"Where's your safe-cracker man?"

"We've got him right here! Burns is sending over an A. B. P. A.

man to take care of him."

"D'you mean he's hurt?"

"No, no! We've identified him as Missouri Horton of the Scott Gang--he got a Sing Sing life sentence for yegg work in Yonkers.

But Burns tells me he had enough money buried away to buy Tammany influence and get paroled. Can't you see what that means?"

"Which way? To your office or to mine?"

"To us! They've got him now, for life! They can get him back to Sing Sing and keep the whole cursed thing under cover!"

There was a moment's silence before the cogitating Pyott spoke again. "And you say you've got Trotter right there with you?"

"Yes, but he's acting like a madman, in the Vice-President's private room."

Again there was a moment's silence. "Then give him ink and paper--give him lots of it. Tell him I've said for him to write the story THERE. Tell him to sling himself, that I want every detail, every fact, and ten solid columns of it!"

"What are you driving at?"

"I'm driving at this: keep him busy, man! Don't you see? Keep him writing there until the thing's worked out of his system. Then I'll tame him down, later. Meanwhile, you'd better clean house up there so you can officially contradict the whole story if the yellows happen to get after you."

"But nothing can get out, I tell you, unless you PUT it out!"

"Then what are you worrying about?"

"Young Trotter says he's got to send his stuff in. He's not satisfied with the mere idea of writing it."

"Then give him one of your men, two of your men, for carriers.

Tell him to keep sending his copy down in relays, as he writes it. But don't let him get away."

"Oh, I'll hold him here if I have to nail him to the floor. I tell you, a thing like this would shake public confidence. It'd be worse than a fireproof hotel going up in flames. It would mean an alarming and immediate depreciation in our credit, a deplorable----"

"Of course it would. Come down as soon as you can and tell me all that. I'll have more time then."

Pyott hung up the receiver. He poised for one brief and immobile moment, deep in thought, before he swung about to the three exigent figures making signs for his attention. Then the thin-featured, many-wrinkled, weary-eyed face relaxed in an almost honest and unequivocal smile.

VIII

Trotter, shut in the Vice-President's private office, paid little attention to his surroundings. He did not even know that the desk on which he wrote was of mahogany. He did not notice the imported Daghestan under his feet. He was unconscious of the orchids in the low desk-vase of French silver. He was oblivious of the onyx and marble elegance that surrounded him.

All he knew was that he had paper and ink in plenty and the Greatest Story of the Age to write. All he knew was that time was precious, that two trusted messengers stood before him to deliver his copy, that presses in the lower part of the city waited like hungry animals to gulp down his story, and that before nightfall a million eyes would widen and half a million hearts would beat a little faster at the words that he was about to write.

He pushed back the silver and cut-gla.s.s desk ornaments, the heavy gold-framed portrait of a young girl standing beside an opulent-bosomed woman in an opera cloak, the foolish vase of orchids. He made s.p.a.ce for himself and his work. And then he wrote.

He wrote with all the rhapsodic pa.s.sion of a G.o.d creating a new world. He began with a preamble that would have broken a copy-reader's heart. He followed it up with atmospheric discursiveness that would have worn away an editor's blue pencil.

He told how Steam and Steel were supposed to have crushed the Spirit of Romance out of the age. He pointed out how the modern city of stone and concrete seemed no longer to house that wayward and retrospective spirit in which the heart of the poet has forever reveled.

Then he sought to demonstrate how true Romance can never die, how Wonder is all about even the Wall Street clerk and the five-o'clock commuter. He put forward the claim that modern New York was as potentially picturesque, as alluringly labyrinthine, as olden Bagdad itself. He argued that the Thousand and One Tales were nightly recurring in our very midst, only we had neither the eyes nor the leisure to observe them. He told of the strange underworlds hidden from the casual eye, of subterranean rivers of life which Respectability never sees. He showed how it was only the face of life that had changed. He intimated that Stevenson had unearthed romance enough in an up-to-date London, that Hugo and Balzac had found it in Paris, and he eloquently proclaimed that even to-day it was to be stumbled across in our city of homes on the Hudson.

It was a very rhythmical piece of fine writing, and he had his coat off and was working in his shirt sleeves before he had advanced six pages into it. Then he veered about to the story itself. He enlarged on the amount of wealth harbored by a national bank. He explained how this vast wealth was h.o.a.rded and protected, the ma.s.sive walls, the steel vaults, the steam flood pipes, the ever-watching attendants, the tangle of articulate wires that a touch would make garrulous, the time locks, the floors of cement and railway iron, the contact mats which reported the slightest footfall of the trespa.s.ser.

Then he told how an idea had come to the mind of an idle yegg named "Missouri" Horton. He told how this wary and cunning and romantic-spirited outlaw had planned his attack, how he had hired the cellar next to the granite-walled citadel of opulence, how he had learned the location of the vaults, how he had figured out the thickness of the masonry, how he had slowly and quietly prepared for his lonely and Promethean attack.

Trotter's sallow young face grew chalkier as he wrote, though he was unconscious of either effort or weariness. They brought him luncheon, in due time, on a napkin-covered tray. He lifted the napkin peevishly, took a disdainful look at the food, gulped down a cup of black coffee, and pushed the mess away from him. He had serious work in hand.

He wrote on, unconscious of time. His mind seemed to sway, hypnotically, with the reverberations of his own rhetoric. He tossed in a cla.s.sical allusion or two; here and there he left an Old Testament phrase to coruscate along the fringe of his text; he even called back one of his copy carriers, to revise an unelaborated figure of speech.

Then he told how the tunnel was begun, how brick by brick and stone by stone a pa.s.sage was grubbed through every obstacle. He expatiated on the infinite patience of such a man as Horton, how Monte Cristo paled beside him, how vast difficulties had to be overcome, how every stone had to be stowed carefully away in the back of the cellar, how in time the mortar and cement had to be ground to a powder and carried secretly away. He told how the tunnel was pushed forward, foot by foot; how the bank was attacked in its one and only vital spot, precisely as a porcupine curled defensively up in the snow is seized by the fisher-marten, not through open attack, but by artfully tunneling up under the quill-less belly.

Then he retailed how the vast business of this great banking inst.i.tution went tranquilly and ponderously on, how millions were handled and changed and stowed away while all the time the unknown enemy was inch by inch crawling nearer.

When a note came up from the Advance office signed by the managing editor--the managing editor who had never been known to praise one of his men in all his twelve-year regime--Trotter took it as a matter of course. "Your story is great," this note had read. "Keep it up." Trotter merely gave the scrawl a second hurried glance. It did not excite him; it did not intoxicate. He was already drunk with the wine of creation, as delirious as a whirling dervish. And he knew he still had work to do.

A white-whiskered gentleman wearing a pearl-b.u.t.toned white waistcoat stepped quietly up to the office door and peered guardedly in over his gla.s.ses. Then he tip-toed away unseen, with a condoning smile on his astute and thin-nosed old face. Trotter had no thought or memory of his surroundings. It was his Story; the Story of his life. He sat there, entangled and locked together with it, unconscious of what it was doing to him, oblivious of how, like a blood-sucking vampire, it was draining the vigor of his youth from him.

He was now in the very vortex of his story. He told how he had posted Tiernan at the head of the steps leading down into the plumber's shop. He cunningly enlarged on the huge Irishman's bewilderment, his incredulity, his blasphemously reiterated demand to know what it was all about. He told how he himself had silently entered the shop, how he had crept through to the second door, how he had waited for a moment to take out his revolver. He described the hot and reeking air of the tunnel as he crept into its mouth. He pictured the sudden glare of light at the shaft end where Horton stood burning away an outer vault wall with an electrode. He told how the heat and the fumes of that little underground h.e.l.l bewildered him, how he stood gaping at the scene, watching the white-hot tongue of fire hissing and licking at its last barrier of steel. He did not neglect to paint how the hardened metal, under the electrolyzing current eroding its surface, became as chalk, decomposing into a charry ma.s.s which one blow of a hammer might penetrate.

He told how he crept up on the man, step by step, with his revolver in his hand. He told how he could see the safe-breaker's face shining with sweat, how he could smell scorching clothing, how his eyes began to ache with the light-glare until he threw up a forearm to protect them. He explained how it had been his intention to creep up on the criminal and seize him bodily, and how he was defeated in this by a sudden and unlooked-for movement on the part of his unsuspecting enemy.

Horton had quickly swung about--he was, in fact, groping along the pa.s.sage floor for a two-quart tin pail partly filled with tap water. The glare had blinded him, for the time being, and he was in reality feeling for a drink. But the Advance reporter had thought the movement meant that his presence was discovered. And the two men had come together.

Trotter told of the fight there, hand to hand, in the choking tunnel with its tangle of deadly currents. He recounted how the other man's strength had been greater than his own, how he felt his breath going, how he saw himself being forced closer and closer back on the glaring electrode. He confessed that he had been excited and foolish enough to lose the revolver. He mentioned his indignation when he saw that the other man was actually trying to use his teeth. He described how for the first time it came home to him that he would be killed there, that Tiernan could not possibly hear his cries, that his heart could not possibly continue to beat without fresh air.

Then he had grown desperate. He had apparently gone mad. He had started to use his own teeth. He had set his jaw on the yeggman's hand as it groped for his throat. He had caught the index finger of the other blackened hand and levered it savagely backward, backward until the bone broke and it hung limp on the tortured tendon. He had sent the relaxed head skidding against the tunnel wall, once, twice, three times, until the sweat-stained arms fell away and left him free.

He had sat there for many minutes, stupidly staring at the unconscious man. Then he had found the revolver at his feet, and, being too weak to get up he had still sat there, contentedly firing a volley of bullets against the steel vault wall until the bank officials were alarmed and an armed guard was sent scurrying about to investigate. And with the timely arrival of Tiernan and that armed guard came an end to the most audacious and staggering criminal coup of the century!

It was all very beautiful, the very finest of fine writing.

Trotter poured his ardent and exultant young soul into it. And when his last page had been written and sent away, he sat back in the wide-armed, morocco-upholstered bank-room chair, white with weariness, the fires of creation burnt out to the last ember.

But one thing sustained and consoled him. He knew, as he whisked down to the Advance office in the Vice-President's French touring car, that his work was done. He also knew that it was well done.

It did not even startle him when Pyott himself held out a cold-fingered hand.

"Good business!" was his chief's sardonic commendation.

"Then I've made good?" asked the weary youth, without enthusiasm.

"You've made your TEN-STRIKE!" was the answer. "You're on the city staff at twenty dollars a week."

"When do I have to go over my proofs?" asked the tired-eyed and innocent youth.

"What proofs?"