Phantom Wires | Page 9

a demand for electrical experts at Tangier,
and had promptly worked his passage to that outlandish sea-port on a
Belgian coasting-steamer, only to find a week's employment installing
a burglar-alarm system in the ware-house of a Liverpool shipping
company. In Gibraltar, a week or two longer, he had been able to
supply his immediate wants through assisting in the reconstruction of a
moving-picture machine, untimely wrecked on the outskirts of Fez by
Moorish fanatics who had believed it to be the invention of the Evil
One.
It was at Gibraltar, too, that his first mocking hopes for some renewal
of life had come to him, along with the vague hint that his transmitting
camera had at last been recognized, and perhaps even marketed. But
escape from that little seaport had been as difficult as escape from gaol.
He had finally effected a hazardous and ever-memorable migration
from Algeciras to Cimiez, but only by acting as chauffeur for a
help-abandoned, gout-ridden, and irritable-minded ex-ambassador to
Persia, together with a scrupulously inattentive trained nurse, who,
apparently, preferred diamonds to a uniform, and smuggled incredible
quantities of hand-made lace under the tonneau seat-cushions. And then
he had found himself at Monte Carlo, still waiting for word from Paris,
fighting against a grim new temptation which, vampire-like, had grown
stronger and stronger as its victim daily had grown weaker and weaker.
For along the sea-front, one indolent and golden afternoon, he had
learned that an American yacht in the harbor was sending ashore for a
practical electrician, since a defective generator had left its cabins of
glimmering white and gold in sudden darkness. Durkin, after a brief
talk with the second officer, had been taken aboard the tender and
hurried out to where the lightless steamer rocked and swung at her
anchor chain in the intense turquoise bay. He had hoped, at first, that he

was approaching his ship of deliverance, that luck was favoring the
luckless and at last the means of his escape were at hand. So he asked,
with outward unconcern, just what the yacht's course was. They were
bound for Messina, the second officer had replied, and from there they
went on to Corfu for a couple of weeks, and then on to Ragusa.
He went on board and looked over the armature core. It was of the
slotted drum type, he at once perceived, built up of laminations of soft
steel painted to break up eddy currents, and as he tested the soft amber
mica insulation about the commutators of hard-rolled copper, he knew
that the defective generator could be repaired in three-quarters of an
hour. But certain scraps of talk that came to his ears amid the clink of
glasses, from one of the shadowy saloons, had stung into vague activity
his old, irrepressible hunger for the companionship of his own kind, his
own race.
It was uncommonly pleasant, he had told himself as he had caught the
first drone of the lowered, confidential voices, to hear the old home talk,
and even broken snatches of old home interests. As he explored the
ship and minutely examined automatic circuit-breaker and switchboard
and fuse, he even made it a point to see that his explorations took him
into the pantry-like cabin next to the saloon from which these droning
voices drifted. As he gave apparently studious and unbroken attention
to a stretch of defective wiring, he was in fact making casual mental
note of the familiar tones of the distant voices, listening impersonally
and dreamily to each question and answer and suggestion that passed
between that quietly talking group. One of the talkers, he soon found,
was a Supreme Court judge on his vacation, equable and deliberative in
his occasional query or view or criticism; another was apparently a
secret agent from the office of the New York district-attorney, still
another two were either Scotland Yard men or members of some
continental detective bureau--this Durkin assumed from their
broad-voweled English voices and their seemingly intimate knowledge
of European criminal procedure. The fifth man he could in no way
place. But it was this man who interrupted the others, and, apparently
taking a slip of paper from some inside pocket or some well-closed
wallet, read aloud a list which, he first explained, had been secured

from some undesignated safe on the night of a certain raid.
"Three hundred and twenty shares of National Bank of Commerce,"
read the voice methodically, the reader checking off each item,
obviously, as he went along. "One certificate of forty-seven shares of
United States Steel Preferred; two certificates of one hundred shares
each of Erie Railroad First Preferred; eighteen personal cheques, with
names and amounts and banks attached; seven I. O. U.'s, with amounts
and dates and initials."
"Probably worthless, from our point of view!" interposed a