There she quietly unpacked her suit-case, jointed her pole of split bamboo, attached and graduated her relay, and fingered noiselessly through the tangle of wires beneath her window for that one and essential thread of metal along which was to flash the departmental cotton reports, between New Orleans and Washington. There, hour after hour, she sat and waited and watched; and it was late in the next morning that, white and worn-out, she detached the unobserved wire, hurried off her brief despatch in cipher, ordered breakfast up to her room, and even before undressing fell into a long and restless slumber. That day, in her narrow little corn-husk bed, she dreamed that she and Durkin had tunnelled under the Potomac River and had carried away the last ounce of gold from the United States Treasury. How many millions they had taken it was beyond them even to count. But she knew they were escaping in submarines and were being breathlessly pursued by the entire North Atlantic fleet. And her one great fear, during all that agonized and endless pursuit, seemed not that she was destined either to final capture, or to final suffocation, but that, in some way, she might become separated from Durkin. CHAPTER XIV 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 brokenly out of somewhere to some one: “You’re connected now—go ahead.” Then came a grating rasp and drone, a metallic click or two, and out of the stillness there floated in to his waiting ear the space-filtered music of an anxious “Hello”—flute-like, mellow, far-away. It seemed to him there, under the stress of his passing mood, that an incorporeal presence had whispered the word to him. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, the miracle of it all came home to him, the mystery and magic of that tenuous instrument, which could guide, and treasure, and carry in to him through the night the very tone and timbre of that one familiar voice, flashing it so many miles through star-hung forest and hill and valley, threading it on through sleeping towns and turbulent cities, winging it through wind and water unerringly home to his waiting ear. “Hello!” the anxious contralto was asking again. “Hello?” cried Durkin, pent in the little bald speaking-closet, yet his face illuminated with a wonderful new alertness. “Hello! Is that you, Frank?” A ripple of relieved laughter ebbed out of the wire. “Oh, Jim,” sounded the far-away voice in his ear, sighingly. “It seems so good!” “Where are you?” “In Washington, at the Arlington office.” He chuckled a little, as though the accomplishment of the miracle, the annihilation of so many miles of space, was a matter of his own personal triumph. “Here we’re talking together through three hundred miles of midnight!” he boasted to her.