Chapter 29

Early the next morning Trotter was back at the bank corner, like a guard at his sentry-box. He kept watch there, with that pertinacious alertness peculiar to the idler, until he had the satisfaction of witnessing Heeney's early departure from the cellar, with a tool kit under his arm.

Five minutes later Trotter was descending the stairs that led to the plumber's shop. Once there, he took out his key, fitted it to the lock, opened the door, stepped quietly inside, and locked the outer door after him. Before venturing to open the inner door he pressed an ear flat against the wooden partition and stood there listening. The silence was unbroken.

He stepped to the side of the shop and caught up a plumber's thick-bodied tallow candle. Then he softly opened the second door, stepped inside, and as softly closed the door after him.

He found himself in perfect darkness. But he stood there, waiting, before venturing to move forward, before daring to strike a light. He knew, as he peered about the blackness that engulfed him, that he was now facing more than an indeterminate responsibility. He was confronting actual and immediate danger. Even as he stood there, sniffing at the air, so heavy with its smell of damp lime and its undecipherable underground gases, a sudden fuller consciousness of undefined and yet colossal peril sent a telegraphing tingle of nerves up and down his body.

The only thing that broke the silence was the faint sound of footsteps on the laundry floor above him, together with the steady thump of irons on the ironing table. There was something fortifying, something consoling, in those neighborly and sedentary little noises.

Trotter struck a match and lighted his candle. He waited without moving for the flame to grow. Then he thrust the candle up before him. As he did so, his hand came in contact with the rough surface of what at first he took to be a stone wall. But as he looked closer he saw that it was not masonry. It was nothing more nor less than a carefully piled mass of stone and brick. Each fragment had been carefully placed on top of its fellow, each interstice had been carefully filled with rubble.

The pile extended from floor to ceiling. It filled the entire cellar. It left only space enough for a man to pass inward from the opened door. It was nothing more than the dump of a mine, the rock and brick from a tunnel, not flung loosely about, but scrupulously stowed away.

Holding the candle in front of him, Trotter bent low and groped his way in through the narrow passage. Everything was as orderly and hidden as the approach to a wild animal's lair. Everything was eloquent of a keen secretiveness. No betraying litter met his eye. Each move had been calmly and cautiously made. Each step of a complicated campaign had been quietly engineered. Trotter could even decipher a series of electric wires festooned from the little tunnel's top. He could see where the passage had gone around obstacles, where it had curled about a dishearteningly heavy buttress base, where it had dipped lower to underrun a cement vault bed, where it had sheered off from the tin-foiled surface of a "closed-curcuit" protective system, and where it had dipped and twisted about to advance squarely into a second blind wall at right angles to the first.

A portion of this wall had been torn away. With equal care an inner coating of cement had been chiseled off, exposing to view an unbroken dark surface.

As Trotter held the candle closer, he could see this dark surface marked off with chalk lines, sometimes with crosses, sometimes with figures he could not decipher. On it, too, he could see a solitary depression, as round and bright as a silver coin, as though a diamond drill had been testing the barrier.

He knew, even before he touched the chill surface with his hand, that it was a wall of solid steel, that it was the steel of the bank vault itself, the one deep-hidden and masonry-embedded area which stood without its ever-vigilant closed-circuit sentry. And he knew that Heeney had grubbed and eaten and burrowed his way, like a woodchuck, to the very heart of the First National Trust's wealth.

It was only then that the stupendousness of the whole thing came home to Trotter. It was only then that he realized the almost superhuman cunning and pertinacity in this guileless-eyed cellar plotter called Heeney. He could see the hours of patient labor it had involved, the days and days of mole-like tunneling, the weeks and weeks of gnome-like burrowing and carrying and twisting and loosening and piling, the months of ant-like industry which one blow of the Law's heel would make as nothing.

It rather bewildered Trotter. It filled him with an ever-increasing passion to get away from the place, to escape while he still had a chance. It turned the gaseous underground tunnel into a stifling pit, making his breath come in short and wheezing gasps. It brought a tiny-beaded sweat out on his chilled body.

Then he stopped breathing altogether. He wheeled about and suddenly brought his thumb and forefinger together on the candle flame, pinching it out as one might pinch the life out of a moth.

For on his straining ears fell the sound of a door slammed shut. There was no mistake, no illusion about it. Some one had entered the shop. Then came the sound of a second door. This time it was being opened. And it was the door leading into the tunnel.

Trotter could see the momentary efflorescence of pale light at the bend in the passage before him. And he realized that he was unarmed. He had not even a crowbar, not even a chisel or wrench, with which to defend himself. He knew he stood there trapped and helpless.

He shrank back, instinctively, without being conscious of the movement. He heard the sound of steps, shuffling and short. Then came an audible grunt, a grunt of relief. This was followed by the thump of a heavy weight dropped to the brick floor. Then came the sound of steps again, still shuffling and short.

Trotter leaned forward, listening, waiting, with every nerve strained. He concentrated every sense on the blur of light along the tunnel wall before him.

As he peered forward, scarcely daring to breathe, he was conscious of the fact that the light had suddenly withered. It vanished from the refracting tunnel sides, as though wiped away by an obliterating black sponge. Even before the truth of the thing had come home to him, he heard the sound of a quietly closed door.

Heeney had gone. He had merely crept into his tunnel mouth, dropped some tools, and then quietly crept out again.

It was not until he heard the slam of the outer door, a moment or two later, that Trotter felt sure of his deliverance. It was not until he knew his enemy was up the steps that he let his aching lungs gulp in the fetid tunnel air.

Then he crept forward cautiously, obsessed by one impulse, the impulse of escape, the passion to reach the open, to find air and light and space once more about him. He did nothing more than feel hurriedly over the bundle that lay in his path. It seemed an instrument of steel tied up in a cloth. He could feel strand after strand of wires, ductile and cloth-covered wires. He could also decipher a disk through which ran a piece of metal, like a blade through a sword guard. He felt sure it was an electrode of some sort, a tool to convert stolen electricity into a weapon of offense and assault. But he neither waited to strike a light nor stooped to puzzle over the bundle.

He paused for a minute to listen at the closed partition door. The only sound that came to his ears was the shuffle of feet and the thump from the ironing board above him. Yet when he opened this partition door he did so noiselessly, cautiously, slowly, inch by inch. Still screened in shadow, he studied the shop, the steps, the wire-blurred window, the street above him. Then he took a deep breath, crossed to the shop door, unlocked it, stepped outside, relocked it after him, and, pocketing the key, climbed the steps to the sidewalk.

His face, as he came out to the light, was almost colorless. His eyes were wide and staring with wonder. He kept telling himself that he must walk slowly, that he must in no way betray himself, that he must appear indifferent and offhand and inconspicuous to every one he chanced to pass. He felt the necessity of guarding himself, for he was now a person of importance. He was an emissary of destiny, an agent entrusted with a vast issue.

The streets through which he passed no longer frowned down at him from their inhospitable skylines. He was no longer an unattached and meaningless unit in the life that throbbed and roared all about him. He meant something to it. He was part of it. He was its guardian. And it would acknowledge him, in the end, or he would know the reason why.

VI

Trotter sat peering mildly about him as that Gargantuan organism known as a newspaper office labored and shrieked in the birth of an afternoon edition. Subterranean Hoe presses roared and hummed, telegraph keys clicked and cluttered, typewriters tapped and clattered like a dozen highholders on a hollow elm, telephone bells shrilled, shouting pressmen came and went, unkempt copy boys trailed back and forth with their festoons of limp galley proof, and Hubbart, with close-set eyes and a forehead like a bisected ostrich egg, sat at the City Desk, calmly presiding over an otherwise frenzied accouchement.

It interested Trotter. It interested him very much. But it no longer filled him with mingled fear and revolt. He was, indeed, no longer envious, just as he was no longer nervous. He was as calm as a Nihilist with a bomb in his pocket.

Looking up, he saw that the office boy was holding the rail gate open for him to enter. But he was conscious of no spirit of elation as he stepped through the gate and passed on into that glass-fronted cage where Pyott, the managing editor, sat like a switchman in his many-levered tower.

Trotter saw, seated at a desk before him, a thin-featured, thin-haired man of forty, with the crumpled-up eye-corners peculiar to the face that masks a circuitous and secretive mind. It was a face full of that weary concern, that alert indifferency, which is companion to the spirit of repeated compromise. It was far from an open face: it seemed to betray only two things, tiredness and satiric intelligence.

The man at the desk did not even look up. He merely flung a barbed "Well?" over his shoulder. It reminded Trotter of the preoccupied tail swish of a horse worried by a black-fly. The side flick of one casual monosyllable was plainly all he was worth. Trotter calmly sat down.

"I've been waiting for six months for a job on this paper," he began, quite seriously, quite deliberately. The man at the desk went on writing. The pen did not even stop.

"Yes?" This second monosyllable was neither an answer nor a question. It was merely an intimation that nothing of arresting moment had as yet been uttered.

"So I've come straight to you!"

"Yes!" This third exclamation was plainly a challenge to come to the issue in hand.

"I've been thrown down three----"

"Excuse me," the man at the desk had his hand on a desk 'phone standard, "but you'd better see our city editor."

Trotter laughed a little. "I've seen the city editor four times. It's no use. He only throws me out."

For the first time Pyott, the managing editor, looked up. Then he swung about in his swivel chair and stared at the youth, the somewhat narrow-chested and calm-eyed youth who had the effrontery to sit down without being asked. The calm-eyed youth seemed in no way daunted by the ordeal.

"What do you want?" was Pyott's quick and curt demand.

"I want a job."

The editor's face darkened. Trotter could see that he had angered him. He could see a lean hand shoot out and a lean finger push down on the button that sounded a buzzer in the outer office.

"There's no use doing that till you've heard what I've got to say," announced Trotter.

"Why not?" snapped the man, with a finger still on the button.

"Because your man Hubbart out there told me not to stick my nose in here till I'd made good--till I'd got a big story. And now I've got it. And I'm going to give you the biggest scoop you've printed in five years."

"That's interesting!"

"I'd never have had the nerve to face you if it wasn't."

A boy appeared through the door. The editor swung back to his desk.

"Show this gentleman the way downstairs," he said, without anger, without resentment, without interest.

Trotter stood up and stared at him. "You mean you're not going to take this beat when I've got it right here to hand out to you?" he cried in his startled and high-pitched voice. "You're not going to give me my chance?"

"What chance? What beat are you talking about?"

"A beat that involves the theft of millions of dollars!"

"And what's going to happen to your millions of dollars?"

Trotter sat down in the chair again. "It's going to be stolen, every cent of it."

The man at the desk smiled. It was a very faint and mirthless smile. "You said that before, I think. But who's taking it?"

"One of the most accomplished crooks in all America."

"And from where?" was the next indulgent interrogation.

"From one of the richest banks in this city."

Trotter's calm and deliberate tones were beginning to nettle the other man a little.

"Then it hasn't actually been done?"

"No!"

"Yet you know it IS to be done?"

"Yes!"

Pyott was smiling by this time, quite broadly. "Would you kindly tell me just how you know all this? Just what first opened up the road to your somewhat startling knowledge?"

"Some turkey bones!"

"Ah, I see! Some turkey bones!" He nodded approvingly, indulgently. "And what were you doing with these particular turkey bones?"

"Putting them in a garbage can."

"Ah! You were putting some turkey bones in a garbage can. And as you were about to do this?"

"I caught sight of another man also trying to get rid of a parcel."

"Turkey bones, of course."

A butterball's bosom was no more impervious to slough water than the rapt-eyed youth to the older man's irony.

"When I opened his parcel I found it held mortar and stone and some steel cuttings."

"And this led you to infer?"

"This led me to follow him. He had a basement, I found, directly in the rear of a bank building."

"What bank building?"

"That's my story."

"And I trust the locality agreed with him."

"Extremely well," was Trotter's mild-toned reply. "In fact, it was essential for him to be side by side with that particular bank building, where he could quietly tunnel his way through its back wall and burrow under its floors and eat a passage right through to its vaults."

The man at the desk sighed and looked at the obsessed youth with a smile too impersonal to be called pitying. "Vaults! That's a matter for the police. This is a newspaper office."

"But can't you see the story in it? Can't you see what it means when you're the only people who're in on it?"

"You'll have to show me your Eskimo!" remarked the unperturbed editor.

"That's what I'm here for!" cried the exasperated youth.

Still again the man at the desk eyed his visitor for a minute of silence. Then he reached for his telephone. "I want Kendrick and Gilman for some city work. Send 'em in to me. Yes, right away, please."

Pyott swung about to his visitor once more. "I'm giving you our two best men. They'll do what you tell them to do."

"But that'll make it THEIR story!" objected Trotter. "I want to land this myself. I want it to be mine."

"Then what am I to do?"

Trotter scarcely knew. But he had not forgotten the thing he had waited and hungered for this many a month. "Put me on your staff, first, so I can be acting for somebody."

Still again the editor smiled. "You're set on being one of us, aren't you?"

"I've got to have something behind me before I can tackle a job like this."

"All right," was the wearily indulgent answer, "call yourself one of us. Now what else do you want?"

"I guess you'd better give me one of your workmen for a lookout," suggested the narrow-chested youth.

"Why a workman? Why not Kendrick or Gilman?"

"All I want is a husky man to see I'm not interfered with from outside," replied the new and jealous god of the press world. "Then I'll land the story myself."

The managing editor's finger end was once more on the buzzer. "I'll give you Tiernan of the job room. He's Irish, and weighs two hundred. Is there anything else?"

"I s'pose I'll need a gun," ruminated the mild-eyed youth. "But I'm willing to buy that with my own money."

It was not the purchase of the gun that was troubling him. It was the thought that he had never in all his life so much as discharged a revolver. He would not even know how to load it. But then Tiernan would doubtless be able to show him.

A telephone bell was shrilling at the editor's elbow.

"Is that all?" demanded the impatient man of affairs as he turned to the 'phone. He called a cryptic sentence or two into the transmitter and slapped the receiver back on its hook.

"Yes, I guess that's all," answered the wide-eyed boy, with his hat in his hand.

"Then go and make good," said the man at the desk as Tiernan swung in through the office door. "Go and get your story!"

VII

In a newspaper office, where one impression so quickly and inevitably obliterates another, sensation is startling only in the fact of its ephemerality. For two busy hours wave after wave of the world's turbulence had beaten on the shoreline of the Advance staff's attention. Every one knew, from Pyott down, that the day was a "big" one. And since it is seldom the ever-arriving guests of sensation which disturb a newspaper office but rather the secondary thought of bestowing them in their right chamber and bed and fitting them with their right "heading" night-caps, the ordeal of the Advance's day had reached its second and most exacting crisis. So when Pyott, the managing editor, was called up on the wire by Obed Tyrer, the President of the First National Trust, the call from that quarter carried with it no responsive curiosity.

"Can you come up here right away?" demanded the banker, in a voice of that coerced tranquillity into which the trained mind translates itself when face to face with undue excitement.

"No; I can't! "

"Why can't you?"

"Well, among other things, I've got the trifling matter of a paper to put to press. What's wrong?"

"You know what's wrong!"

"Do I?"

"And you and your men let this go through, two whole weeks of it, for the sake of your little yellow-journal scarehead!"

"Look here, Tyrer, I'm a busy man. Tell me what you're talking about, or ring off."

"I'm talking about the lunacy of a one-cent journalist who's willing to risk even his own funds for the sake of an afternoon beat! I tell you, Pyott, the whole story's got to be stopped!"

"What story?"

"The Advance story! I've got your man Trotter here now. He----"

"Ah, Trotter!" exclaimed Pyott. He was at last beginning to see light.

"I've got him and your job-room man named Tiernan up here, but I can't do anything with Trotter. He's mad, mad as a March hare. Says he's got to get his story down to you for to-day's issue."

"So you've got Trotter there! What else have you got?"

"Will you hold things up till I run down and talk it over? Will you promise me that much?"

Pyott laughed. "Then young Trotter got his story, after all?"

"Got his story? Of course he got it. And in another four hours that safe-cracker would have drilled right into our vitals. I tell you we can't imperil our institution this way. We can't let that stuff get out. We can't do it!"

"Nobody's going to break your nice new bank, Obed! You run down here in a taxi and we'll try to straighten things out."

"But what'll I do with Trotter? How're we ever going to hold him in?"

"Where's your safe-cracker man?"

"We've got him right here! Burns is sending over an A. B. P. A. man to take care of him."

"D'you mean he's hurt?"

"No, no! We've identified him as Missouri Horton of the Scott Gang--he got a Sing Sing life sentence for yegg work in Yonkers. But Burns tells me he had enough money buried away to buy Tammany influence and get paroled. Can't you see what that means?"

"Which way? To your office or to mine?"

"To us! They've got him now, for life! They can get him back to Sing Sing and keep the whole cursed thing under cover!"

There was a moment's silence before the cogitating Pyott spoke again. "And you say you've got Trotter right there with you?"

"Yes, but he's acting like a madman, in the Vice-President's private room."

Again there was a moment's silence. "Then give him ink and paper--give him lots of it. Tell him I've said for him to write the story THERE. Tell him to sling himself, that I want every detail, every fact, and ten solid columns of it!"

"What are you driving at?"

"I'm driving at this: keep him busy, man! Don't you see? Keep him writing there until the thing's worked out of his system. Then I'll tame him down, later. Meanwhile, you'd better clean house up there so you can officially contradict the whole story if the yellows happen to get after you."

"But nothing can get out, I tell you, unless you PUT it out!"

"Then what are you worrying about?"

"Young Trotter says he's got to send his stuff in. He's not satisfied with the mere idea of writing it."

"Then give him one of your men, two of your men, for carriers. Tell him to keep sending his copy down in relays, as he writes it. But don't let him get away."

"Oh, I'll hold him here if I have to nail him to the floor. I tell you, a thing like this would shake public confidence. It'd be worse than a fireproof hotel going up in flames. It would mean an alarming and immediate depreciation in our credit, a deplorable----"

"Of course it would. Come down as soon as you can and tell me all that. I'll have more time then."

Pyott hung up the receiver. He poised for one brief and immobile moment, deep in thought, before he swung about to the three exigent figures making signs for his attention. Then the thin-featured, many-wrinkled, weary-eyed face relaxed in an almost honest and unequivocal smile.

VIII

Trotter, shut in the Vice-President's private office, paid little attention to his surroundings. He did not even know that the desk on which he wrote was of mahogany. He did not notice the imported Daghestan under his feet. He was unconscious of the orchids in the low desk-vase of French silver. He was oblivious of the onyx and marble elegance that surrounded him.

All he knew was that he had paper and ink in plenty and the Greatest Story of the Age to write. All he knew was that time was precious, that two trusted messengers stood before him to deliver his copy, that presses in the lower part of the city waited like hungry animals to gulp down his story, and that before nightfall a million eyes would widen and half a million hearts would beat a little faster at the words that he was about to write.

He pushed back the silver and cut-glass desk ornaments, the heavy gold-framed portrait of a young girl standing beside an opulent-bosomed woman in an opera cloak, the foolish vase of orchids. He made space for himself and his work. And then he wrote.

He wrote with all the rhapsodic passion of a god creating a new world. He began with a preamble that would have broken a copy-reader's heart. He followed it up with atmospheric discursiveness that would have worn away an editor's blue pencil. He told how Steam and Steel were supposed to have crushed the Spirit of Romance out of the age. He pointed out how the modern city of stone and concrete seemed no longer to house that wayward and retrospective spirit in which the heart of the poet has forever reveled.