LITMIR.BIZ

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be paid out like links of a rusted cable.

      "You're not afraid of me?" she inquired, with a disarming soft intimacy of tone that sent the blood once more rioting through his veins. He did not answer. He merely gazed at her in in articulate and tingling wonder.

      "You're not, are you?" she persisted, stooping forward and turning her body about in the cab seat so that her face was directly before him, within a foot of his own.

      "No," he managed to say.

      He noticed that she almost closed her eyes.

      "Then kiss me," he heard her low voice murmuring, with her parted red lips lifting and creeping audaciously up to his, her hand already on his shoulder.

      He drew back, white and stunned. It was ​beyond reason. It was so beyond reason that it brought a hundred unkenneled suspicions yelping and snapping about him. Things that once seemed accidental and trivial took on a new significance. He could carpenter inconsequentialities into dim and towering structures of intrigue. He was afraid of himself and his surroundings.

      The woman must have seen this the very moment she locked her arms about his reluctant neck, for her face changed and hardened. Even before he saw that change, though, he was crowding and struggling and pulling away from her.

      The entire situation was so unlooked-for, so startling, that no new turn of it could add to his sense of surprise. He was conscious of the fact that she was crying out, while she still clung to him, and that the cab had come to a sudden stop. He noticed a figure at the door and a man's huge hand dart in towards him as it swung open. And still again he heard her shriek of simulated fear. It might even have been anger—he was not sure; he could not fathom it all. But he felt, dimly, that he was being tricked into some thing beyond his understanding; that the whole thing was some sort of trap. He resented being clawed at; he resented the way in which the man at the cab door was dragging and pulling him ​to the street. There was no longer any doubt as to that intruder's immediate intention.

      The wireless operator's one passion was to escape, to fight his way back to freedom. He remembered his ship and his waiting station, and how Heilig, the engineer, would have the laugh on him.

      He was fighting like a terrier by this time, striking out blindly, in a frenzy of sheer panic. He was stung by the injustice of it all, and kept calling and shouting for help as he fought, fortified by the memory that his hands were clean, that he had done nothing amiss.

      He was dazed and bruised, but he still fought and shouted, imagining it was his opponent's mad intention to kill him. He saw the shifting figures of men appear through the fog, and stand about in a circle, impassively watching his struggles. But still he fought and shouted.

      His cries brought a patrolman with a night-stick in his hand. He could see the circle disrupted and scattered. He could hear the relieving sound of the falling club on the body of the brute above him, and sharp oaths and grunts, and then cries and counter-cries.

      Then a fourth figure pushed peremptorily in through the re-formed circle of onlookers, a figure not in uniform, but quick-acting and authoritative. This newcomer seemed to pull the ​entangled and struggling trio apart in one breath, as a child separates a puzzle-picture. He flung back the clubbing patrolman. He swept aside the still fighting second figure. He dragged the fallen operator to his feet, with a sharp question or two at the other man, who was blowing his nose on a handkerchief maculated with blood. Then he called out to the waiting cab-driver: "To the police station, straight!" and all but carried the dazed operator back into the waiting carriage.

      He turned at the step, before following the operator into that cab, and spoke a crisp word or two to the still blinking patrolman. Then he lurched angrily and impatiently into the cab and slammed the door shut as they went clattering and swinging away through the heavy fog.

      He left the patrolman gazing after him through the gloom, his idle night-stick dangling from his wrist like a bird's broken wing.

      "Can you beat it!" gasped the astounded officer to the other man busy prodding and feeling his own body, very much as a housewife might explore a market-fowl.

      "You'd beat it, all right!" retorted the other, disgustedly, with seismic-like rumblings of the chest. "You hare-brained bulls'd beat anything!"

      ​"But what's this all about, anyway?" demanded the bewildered officer, shouldering out through the crowd with the other man at his heels.

      "God only knows," was that other man's retort, morosely brushing his battered hat with the palm of his hand.

      "But who is he?"

      "Who's who?"

      "The guy who flashed that Central Office shield."

      "One o' Wilkie's men."

      "Wilkie?"

      "Chief Wilkie, of the Washington Bureau; and we've made a nice mess o' this little coup o' his between us!"

      "Then where's the rib figurin in it?" asked the still perplexed officer.

      "The rib?"

      "The woman with the Fifth Avenue make-up."

      "Oh, that s Cherry Purcelle—she's the come-on for the Washington Bureau people."

      "Bureau—what Bureau?" asked the officer, still in the dark.

      "The Secret Service Bureau, you pin-head!" The man speaking had just discovered a rib abrasion that made him wince with pain.

      "Then why t'ell didn't you put me wise? I ​might've fanned the bean-boxes off some o' you folks!"

      "You make me sick!" said the disgusted one, still preoccupiedly feeling about a bruised shoulder. "What'd you suppose it's called Secret Service for, if you've got to advertise it on every street-corner?"

      The officer was slow to comprehend the situation.

      "But I thought Wilkie only muckraked round after counterfeiters."

      "He does any old thing his Uncle Sam sets him at."

      "Then what're they holdin up that quiet-lookin young feller for? What're they runnin' him in for, anyway?"

      "Mebbe they don't want him to sail to-morrow."

      "But why shouldn't he sail to-morrow? Has he done anything?"

      "Oh, cut it out!—cut it out! and get me to the nearest drugstore. I hate dirty work like this!"

      "Then why're you doin' it?"

      The other man did not answer, and the question was repeated.

      "War's war!" was all he said. And he emitted the laconism as though he had no love for the subject from which it sprang.

      ​"You may as well put me wise," suggested the still waiting officer.

      "I said this was Secret Service, didn't I?" grunted the other. "Where'd you say that drug-store was?"

      ​

      CHAPTER II THE SPARK IN THE GAP

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      "Are you the operator?" asked a passenger in a black rain-coat, blocking the doorway of the Laminian's wireless-room.

      The fog of the night before had given way to a driving rain, like a sulky woman who finally and openly surrenders to tears. New York lay behind the Laminian and her passengers, seeming, under the soft torrent of those tears, a many-towered city of loaf-sugar which dissolved lower and lower into the flat line of the horizon.

      The stranger in the doorway repeated his question.

      "I'm going to be," came the answer from the coatless figure bent over its mystic apparatus. He had not so much as turned to face his interlocutor.

      "Mean it's your

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