Phantom Wires: A Novel

His eyes fell on a paltry handful of silver, with the dulled gold of one worn napoleon showing from its midst. He remembered, suddenly, that it was the third time he had counted...

As Durkin and the young Chicagoan once more stepped out of the brilliantly lighted theatre, into the balmy night air, a seductive mingling of perfumes and music and murmuring vo...

Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submerge himself in the muffling midnight silences, the silences of those outwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in si...

Under the softly-waving palms of that midnight garden, Durkin relived their feverish past, month by remembered month, until they found the need of money staring them in the face...

Durkin waited until, muffled and far away, the throb and drone of an orchestra floated up to him. This was followed, scatteringly, by the bells of the different _tables d'hôte_....

"Oh, Jim!" she half-moaned, inadequately. Yet an _aura_ of calmness seemed to surround her. So great was his own excitement that the words burst from him of their own will, appa...

Durkin was pacing up and down the small room in his stockinged feet, looking at her, from time to time, with a detached, but ever studiously alert glance. Then he came to a stop...

Frances Durkin, as she turned back into the darkness of the room, desperately schooled herself to calmness. She warned herself that, above all, she must remain clear-headed and...

It was not until Frances Durkin and her husband were installed in an empty first-class compartment, twining and curling and speeding on their way to Genoa, that even a comparati...

Henry Keenan, of New York, had leisurely finished his cigar, and had as leisurely glanced through all the three-day-old London papers. He had even puzzled, for another half-hour...

It was two days later,--and they had been days of blank suspense for him,--that Durkin made his way to Frank's room, unobserved. His first resolution had been to wait for a clea...

"May I speak to you a moment?" asked Keenan, taking a step nearer to her as he spoke. She seemed able, even under his quiet composure, to detect some note of alarm.

There flashed through Frances Durkin's mind, in the momentary silence that fell over that strange company, the consciousness that the triangle was completed; that there, in one...

Frances Durkin's memory of that hurried flight from Genoa always remained with her a confusion of incongruous and quickly changing pictures. She had a recollection of stepping f...

"It's the messages that simplify things for us. All we now have to do is to get on board in such a manner that the ship's officers will have no suspicions. They mustn't dream of...

The _Slavonia_ was well down the Adriatic before Keenan was seen on deck. Both Frank and Durkin, by that time, had met in secret more than once, and had talked over their predic...

It was the _Slavonia's_ last night at sea. In another twelve hours the pilot would be aboard, Quarantine would be passed, the engines would be slowed down, and the great steamer...

It was in the gray of the early morning, as the _Slavonia_ steamed from the Upper Bay into the North River and the serrated skyline of Manhattan bit into the thin rind of sunris...

Any passion so neutral and negative as jealousy soon burned itself out in an actively positive brain like Durkin's. And it left, as so often had happened with him, manifold gray...

Frances Durkin was neither protesting nor struggling when he drew up in front of what she knew to be Penfield's lower gambling club. It stood in that half-squalidly residential...

"I mean that Durkin's got his quarter of a million in securities, all right, all right, but, by God, I've got _you_! And I mean that he's goin' to, that he's _got_ to, make a ch...

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...

It was a thick and heavy night, with a drizzle of fine rain blanketing the city. Every now and then a lonely carriage spluttered along the oily and pool-strewn pavement of the c...

In the ensuing silence, as the unbroken seconds dragged themselves on, Durkin called himself a fool, and, struggling bitterly with that indeterminate uneasiness which possessed...

Beyond that first involuntary little cry of terror Frances Durkin uttered no sound, as she found herself in the hooded tonneau, wedged in between MacNutt and Keenan. That first...

Durkin's first feeling, as he scrambled to his feet and half-stumbled, half-groped his way along the narrow, tunnel-like passage, was an untimely and impotent and almost delirio...

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 sen...

It was slowly, almost reluctantly, that Durkin returned to full and clear-thoughted consciousness. Even before he had opened his eyes he realized that he was in a hurrying carri...

Durkin advanced into the room quickly, the revolver in his right hand. It was a short-barreled bull-dog gun of heavy caliber, ugly and menacing as it swung from his out-thrust w...

Frances waited for her husband, walking slowly up and down under the row of pallid city maples. She preferred the open light of the Square to the gloom of the street that cut li...