g in the street beyond was
shrilly whistling "Tammany."

"Tell me--now!" demanded Durkin.

"When you fainted MacNutt reached back for the revolver. He would have
shot you, only Keenan called for him. He cried down the shaft that he
was dying. He--he must have pushed the button as he fell. MacNutt was
still on the floor of the cage, leaning out to take aim at us. Then
the steel of the shaft-door and the steel of the elevator cage as it
went up came to--oh--I _can't_ tell you now!"

Durkin came to a stop, swaying against her.

"You mean the cage worked automatically, that it went up, with MacNutt
still leaning out?"

"Yes!" gasped the woman brokenly; and Durkin felt the shiver of the
tortured body on which he leaned.

He was silent as they swung into the open street. His exhausted and
uncooerdinating brain was idly busy with some vague impression of the
poignant irony of that end, of how that uncomprehending yet ineluctable
power with which this man had toyed and played and sinned had, at the
ultimate moment, established its authority and exacted its right.

He pulled himself up with a fluttering gasp, weak, sick, overcome, and
was wordlessly grateful for the sustaining arm at his side.

For, once in the open, they were walking eastward, without a sense,
momentarily, of either direction or destination.

Above the valley of the mist-hung street a thin and yellow light showed
where morning was coming on, tardily, thickly. The boy whistling
"Tammany" passed out of hearing.

"Thank God! oh, thank God!" Frank suddenly sobbed out, tossed and
exalted on a wave of blind gratitude.

"God?" moaned the defeated and unhappy man at her side, dragging
painfully on with his bruised and bitter body. "What has God to do
with all this--or with us?"

She could not answer. She saw only a wide and gloomy vista of tangled
crime and offense, stretching back into the past, as the tumbled and
huddled waves of a sea run out to its crowding skyline. But it was the
sea that had delivered them.

Broken, frustrated and defeated, hunted and homeless, without
consolation for her Yesterday or respect for her Today, she looked up
at the slowly wakening morning with a feeling that seemed to fuse and
blend into the fiercest of joy.

Then the momentary exaltation died out of her weary body. They had
life--but life was not enough! A sense of something within her falling
and crumbling away, a silence of dark questioning and indeci