The Wire Tappers

The discharged prisoner hung back, blinking out at the strong sunlight with preoccupied and unhappy eyes. When the way at last seemed clear he thrust his hands deep in his pocke...

It was a full minute before the door swung open; and the unlooked-for wait in some way keyed the younger man’s curiosity up to the snapping point. As it finally opened, slowly,...

“It _is_ a great deal! But we’re up against a great deal! If we had twice as much, it would be even better. I have a possible twelve hundred now, altogether—just a scrawny, mise...

A sudden thought came to her, as she stood there in the silence, and, slipping back to her room, she took first a hot-water bottle out of her nurse’s bag, and then a hypodermic...

Durkin, bending restlessly over his relay, and dreamily cogitating on the newly discovered fact that Morse was a language as harmonious and mysterious and subtly expressive as m...

At twenty minutes to eleven, slipping off his shoes, Durkin climbed cautiously through the transom opening out on the roof. Creeping as carefully from chimney tier to chimney ti...

“It’s a very odd diamond, and a very big diamond, only tinted with a pale blue coloring the same as the Hope Diamond is tinged with yellow. That’s how it came to get its name. B...

“No, it wasn’t the trouble so much—only, for the first time in my life, I felt so—so cruelly alone!” She found it hard to explain it to him adequately. She wondered why it was s...

Frances sent Durkin on alone to the Chelsea, where, he had finally agreed, they were to take rooms for a week at least. There, she argued, they could live frugally, and there th...

“Tomorrow for the States—for me England, and Yesterday,”—murmured Frances Candler as she stood at her window looking down over the tangle and tumult of the Strand. “For me, Engl...

More than once, during the feverish, kaleidoscopic days that followed, Durkin found himself drawing aside to ask if, after all, he were not living some restless dream in which a...

Frances Durkin knew the man she had to face. She knew the pagan and primordial malevolence of the being, the almost demoniacal passions that could sweep through him. More than o...

For all the calm precision with which Frances Candler had planned and mapped out a line of prompt action with Durkin, she was shaken and nervous and unstrung, as she leaned over...

Entrenched in her little top-floor studio, behind a show-case of cotillion-favors, Miss Cecelia Starr sat in her wicker rocker, very quietly and very contentedly sewing. She fel...

Durkin’s first feeling, incongruously enough, once he was out in the open air, was a ravenous sense of hunger. Through all that busy day his only meal had been a hasty and half-...

Certain disjointed pictures of the first night and day remained vividly in her memory; unimportant and inconsequential episodes haunted her mind, as graphic and yet as vaguely u...

Durkin sat at the restaurant table, smoking, his watch in his hand. It was already seven minutes to four. As the seventh minute slipped into the sixth, and the sixth into the fi...

Durkin waited, with the receiver at his ear. Once more the signal-bell shrilled and cluttered its curtly hurried warning. A vague yet nasal and half-impatient voice murmured bro...

She knew that Sunset Bryan’s success on the circuit, his midnight prodigalities, his bewildering lavishness of life, and his projected departure for New Orleans, had already bro...

Durkin was both puzzled and apprehensive. That a taxi should follow his own at eleven o’clock at night, for some twenty-odd blocks, was a singular enough coincidence. That it sh...

This was the cipher message which flashed from Samuel Curry to his New Orleans partner, giving him hurried warning that the final movement in their cotton coup had been again po...

There was, apparently, nothing amiss. A noise of pounding came to him from the shipping-room of a lace importer below. A few scattered shafts of light glimmered from the windows...

Durkin, with an officer at either elbow, tried to think far ahead and to think fast. Yet try as he might, his desperate mind could find no crevice in the blind wall of his predi...

“Surely this is Indian Summer—strayed or stolen!” said Frank one morning a few days later, as she wheeled Durkin and his big arm-chair into the sunlight by the open window.

As she slowly wakened in response to the call that had been left at the hotel office, Frances wondered, with the irrelevancy of the mental machinery’s first slow movements, if D...

Four hours later, in that shabby little oyster-house often spoken of as “The Café of Failures,” lying less than a stone’s throw from the shabbiest corner of Washington Square, F...

In the paling afternoon, with a pearl-mist of fine rain thinly shrouding the city, Frances Candler waited for Durkin impatiently, with her watch open before her. As the frail st...

For all the rest of that day Frances Candler hated herself, hated Durkin for the mean and despicable paths into which he and his plottings had forced her, hated her sordid and h...

As a result of her midnight conference with Durkin, Frances Candler learned many things. One of these was the fact that the life into which she had flung herself was proving a c...

It was one week later that Frances Candler wrote her second letter to Durkin. She wrote it feverishly, and without effort, impetuous page after page, until she came to the end....

It was a whim of Durkin’s that the ceremony should take place on Broadway, “on the old alley,” as he put it, “where I’ve had so many ups and downs.” So, his arm in a black silk...

Neither Frances nor Durkin seemed to care to come on deck until the bell by the forward gangway had rung for the last time, and the officer from the bridge had given his last wa...