He afterward decided that in his sheer weariness of body and mind he must have dozed off into a light sleep.
It was past midnight when he awoke with a start, a vague sense of impending evil heavy upon him.
His first thought, on awakening, was that some one had knocked. He glanced at his watch, as he sprang to open the door. It was on the point of one.
Frank should have been back an hour ago. Then he _had_ fallen asleep, of a certainty, he decided, with electric rapidity of thought.
But this was she, come at last, he conjectured. Yet, with that sense of impending danger still over him, he stepped back and turned off the lights. Then he quietly and cautiously opened the door.
No one was there. He peered quickly down through the gloom of the hallways, but still neither sound nor movement greeted him.
His now distraught mind quickly ran the gamut of possibilities. A baffling, indeterminate impression seized him that somebody, somewhere, was reaching out to him through the midnight silence, trying to come in touch with him and speak to him.
He looked at the motionless clapper of his transmitter signal-bell, where he had discreetly muffled the little gong with a linen handkerchief. It could not have been the telephone.
Yet he caught up the receiver with a gesture of half-angered impatience.
“. . . in this house—send an officer at once!” were the words that sped along the wire to his listening ear. An officer at once! Six quick strokes of conjecture seemed to form the missing link to his chain of thought.
“My God!” he exclaimed in terror, “that means Frank!”
There had been a hitch somewhere, and in some way. And that was the Van Schaicks telephoning for the police—yes, decided Durkin, struggling to keep his clearness of head, it would be first to the Sixty-Seventh Street station that they would send for help.
He had already learned, or striven to learn, at such work, not only to think and to act, but to essay his second step of thinking while he accomplished his first in action.
He rummaged through a suit-case filled with lineman’s tools, and snatched up a nickel badge similar to that worn by inspectors of the Consolidated Gas Company. It was taking odds, in one way, such as he had never before in his career dared to take. But the case, he felt, was desperate.