“I’ll have a rehearsal or two alone—though, I guess, we can muffle up that ’phone to suit our purpose. My last trouble now, is to find out how I’m going to get through those two doors without powder.” Again he fell to pacing the little room with his abstracted stride, silently testing contingency after contingency, examining and rejecting the full gamut of possibilities. Sometimes he stood before the woman with the receiver, staring at her with vacant and unseeing eyes; at other times he paced between her and the window. Then he paused before the little green coils of wire that stretched across the room. He studied them with involuntary and childish movements of the head and hands. Then he suddenly stood erect, ran to the back window, and flung it open. “My God, I’ve got it!” he cried, running back to where the woman still sat, listening, “I’ve got it!” “How?” she asked, catching her breath. “I’ve got to eat my way through what may be, for all I know, a full inch of Harveyized steel. I’ve got to burrow and work through it in some way, haven’t I? It has to be done quickly, too. I’ve got to have power, strong power.” He stopped, suddenly, and seemed to be working out the unmastered details in his own mind, his eyes bent on a little shelf in one corner of the room. “Have you ever seen an electric fan? You see this shelf, up here in the corner! Well, at one time, an electric fan stood there—see, here are the remnants of the wires. It stood there whirling away at five or six thousand revolutions to the minute, and with no more power than it takes to keep an ordinary office-lamp alight. Right at the back of this house is a wire, a power-circuit, alive with more than two hundred times that voltage, with power in plenty—a little condensed Niagara of power—asking to be taken off and made use of!” “But what use?” “I can capture and tame and control that power, Frank. I can make it my slave, and carry it along with me, almost in my pocket, on a mere thread of copper. I can make it a living, iron-eating otter, with a dozen fangs—in the shape of quarter-inch drills, gnawing and biting and eating through that armor-plate door about the same as a rat would gnaw through a wooden lath. Oh, we’ve got them, Frank! We’ve got them this time!” “Not until we know that combination, though,” qualified the colder-thoughted woman in the wicker rocker, still not quite understanding how or in what the other had found so potent and so unexpected an ally. And while he leaned out of the window, studying the wire-distribution, she discreetly slipped her watch-case receiver over her head, in case anything of importance should be going through over the telephone. CHAPTER XI