.tt?" 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 the pitiably 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!"