“Yes, I know; but I wish it wasn’t so far! Did you recognize my voice there?” “I’d know that voice in—in Hell!” he answered, with a sudden grim but inadequate earnestness. He had hoped to say something fitting and fine, but, as always seemed to happen to him in such moments, his imagination foundered in the turbulence of his emotions. “You may have to some day, my poor Orpheus!” she was laughing back at him. But the allusion was lost on Durkin, and he cut in with a curt, “What’s happened?” “I want to come home!” It must have been a good night for ’phoning, he felt, as he heard those five cogent words, and an inconsequential little glow suffused him. Not an ohm of their soft wistfulness, not a coulomb of their quiet significance, had leaked away through all their hundreds of miles of midnight travel. It almost seemed that he could feel the intimate warmth of her arms across the million-peopled cities that separated them; and he projected himself, in fancy, to the heart of the far-off turbulence where she stood. There, it seemed to him, she radiated warmth and color and meaning to the barren wastes of life, a glowing and living ember in all the dead ashes of unconcern. And again it flashed through him, as the wistful cadence of her voice died down on the wire, that she was all that he had in life, and that with her, thereafter, he must rise or sink. “I want to come home,” she was repeating dolefully. “You’ve _got_ to come, and come quick!” “What was that?” “I say, risk it and come,” he called back to her. “Something has happened!” “Something happened? Not bad news, is it?” “No—but it will open your eyes, when you hear it!” “Everything at my end has been done, you know.” “You mean it came out all right?” “Not quite all right, but I think it will do. Is it safe for me to tell you something?” “Yes, anything in reason, I guess.” “Curry’s men in New Orleans are working against him!” “Let me add something to that. Green and his men are trying to break Curry, and Curry all the time is laying a mine under every blessed one of them!” and Durkin gave vent to a triumphant chuckle, deep down in his throat. “Where did you find this out?” the unperturbed and far-away contralto was demanding. “You could never guess.” “Talk faster, or this telephoning will break us!” she warned him. “Oh, I don’t care—it’s worth the money.” “Hello—Hello! Oh, all right. Go on!” “You heard about the fire in the Terminal Room of the Postal-Union? No—well, some dago with a torch got a little too careless in a P. U. conduit, and set fire to a cable-splicer’s pot of paraffin down on lower Broadway, not much more than a hundred yards from Wall Street itself. Then the flames caught on the burlap and the insulating grease and stuff round the cables—can you hear me? There was the dickens to pay, and in about ten minutes they looked more like a cart-load of old excelsior than the business wires of a few thousand offices!” “Yes, go on!”