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 postponed for at least another twenty-four hours. Frances Candler, keeping watch on the up-town wires, had caught the first inkling of this relieving news. After a passionate hour of talk and pleading from Durkin, and after twelve long hours of unbroken sleep, much of her spirit of rebelliousness had passed away, and she had unwillingly and listlessly taken up the threads of what seemed to her a sadly tangled duty once more. But with the advent of Curry’s climactic message her old, more intimate interest in the game gradually awoke. By daylight she had sent word down to Durkin, who, about that time, was having quite trouble enough of his own. For his underground guerrilla work, as it was called, had its risks in even the remoter parts of the city. But here, in the Wall Street district, by day the most carefully guarded area of all New York, just as by night the Tenderloin is the most watched—here, with hundreds hourly passing to and fro and Central Office men buzzing back and forth, Durkin knew there were unusual perils, and need for unusual care. Yet early that morning, under the very eyes of a patrolman, he had casually and hummingly entered the Postal-Union conduit, by way of the manhole not sixty yards from Broadway itself. In his hands he carried his instruments and a bag of tools, and he nodded with businesslike geniality as the patrolman stepped over toward him. “Got a guard to stand over this manhole?” demanded the officer. “Nope!” said Durkin. “Three minutes down here ought to do me!” “You people are gettin’ too dam’ careless about these things,” rebuked the officer. “It’s _me_ gets the blame, o’ course, when a horse sticks his foot in there!” “Oh, cover the hole, then!” retorted Durkin genially, as he let himself down. Once safely in the covered gloom of the conduit, he turned on his light and studied a hurriedly made chart of the subway wire-disposition. The leased Curry wires, he very well knew, were already in active service; and the task before him was not unlike the difficult and dangerous operation of a surgeon. Having located and cut open his cables, and in so doing exposed the busy arteries of most of Wall Street’s brokerage business, he carefully adjusted his rheostat, throwing the resistant coils into circuit one by one as he turned the graduated pointer. It was essential that he should remain on a higher resistance than the circuit into which he was cutting; in other words, he must not bleed his patient too much, for either a heavy leakage or an accidental short-circuiting, he knew, would lead to suspicion and an examination, if not a prompt “throwing it into the quad,” or the reversal to the protection of some distant and indirect wire.