When his current had been nicely adjusted and his sensitive little polarized relay had broken into a fit of busy and animated chattering, he turned his attention to the unused and rusted end of gas-pipe which careless workmen, months, or even years, before, had hurriedly capped and left protruding a good quarter-inch into the conduit. On this cap he adjusted a pair of pocket pipe-tongs. It took all his weight to start the rusted pipe-head, but once loosened, it was only a minute’s work to unscrew the bit of metal and expose the waiting ends of the wires which he had already worked through from the basement end of the pipe. He then proceeded with great deliberation and caution to make his final connections, taking infinite care to cover his footsteps as he went, concealing his wire where possible, and leaving, wherever available, no slightest trace of interference. When everything was completed, it was nothing more than an incision made by a skilled and artful surgeon, a surgeon who had as artfully dressed the wound, and had left only a slender drainage tube to show how deep the cutting had been. Durkin then repacked his tools in his spacious double-handled club bag of black sea-lion, put out his light, emerged whistling and dirt-soiled from his manhole, and having rounded the block, slipped into his basement printing-office and changed his clothes. What most impressed and amazed Durkin, when once his quadruplex had been adjusted and pressed into service, was the absolute precision and thoroughness with which the Curry line of action had been prearranged. It was as diffusedly spectacular as some great international campaign. This Machiavellian operator’s private wires were humming with messages, deputies throughout the country were standing at his beck and call, emissaries and underlings were waiting to snatch up the crumbs which fell from his overloaded board, his corps of clerks were toiling away as feverishly as ever, Chicago and St. Louis and Memphis and New Orleans were being thrown into a fever of excitement and foreboding, fortunes were being wrested away in Liverpool, the Lancaster mills were shutting down, and still cotton was going up, up, point by point; timid clerks and messenger boys and widows, even, were pouring their pennies and dollars into the narrowing trench which separated them from twenty cent cotton and fortune.