“It is that you return to Durkin every cent you owe him, and let him go his way, while we go ours.” “You mean that, Frank?” “Yes, I mean it!” He looked at her colorless face closely. Something in it seemed to satisfy him. “But how am I to know you’re going to stick to your bargain?” he still hesitated. “How am I to be sure you won’t get your price and then give me the slip?” “Would Durkin want me, _after that_? Would he take up with me when _you_ had finished with me? Oh, he’s not that make of man!” she scoffed in her hard, dry voice. There was a little silence; then, “Is that all?” she asked in her dead voice. “That’s just as you say,” he answered. “Very well,” she said between her drawn lips. She stepped quickly to the back of the room, and lifting the hidden telephone transmitter up on the table she threw open the window to loop the wire that ran by the overhanging eave. “Hold on, there!” cried MacNutt, in alarm. “What’s all this, anyway?” “I have got to tell Durkin, that’s all. He has got to know, of course, what we have decided on.” “Oh, no, you don’t, my beauty! If there’s goin’ to be any telephonin’ out o’ this house, I do it myself!” “It makes no difference,” she answered, apathetically. “You can tell him as well as I could.” She could see some new look of suspicion and rage mounting into his watchful eyes. “I do the talking this trip,” he cried. “Then cut in and loop that third wire—no, the fourth, counting the lighting wire—on the eave there. It is the Van Schaick house-wire—indeed, it would be much better to cut them off altogether, after we cut in, or there might be some interference from them with Central. Now throw open that switch behind the window-curtain there—so. Now, if you will ring up Central and ask for the Chelsea, they will connect you directly with Durkin. He is waiting in his room there for me.” He looked at her, suspicious and puzzled, the momentary note of triumph gone out of his voice. “See here, Frank, I may as well tell you one thing, straight out. Although I square up with Durkin for what I got out of him, and pass this money of his over to you, I tell you now, I’m going to smash that man!” “Smash him?” she echoed, dismally. “Then you’ve been lying!” “Yes, smash him! You don’t imagine I’m goin’ to have that piker shadowin’ and doggin’ me like a flatty all my days! I stand pat now with Doogan and his men. And in ten days I can have Durkin up against ten years!” “That’s a lie,” she contended. “Well, I can have him so he’ll be glad to get ten years, just to get out o’ what’s comin’ to him!” “Then this was all a trap, a plot?” she gasped. “No, it’s not a trap—it’s only that I wanted to save you out o’ the mess. I’m wise enough in most things, but about you I’ve always been a good deal of a fool. It’s my loose screw, all right; sometimes it’s driven me near crazy. I’m goin’ to have you, I don’t care what it costs me—I don’t care if I have to pound this Durkin’s brains out with a lead-pipe!”