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Updated: May 10, 2025
"What would we do, Jim," she asked, after a second long and unbroken silence, "what would we do if this thing ever brought us face to face with MacNutt again?" "But why should we cross that bridge before we come to it?" was Durkin's answer. She seemed unable, however, to bar back from her mind some disturbing and unwelcome vision of that meeting.
MacNutt laughed his mirthless laugh once more. "Oh, I guess you'll stand it!" "But I can't!" she moaned. "Oh, yes; you'll stand it, and you'll see it, too! You'll be right here, where you can take the whole show in, this time! It won't be a case o' foolin' the old man, like it was last time!" "I will be here?" she gasped. "You'll be right on the spot and you'll see the whole performance!"
Durkin could feel the fire of the brandy soar up to his brain and sing through his veins. MacNutt supported him as they stepped from the elevator cage into a darkened room. On the far side of this room, from between two heavy portières, a gash of light cut into the otherwise unbroken gloom.
That is one fact we have to face, one hard fact; MacNutt is not over and done with us!" "But haven't you made a sort of myth of him? Isn't he only a fable to us now? And haven't we got real facts to face?" "Ah," she said protestingly, "there is just the trouble. You always refuse to look this fact in the face!"
MacNutt seemed to follow her line of flashing thought, for he emitted a short bark of a laugh and said: "It's pretty small, this world, isn't it? I guessed that we'd be meetin' again before I'd swung round the circle!" "Where are we going?" she demanded, trying to lash her disordered and straggling thoughts into coherence. "We're goin' to the neatest and completest poolroom in all Manhattan!"
Frank remained silent, as the bathing women, with a methodic click of the mechanism, once more dropped down through the slit in the picture frame, and hid the red-lined bulletin board from view. "Gamblers, like us, always were weak on art," gibed MacNutt.
He recalled his chance meeting with MacNutt, the wire-tapper, and their partnership of privateer forces in that strange campaign against Penfield, the alert and opulent poolroom king, who had seemed always able to defy the efforts and offices of a combative and equally alert district-attorney.
Beyond that first involuntary little cry of terror Frances Durkin uttered no sound, as she found herself in the hooded tonneau, wedged in between MacNutt and Keenan. That first outcry, indeed, had been unwilled and automatic, the last reactionary movement of an overtried and exhausted body. A wave of care-free passivity now seemed to inundate her.
He saw MacNutt step inside, and the finger again play on one of a row of five pearl buttons set in the polished wood of the cage-wall, and the elevator noiselessly ascend. The moment it went up Durkin was on his feet. He first ran to the two doors at the opposite end of the billiard-room. They were both securely locked; and they were his only means of escape.
She was in a blind and unreasoning passion of vituperative malevolence by this time, her face drawn and withered with fear, her eyes luminous, in the dungeon-like half-lights, with the inner fire of her hate. "Keep cool, my dear, keep cool!" mocked MacNutt, without a trace of trepidation at all her vague threats. "Durkin's not dead yet!"
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