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Updated: May 10, 2025
He trembled and shook like a man in a vertigo; the fingers of his upraised right hand opened and closed spasmodically; his flaccid lips fell apart, vacuously, insanely. "I'll kill her!" he ejaculated under his breath. MacNutt knew that his moment had come. Without a spoken word he caught his revolver up from his coat pocket. Then he thrust it, craftily, into the other man's hand.
Durkin next saw his enemy gaze about the entire circle of the room scrutinizingly, the subdolous green eyes coming to a rest only when they fell on his own relaxed figure. "And this is where the music starts!" muttered MacNutt aloud, as he strode toward Durkin. Even before he had uttered that half-articulate little sentence his captive was possessed by a sudden conviction of approaching climax.
It was only a matter of seconds before MacNutt stepped once more from the cage into the billiard-room, yet as he did so he saw nothing but the still limp and relaxed form of Durkin, huddled back in his huge chair, emitting from between his half-parted lips an occasional weak groan of pain. A gloating and half-demoniacal chuckle broke from the newcomer's lips.
MacNutt still expostulated, still begged for a private audience in the street-corner saloon, still threatened and pleaded and protested. The exasperated officer turned to the cab-driver, as he slung the street loafers from him to right and left. "Here, you get these fares o' yours out o' this get them away mighty quick, or I'll have you soaked for breakin' the speed ord'nance!"
But she was resisting him, inch by inch, fighting desperately, like a cornered cat, for her very life, yet knowing there could be only one end to that uneven conflict. Durkin, after one comprehending glance, followed his first animal impulse of offense, and descended on MacNutt, beating at the prone, bull-like head, with its claret-colored bald spot, across which ran one livid scratch.
And I've got a few old scores to wipe out some old scores between that enterprisin' husband o' yours an' myself!" "What has he ever done to you? Why, should you want to punish him?" argued Frank, helplessly. "I'm not goin' to punish him!" declared MacNutt, with a little laugh. "That's just where the damned fine poetic justice of the thing comes in. He's goin' to punish himself!"
Her revolver she had been unable to use; it lay out of her reach, behind them on the floor of the cage. MacNutt, as he strained and tore at her resisting body, was fighting and edging his way with her back into the cage, to where that waiting revolver lay. He himself was already well within the narrow opening, sprawled out red and disheveled and Titanesque on the cage floor.
But, even then, in that moment of seeming frustration, Durkin's subterranean yet terrible pertinaciousness, his unparaded bull-dog indefatigability, glowed and burned at its brightest. They were not yet in their last ditch. "That's one part of it!" muttered MacNutt, as he stowed away the packet and rebuttoned his coat.
A sickening smell of burning paint, mingling with the subtler gaseous odors of the corroding metal, filled the little dungeon. "Don't! That's enough!" gasped the woman, groping back toward the support of the wall. MacNutt shut off the current, and kicked the charred door-sheathing, already fading from incandescence into ashen ruin, with his foot.
MacNutt softly opened a door on the right, and, after listening for a cautious moment or two, as softly entered the room into which this door led. And still again a key was turned and withdrawn from the lock. Even with his eyes closed Durkin, as he lay there husbanding his strength, was conscious of the sudden light that flooded the room.
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