a pious and unoffendin'
cigar-store vault! And you'll be the only one who'll know anything
different, and I guess you won't do much squealin' about it!"

She wheeled, as though about to spring on him.

"I will! I will, although I wither between gaol walls for it--although
I die for it! I'm no weak and foolish woman! I've known life bald to
the bone; I've fought and schemed and plotted and twisted all my days
almost, and I can die doing it! And if you kill this man, if you
murder him--for it is murder!--if you bring this dog's death on him, I
will make you pay for it, in one way or another--I'll make you mourn
it, David MacNutt, as you've made me mourn the first day I ever saw
your face!"

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!"

She caught madly at the slender thread of hope which swung from his
mockery.

"No! No, he's _not_ dead yet, and he'll die hard! He's no
fool--you've found that out in the past! He will give you a fight
before he goes, in some way, for he's fought you and beaten you from
the first--and he'll beat you again--I know he'll beat you again!"

Her voice broke and merged into a paroxysm of sobbing, and MacNutt
looked at her bent and shaken figure with meditative coldness.

"He may have beaten me, once, long ago--but he'll never do it again.
He won't even go out fightin'! He'll go with his head hangin' and his
nose down, like a sneak! And you'll see him go, for you'll be tied
there, with a gag in your pretty red mouth, and you'll neither move nor
speak. And there'll be no light, unless he gets so reckless as to
strike a match. But when the light does come, my dear, it'll be a
flash o' blue flame, with a smell o' something burnin'!"

The woman covered her face with her hands, and swayed back and forth
where she stood.

Then MacNutt held back his guttural laugh, suddenly, for she had fallen
forward on her face, in a dead faint.

CHAPTER XXII

THE ENTERING WEDGE

It was at least four o'clock in the afternoon--as the janitor of the
building later reported to the police--when a Postal-Union lineman,
carrying a well-worn case of tools, made his way up through the halls
and stairw