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THE GUN-RUNNER





GUN-RUNNER
A Novel
BY
ARTHUR STRINGER
Author of “The Wire-Tappers,” “The Under Groove,”
"The Silver Poppy,” etc., etc.
Q
NEW YORK
B. W. DODGE & COMPANY
* - - - - - - - - - -
1909


Copyright, 1909, by
B. W. DODGE & COMPANY
Registered at Stationers' Hall, London
(All Rights Reserved)
Printed in the United States of America


PREFATORY NOTE
A portion of this novel was printed in the
January, 1909, number of “The Popular Maga-
zine,’’ winder the same title which is here used
for the story in its complete form.





IDEDICATION
To my old bunkie and friend and camp-mate,
#ajor Charles Cumath Íñills
who in the good days that are gone was known
as “Shorty,’’ and knocked about all the
blessed Seven Seas of the earth and smoked
over campfires in four continents and ad-
*entured up and down the length of the
two Americas and always loved War
and Danger and the Open Road,
and full many a time tramped
and camped and hunted and
went hungry with me, I
"most apprehensively yet
affectionately inscribe
this volume





CONTENTS
OHAPTEB PAGE
I.—The City of Peril....... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II.-The Spark in the Gap. . . . . . . ............... ?"
III.-The Call from Without. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
IV.-The Man on Board. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • * * * * * * * * * 44
V.-The Web of Intrigue. . . . . . . . . . . . . • • • - - - - - - - 57
VI.-The Second Visitor... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 71
VII.-The Tangling Skein. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
VIII.-The Pawn and the Board. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
IX.-The Converging Trails. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
X.-The Reverse of the Shield. . . . . . . . . • - - - - - - - - 119
XI.—The Movement in Retreat. . . . . . . . . . . • • • - - - - 129
XII.-The Bull-Baiters... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
XIII.-The Recovered Ground... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
|XIV.-The Pyrrhic Victor... . . . . . • • • • e - - - - - - - - - - - - 166
XV.-The Lull in the Storm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
XVI.-The Vernal Invasion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
XVII.-The Proffered Crown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
XVIII.-The Coast of Mischance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211


THE GUN-RUNNER
*-





- - - - sesse-_* ** -
CHAPTER I
THE CITY OF PERIL
THE fog groped and felt its way along the
water-front. Then it crept up to the throat of
the city, like a grey hand, and strangled Broad-
way into an ominous quietness.
It tightened its grip, as the day grew older,
leaving the cross-streets from Union Square
to the Battery clotted with congested traffic. It
brought on an untimely protest of blinking
street-lamps, as uncannily bewildering as the
mid-day cock-crowing of a solar eclipse. It
caused the vague and shadowy walls of sky-
scrapers to blossom into countless yellow win-
dow tiers, as close-packed as the scales of a
Snake. Bells sounded from gloom-wrapt ship-
ping along the saw-tooth line of the river slips,
tolling the watches and falling silent and tolling
again, as they might have tolled in mid-ocean,
or on some lonely waterway that led to the ut-
termost ends of the earth.
Now and then, out of the distance, a river-
• * 1


2 THE CITY OF PERIL
ferry or a car-float tug could be heard growl-
ing and whimpering for room, as it wrangled
over its right-of-way. Everything moved slow-
ly through the muffled streets. Carriages crept
across the sepulchral quietness with a strange
and uncouth reverence, like tourists through a
catacomb. Surface cars, crawling funereally
forward, felt their way with gong-strokes, as
blind men feel their way with stick-taps. An
occasional taxicab, swinging tentatively out of a
side-street, slewed and skidded in the greasy
mud. Lonely drivers watched from their seats,
watched like sea captains from bridge-ends
when ice has invaded their sea lanes.
Under the gas-lamps, dulled to a reddish yel-
low, passed a thin scattering of pedestrians. A
touch of desolation clung about each figure that
groped its way through the short-vistaed street,
as though the thoroughfare it trod were a lonely
moraine and the figure itself the last man that
Walked a ruined world. It was the worst fog
that New York had known for years; the city
lay under it like a mummy swathed in grey.
Yet the gloom seemed to crown it with a new
wonder, to endow it with a new dignity. That
all too shallow tongue of land that is lipped by
the East and North rivers took on strange and
undreamt-of distances. It lay engulfed in twi-
light mysteries, enriched with unlooked-for pos-


THE CITY OF PERIL 3
sibilities. Its narrow acres of brick and stone
and asphalt became something unbounded and
infinite, as bewildering and wide as the open
Atlantic. It seemed to harbour fantastic poten-
tialities. It seemed to release the spirit of ro-
mance, as moonlight unfetters a lover’s lips.
Yet Lingg, the wireless operator of the
Laminian, became more and more alarmed at
the opacity of this fog. He felt, as he burrowed
mole-like across the mist-blanketed city, that he
had been a fool to leave the ship. He should
have listened to reason. And now he had missed
his way. He was lost in the very heart of that
vast and undecipherable wilderness, which had
always filled him with a vague fear, even in the
open sunlight, where its serrated skyline re-
minded him of a waiting trap-jaw. He was
hopelessly at sea in the silence which surround-
ed him, overawed by the quietness which the
turn of a street-corner might convert into some
perilous ambuscade. Heilig, the engineer, had
been right. He’d been a fool to come ashore.
He recalled, a little enviously, the figure of
the engineer, the morose and lank and slatternly
figure in ragged carpet-slippers, leaning against
the ship's rail and smoking the long-stemmed
German pipe with its blue china bowl. He re-
membered the engineer’s impassive stare and
his almost placid grunt of protest as he wheeled


4 THE CITY OF PERIL
slowly round towards the solid land that he
always seemed to hate.
“Where yuh off to, son?” he asked, as Lingg
dropped to the splintered stringpiece of the
wharf. The Laminian was chafing and fretting
against that stringpiece just as his own soul had
been chafing and fretting against the desolation
of her empty decks.
“Ashore,” Lingg answered, resolutely
enough, yet against all the voices of better
judgment.
“Wimmin?” demanded the laconic figure
against the rail.
“No!” exploded the impatient youth.
“Then what yuh after?” persisted his gloomy
interlocutor.
“What am I after?” echoed the other, having
no answer ready.
“What d'yuh want with all that?” demanded
the engineer, with a contemptuous pipe-wave
that embraced the entire island of Manhattan.
“I guess I want to mind my own business,”
was the reproving answer. It was followed by
a contemplative eye-blink or two from the man
in the carpet-slippers. But the disgust did not
go out of his face.
“No good comes o’ knowin’ hell-holes like
this,” he at last averred, with a slow and sa-
gacious side-wag of his head. He spat into the


THE CITY OF PERIL 5
slip water; it was a rite of his infinite con-
tempt.
“I’m not going beyond Broadway,” the half-
repentant Lingg stopped to explain, marvelling
at that strange and lonely seaman’s fixed dis-
trust of solid land. He did not think it worth
while to enlarge on how sick he was of the ship
stink and the quietness, of the fumes of rotting
fruit, of the heavy musk-smell of harbour water,
and the febrile rattle and clatter of donkey en-
gines.
“Yuh’ll find bad enough b'tween here and
Broadway,” avowed the placid misanthrope at
the ship’s rail, contemplating his pipe-smoke as
though it were incense rising before the epito-
mised wisdom of all the ages.
But Lingg was not altogether looking for the
bad. He had been remembering how one of the
junior officers of the Pretoria, when in port,
spent his two riotous days riding up and down
in the Fifth Avenue 'buses, the delirious
'buses, which he described as “bee-hives of
swarming beauty,” where he was ignored and
elbowed and walked over by “the finest women
who ever wore feathers,” to his hungering
heart’s content. And Lingg, too, was hungering
for some glimpse of life beyond that of a dirty
fore-deck; for a sight of faces less satyr-like
than that of a brandy-steeped sea captain. He


6 THE CITY OF PERIL
wanted to see light and colour and movement.
The unpurged emotional tracts of youth ached
for some undiscerned adventure. But above all
he was swayed by a wordless, yet none the less
compelling hunger to behold the faces of women
and girls. Some subliminal sex-hunger, after
so many empty days at sea, made him long for
that vague upper world which seemed embodied
in this very word, Girls. He wanted to see them,
good or bad, with painted faces or pure. It
scarcely mattered, so long as he could look at
them. They would all be goddesses to him,
Olympian beings who breathed some diviner air,
trailing clouds of mystery after their most
casual footsteps. He did not ask to walk or
speak with them. Their lowliest skirt-swish
would seem only too like the ruffle of angel
wings. He merely wanted to brush against
them, indeterminately, in the city's crowded
places, to watch their coming and going, to hear
their occasional voices, to let his eyes dwell on
their faces as a seaman looks at passing land-
lights. For Lingg was still young, clean-living
and clean-thoughted beyond the ways of the
sailor. Heilig’s assistant on the Laminian had
more than once spoken of him as “Mealy-
mouth.”
And then, amazingly enough, came the girl
herself, without sign or warning.


THE CITY OF PERIL 7
Where she fluttered or fell from he scarcely
knew. It was somewhere in one of the quieter
side-streets, and they were standing face to face,
almost, when he looked up and saw her. Had
he seen a mermaid over the ship’s rail it could
not have startled him more. There was no
evading the situation; there was no chance of
being mistaken. It was Adventure, in answer to
his prayer. It was Romance, as he had asked.
And he had never so much as clapped eyes on
her before. Nor was her face a painted face.
. There was no betraying cupid-bow streak of
carmine on the softly smiling lips. There was
no barbaric black gum on the undrooping eye-
lashes, no tell-tale blue paint on the eyelids.
There were no disquieting blandishments, no
sidelong and predatory glances, no ensnaring
simulation of tender levity. His startled eyes
could detect no granite savagery under the vel-
vet of her unconcern. She seemed merely
Woman incarnate to him, the sort of woman he
had sometimes dreamt about on tropic nights
when the Southern Cross swung low to the sky-
line.
“You are Gustav Lingg,” she said quietly,
and as plain as day, while his wide eyes still
studied every tint and shadow and line of her
untroubled face. On that face he seemed to


8 THE CITY OF PERIL
see nothing but a gentle yet determined abstrac-
tion.
“Y—yes,” he stammered, vacuously, as
though her statement had been a question. A
faint tingle of something that was neither fear
nor delight went needling up and down his back-
bone.
“I want to talk to you,” the woman said,
quite gravely. “I must talk to you—alone.”
He knew that she had turned and joined him
as he moved wonderingly forward, with his
staring eyes still on her. Then the futility, the
hopelessness, the impossibility of it all suddenly
came home to him. He was conscious of a sink-
ing feeling in the pit of his stomach. Courage
sank away from him, confidence sucked out of
him, like water out of an unplugged bath-bowl.
If she had only stood before him less alluring,
less Olympian in her loveliness, he might have
been less bewildered. If she had been the Other
Kind, openly and unequivocally, he might have
grown less afraid of her.
But he felt and knew it was a mistake, a fool-
ish and colossal mistake. A vague and slowly
mounting fear took the place of his earlier as-
tonishment. The city itself had already intimi-
dated him. He remembered the engineer’s op-
probrious summing-up of its perils. There was
something amiss, terribly amiss.


THE CITY OF PERIL 9
-:--------, -,
He raised his hat from his head awkwardly,
muttering he scarcely knew what, as he heard
her voice again. He backed away from her
as she essayed to draw nearer, and stumbled,
almost drunkenly, while she stood regarding
him in open wonder. Then he turned and fled
from her, fled from her, abashed and tingling,
fled from her blindly, like a field-mouse from a
coiled blacksnake.
He did not stop until he had rounded a street-
corner. He felt, as he did so, that he was de-
meaning his manhood before some possible high
adventure. He vaguely suspected that one of
life’s vast occasions had slipped away from him
unrecognised. But he was still afraid, foolishly
afraid. He was glad to dip deeper and deeper
into the city, as though it were a cleansing bath
that might wash away his lubberly awkward-
ness. He was glad when the fog crept into the
streets and helped to obliterate him and his
shame. He was glad to wander unknown and
unrecognised about the grey-draped solitude
that engulfed him.
He knew that the woman had not followed
him. But all that afternoon he wandered and
tarried and walked about with the feeling that
he was not alone. He kept looking over his
shoulder from time to time, pondering some
wordless yet persistent sense of disquiet. He


10 THE CITY OF PERIL
felt as though he were being shadowed. He
could not shake off the impression that some
vague figure or two was guardedly dogging his
footsteps.
This sense of being shadowed grew stronger
as night came on. It made him doubly anxious
to get back to his ship, to know the security of
his bald, little, white-painted cabin. It caused
him to reiterate to himself the engineer’s morose
dictum that the city was not to be trusted. He
had hungered for the Unexpected; he had been
restless for his emprising hour or two on land.
But this, he muttered to himself, was the kind of
night that took all the curl out of Romance. He
was not worthy of the venture. He was better
suited to the quietness of a ship’s cabin. He dis-
liked the thought of the two pacing shadows
that seemed to be following him through the
fog. He wanted the Laminian’s dirty fore-deck
once more under his feet.
He designedly kept out of all danger zones, to
make security doubly sure. A thick-voiced man
with a black muffler about his throat had
trailed after him to demand if he had no old
clothes to dispose of. But he did not so much as
stop to answer. A stranger in a Stetson hat,
still later, caught companionably at his arm and
implored him to drink with him. But he freed
himself sharply and kept on his way. A figure


THE CITY OF PERIL 11.
or two blocked his path ominously, but he skirt-
ed them, as a careful pilot skirts his channel-
buoys. He did not care to run risks. He felt
that he was still in the land of the enemy. He
kept to the open, blindly and doggedly. He
knew but one goal, and that goal lay beyond the
Laminian’s odorous gangplank. He fought his
devious way towards it, like a spawning sock-
eye fighting its way to a river source.
He hurried along the fog-wrapt cañons, still
haunted by the impression of some unknown
figure dogging his steps. He felt, as night and
the fog deepened together, that the city was
nothing more than a many-channeled river-bed,
and that he waded along its bottom, breathing
a new element, too thick for air, too etherealised
for water. He saw streets that were new to him,
streets where the misted globes of electric lights
became an undulating double row of white tulips.
Then he stumbled into Broadway. But it was
a Broadway with the soft pedal on. Its roar of
sound was so muffled he scarcely knew it. Then
he came to a square where the scattered lamp-
globes looked like bubbles of gold caught in tree-
branches. Under these tree-branches he saw
loungers on benches, mysterious and motionless
figures, like broken rows of statuary, sleeping
men in the final and casual attitudes of death.
Above these figures he could see wet maple-


12 THE CITY OF PERIL
leaves, hanging as still and lifeless as though
they had been stencilled from sheets of green
copper. His eyes fell on floating street-signs,
blurs of coloured electrics cut off from the in-
visible walls which backed them. He caught
glimpses of the softened bulbs of automatic
signs, like moving gold-fish seen through
frosted glass. Then he saw more lights,
serried lights, subdued into balloons of misty
pearl. They threaded the façade of some
gigantic hotel, like jewel-strings about the throat
of a barbaric woman. But he could not re-
member the place. And again he floundered on
towards the water-front, disquieted with vague
and foolish thoughts, as much oppressed by the
orderly streets as though he were escaping from
some sea-worn harbour slum of vice and out-
lawry. He still wanted his cabin, as a long-
harried chipmunk wants its tree-hole.
He was well out of it, he told himself reassur-
ingly, though he still kept wondering why the
woman had stopped him. He remembered de-
tails of her dress, the sense of assurance and
well-being in her mere figure poise, the open way
in which her eyes had met his. He began to
wonder why he had lacked the audacity to re-
spond to that clear challenge of fate. He de-
manded of himself why he had run away from
the very thing he had been seeking.


THE CITY OF PERIL 13
He knew, as the growl of the ferry-whistles
grew louder, that he was nearing the river. He
felt as ungainly as a tortoise scuffling back to
its water-edge of escape, but his confidence be-
gan to return to him as he found himself nearer
and nearer his brink of delivery. He could per-
ceive the ridiculous figure he had cut. He could
even realise that he had defeated his own ends.
He was conscious of a growing overtone of dis-
content, a peevish resentment against his own
white-livered irresolution. And he would go
aboard, and the next day be out at sea, with the
mystery of it all still unanswered.
He strode on through the fog. It was not
until he came to a narrow street-crossing be-
tween two blank-windowed warehouses that he
saw his way obstructed. But he noticed, as he
came to a sudden stop, that his path was barred
by a cab with an open door. It blocked the cross-
ing, very much as a Neapolitan corricolo ma-
noeuvres for a fare by cutting across a pedes-
trian’s path.
The youth drew up and peered in through that
door, with a slightly quickened pulse, wondering
why the impassive figure on the box should be
thus blocking his way.
Then he saw that the cab was not empty.
Leaning quietly forward from the seat was


14 THE CITY OF PERIL
an intent and waiting figure—a woman’s figure.
It was the woman from whom he had so ig-
nominiously fled.
He felt, this time, no horripilating tingle of
shock. His fund of wonder seemed to be ex-
hausted. He stood staring at her, almost ab-
stractedly, with the mild and resigned bewilder-
ment of a man who has seen lightning strike
twice in the same spot.
“Quick!” said the woman, with an almost im-
perious movement of her gloved hand.
“What?” asked Lingg, inadequately, irrele-
vantly.
“I wanted to warn you,” the woman whis-
pered, as she moved back on the cab seat, obvi-
ously to make room for him. “I must warn you
—but not here.”
“Of what?” asked Lingg. He saw that she
was quite alone in the cab.
“Come!” she commanded, ignoring his ques-
tion.
He stepped into the hooded gloom like a
coerced schoolboy. He was not afraid, he as-
sured himself. It was merely that he was un-
willing to be made the blind tool of forces he
could not comprehend.
“Of what?” he repeated, noticing that the
cab moved forward the moment the door had
Slammed shut.


THE CITY OF PERIL 15
mis- - - *-
- -, --------------
“Not to sail on the Laminian,” said the wom-
an at his side. He could detect a subtle perfume
about her presence, a flowery and effeminising
perfume which made him think of New England
village gardens. An older man would have
thought of boudoirs.
“Why not?” he asked. The woman could see
that he was not as impressed as he might be.
“It will not be safe.”
“It never is, on those third-class boats.”
He insisted on being literal or nothing.
“But there are dangers ahead of you—dan-
gers you don’t and can’t understand.”
“I don’t see how I can help that,” said the
youth of little imagination. “When the Com-
pany puts me on a ship or gives me a station
anywheres, I’ve got to stick to it.”
“Then you don’t believe me?”
“It’s not a matter of believing. It’s more a
matter of not understanding you.”
A change seemed to creep over her, a light-
ening and relaxing change, such as would come
to the New England garden he had thought of
when it passed from shadow to sunlight.
“Would you like to understand me?” she
asked, turning her eyes full on his somewhat
abashed young face. He blushed and tingled
under the directness of her gaze.


16 THE CITY OF PERIL
“How could I?” he succeeded in stammering
out.
“Won’t you stay and try?” she murmured,
pregnantly.
The prospect did not exactly appal him. It
merely puzzled him now as something beyond
the reach of his delimited imagination. The
curl hadn’t been taken out of Romance, after
all, he told himself. He could see the brooding
spirit of her, incarnate before his very eyes,
coifed and gowned like a goddess. But the very
radiance of the vision made him doubly afraid
of her.
“I'm afraid I’ll have to get back,” was his
hesitating rejoinder.
“Back Where?”
“To my ship,” he faltered.
“But you mustn't!” she murmured, with a
solicitous hand on his still tingling arm.
“I’ve got to get back,” he persisted, reaching
and fumbling for the door.
“But not yet—not here,” she begged him.
“I must,” he declared, trying to stand on his
feet under the cramping cab-hood, and tugging
at the door-handle.
“Only listen to me for a moment,” the woman
was saying, almost pleadingly.
He allowed her to draw him gently back into


THE CITY OF PERIL 17
the seat beside her. But disquiet had again
taken possession of him.
“Am I so terrible?” she asked, with her hand
still on his arm. Her voice was low and quiet;
her half-smiling lips were parted a little, giving
a touch of languid abandon to her otherwise
intent and earnest face. And here was the very
thing he had been so restlessly in search of;
but now that it was before him, within his grasp,
he was wordlessly afraid of it.
“N—no, you’re not terrible,” he jerkily re-
assured her, as though the words had to 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, stoop-
ing 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 mur-
muring, 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


18 THE CITY OF PERIL
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 inconse-
quentialities into dim and towering structures of
intrigue. He was afraid of himself and his sur-
roundings.
The woman must have seen this the very mo-
ment 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


THE CITY OF PERIL 19
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, for-
tified 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 strug-
gles. But still he fought and shouted.
His cries brought a patrolman with a night-
stick in his hand. He could see the circle dis-
rupted and scattered. He could hear the re-
lieving 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 au-
thoritative. This newcomer seemed to pull the


20 THE CITY OF PERIL
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 of-
ficer 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 any-
thing!”


THE CITY OF PERIL 21
“But what’s this all about, anyway?” de-
manded the bewildered officer, shouldering out
through the crowd with the other man at his
heels.
“God only knows,” was that other man’s re-
tort, 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


22 THE CITY OF PERIL
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 shoul-
der. “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 situa-
tion.
“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-mor-
rOW.”
“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 ques-
tion was repeated.
“War’s war!” was all he said. And he emit-
ted the laconism as though he had no love for the
Subject from which it sprang.


THE CITY OF PERIL 23
“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?”


CHAPTEB II
THE SPARK IN THE GAP
“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, seem-
ing, 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 inter-
locutor.
“Mean it’s your first run?” inquired the huge
and genial spirit of the doorway. This ques-
tion, like his first, remained unanswered. So
he repeated it in a tone of mild and attained
humility.
34


THE SPARK IN THE GAP 25
“I can’t be an operator until I’ve got some-
thing to operate on,” said the voice from the
room. Its barbed curtness of tone no more
reached the quick of the newcomer than water
could reach a duck’s breast.
“Then you’re not sending yet?” he amiably
persisted, with his shoulder against the door-
post.
“Not till I’ve tuned up this pile of junk!”
was the preoccupied answer of the operator,
bent low over his work.
“You don’t mean she’s off her trolley, our
first hour out?” asked the other. His patience
seemed infinite. He still stood there, studying
the shirt-sleeved figure in the centre of the room.
“I can’t make her spark right. And I’ve got
a damp helix and a motor running weak!”
The words were followed by a gasp of exas-
peration and the rattle of a tool flung to the
floor.
The huge-shouldered man in the raincoat
made no effort to conceal his disappointment.
It was what one deserved, he conceded, for trav-
elling in such a punk-riveted, slush-pitted, coal-
eating second-rater!
But he remained up on the bridge-deck. He
continued to lean nonchalantly against the drip-
ping rail, peering out from under bushy iron-
grey eyebrows drawn close to the flat-bridged


26 THE SPARK IN THE GAP
nose, unmindful of the rain that beat in from
the northeast as the Laminian plowed her way
down through the Narrows and the Lower Bay.
His red-rimmed, many-wrinkled eyes were still
on the horizon, and his massive, russet hand was
still clamped on the white awning-stanchion as
Sandy Hook was passed and Atlantic High-
lands melted down into a vague monotone of
rain-swept loneliness.
Beyond the ship’s officers, who fretted uncer-
tainly back and forth along the bridge, his figure
was the only one on the deserted deck. As the
mist shut off the last dull line of Navesink, and
the nose of the steamer swung southward, rising
and dipping in the long ground-swell of the open
Atlantic, the watching man gave vent to an in-
voluntary sigh of relief.
But he still stood there, in the slanting rain,
while the deck beneath his feet shook with the
purposeful throb of the engines under their
“full steam ahead,” and the pulsating and pon-
derous thing of steel, “carrying a bone in her
teeth,” shouldered her way on through a ghost-
like world of sea and rain. She seemed, for all
her pitted and rust-stained plates, dignified with
some new-found sense of mystery, of austere
and unknown missions, as she sought out her
predestined path through the grey loneliness of
her universe. She seemed humanised, endowed


THE SPARK IN THE GAP 27
with the will of a sentient and reasoning being.
The stranger looked about quickly, as the
thick-necked, short-legged captain, in dripping
oilskins, leaned over the port bridge-gate and
called back along the empty deck:
“You, there!—are you gettin’ anything?”
There was no answer to his call.
“Aren’t you gettin’ that ship out there?” he
demanded peremptorily, as he flung the rain-
drops from his cap-brim with a bull-like shake
of the head.
He leaned on the wet rail and waited. But
still there was no answer to his question. So he
repeated it, this time in a bellow. Then came
the sound of a chair being pushed back on deck-
boards in the wireless-room, and the rattle of a
quickly opened shutter.
“I’ll have her in five minutes,” answered the
operator. The shutter closed again, sharply.
Captain Yandel, the master of the Laminian,
mumbled under his breath, and turned back to
the bridge.
The man in the raincoat swung casually about
on his heel and studied the operator’s station,
where the after-deck superstructure rose squat
and square as a scow-cabin out of the bleached
flooring of the weather-deck. He peered up to
where the “T” aerials of phosphor-bronze wire
on their ashwood stretchers bridged the two


28 THE SPARK IN THE GAP
mastheads; he followed the course of those
united wires as they led down into the square
little station.
Next to this station, on the right, was the
ship's lamp-room. In front of it stood the flag-
locker. Farther along the deck, he noted, came
the chart-room, and then the captain's cabin.
In front of that again was the wheel-house and
the canvas-strapped bridge.
On this bridge an officer, unsheathing a glass,
was peering out to sea. The stranger followed
the direction of the pointed glass and made out
the ponderously rocking mass of a battleship
as she crept up on them through the mist. There
was something ominous and authoritative about
her, with her sullen turrets and her monotone of
colour, as she belched out her black smoke-
plumes that hung low on the sky-line.
Then the stranger in the dripping raincoat
swung sharply about and looked up at the mast-
head. As he did so he saw a nervous blue spark
appear and disappear at the ends of the taut-
strung aerials that cradled back and forth with
every dip and plunge of the ship. A muffled
crash and clatter of sound echoed out of the
closed station; a simultaneous kiss and crackle
of broken noise came from the masthead.
It was the wireless operator at last working
his key. It was the Hertzian waves, erupting


THE SPARK IN THE GAP 29
from the mended coils, winging their way with
the speed of light out through the loneliness of
the rain-fogged afternoon.
Then came a space of silence, interrupted by
the sudden appearance of the operator, still in
his shirt-sleeves, with his coat held over his head
like a hood. He strode forward to the bridge-
gate, where he was met by the waiting captain.
Together they bent over a sheet from a tinted
form-pad. Then the hooded figure hurried back
to the station, and the slam of a door punctuated
his disappearance from sight.
The man in the raincoat turned back to the
battleship, and stood thoughtfully regarding the
bursts of foam on her plunging cutwater and the
intermittent shower of spray as she rose and
dipped in the cross-swell. Through the engine-
room skylight behind him came the call of sub-
terranean voices, the busy clangour of iron
scraping on iron, the quick slam of furnace
doors, magnified in the open shaft-head to
sounds of titanic proportions. As he stood there
a deck steward mounted the brass-plated stair-
way, carrying a tray with coffee-cake and steam-
ing cups of tea.
The man at the rail wheeled about quickly at
the unexpected sound of a voice so close behind
him. He declined the proffered refreshment
bruskly and swung back to his earlier position,


30 THE SPARK IN THE GAP
staring out at the battleship. The steward took
up his tray and passed on to the operator’s door,
where, adroitly balancing on one foot, he tapped
on the panel with the other.
The door opened, and this time the white glare
of the electric light shone along the wet deck.
The man at the rail, twisting his head, without
any betraying movement of the body, succeeded
in getting a more satisfactory glimpse of the
TOOm.
Behind the door swung a curtain of soiled
denim, partly withdrawn. Squatting on a can-
Vas camp-chair before his unpainted work-table
Was the operator. His wireless helmet-receiver,
or “set,” was clasped over his ears and held
close to the bent head by a chaplet of glimmering
metal. Against each “receiver” the operator
pressed a white handkerchief, to shut away out-
side noises.
His face was lean, clear-cut, touched with
Vigour. It was too vital and youthful in texture
to be called leathery, though it was sunburnt
to what seemed almost a coffee-colour, contrast-
*8. Strangely with the ruddiness of the open-
Weathered ship's officers about him. He had,
too, a touch of the ascetic in the high brow and
the wide cheek-bones, his leanness of jowl giving
* the impression of generous reservoirs of
*gy greedily and continually drained by


32 THE SPARK IN THE GAP
from the bridge-gate. It was plain to see his
feeling for the new operator was not an over-
kindly one.
The new operator showed his head round one
corner of the stateroom.
“I’ll try again!”
Once more came the hiss and rattle and crackle
of the spark, and once more the lean and sun-
tanned face appeared round a corner of the
Stateroom.
“He’s busy talking to the navy-yard!”
“To what?”
“To the navy-yard.”
“What'd he tell you?”
The new operator hesitated for a moment or
two before answering. His singularly quiet eyes
were resting on Captain Yandel’s nose, for it
was a remarkable nose, something between a
cardinal and magenta colour, stippled with the
brighter hues of countless little broken veins.
“He told me to shut up, and cut out!” he
answered at last, editing the irate officer’s
blasphemy out of the message.
The passenger in the raincoat fell to pacing
the open deck. He stopped once or twice, quite
casually, to glance in at the wireless apparatus.
Then, seeing that the operator had taken off his
ear-phones and was leaning back in his canvas
chair, giving his open and undivided attention


THE SPARK IN THE GAP 33
to the tea and coffee-cake, the stranger came to
a stop and leaned companionably against the
jamb of the open door. -
The young man glanced up at the huge figure
darkening his cabin. He did so with no outward
sign of emotion. He had, apparently, become
inured to the wondering eyes of the passengers,
and he had his own ends to pursue. So he went
on with his coffee-cake in silence.
“Could you take those messages of mine
now?” asked the man in the raincoat.
“Any old time now,” answered the operator,
without so much as a second glance.
“I settle for it with you, don't I?” asked the
stranger, drawing out a roll of bills. The for-
midable dimensions of that roll were lost on the
man bending over the teacup.
“Leave your name and cabin number, and pay
the purser. They don’t seem to trust operators
on this floating palace! All I do is stamp the
time-check on the message and send it out.”
He took the two messages, stamped them, and
read them aloud, before pencilling the number of
words on a corner of each sheet and stabbing
it on his “send” hook. He read, perfunctorily:
WARREL, Sixty Wall Street, New York.
Our man on board Laminian bound Puerto Locombia. Wire
Washington. Will have him held by authorities to await in-
structions. DUFFY.


34 THE SPARK IN THE GAP
The second message he read off quite as hasti-
ly, and with equal nonchalance:
DOCTOR BERNADO MORALES, Mobile.
Advise Charleston wireless to relay Laminian southward
bound if shipment of laundry equipment and steel ties left
Mobile for Ganley and date of sailing. MICHAEL DUFFY.
The stranger waited a moment at the door, as
though expecting some further word or move-
ment from the operator.
But the man of the key was already busy over
his “tuner.” So the stranger in the raincoat
turned away, with a look of mild exasperation
in his predaceous and puzzled little eyes.


CHAPTER III
THE CALL FROM WITHOUT
IT was four hours later that the man in the
raincoat reappeared on the bridge deck. The
night was thick, and McKinnon, the operator,
worked with his coat off and his door hooked
back against the wall-plates.
He looked up for only a moment as he saw
the huge figure once more confronting him. The
stranger, unrebuffed by his silence, stepped
calmly inside.
“Anything come in over this machinery o’
yours for me?” he inquired as he took out a
cigar, pushed his hat back on his head, and
struck a light. The operator looked up with
his habitually abstracted and unseeing stare.
“What’s the name?” he asked, once more
studying his “tuner.”
The other was indignantly silent for a mo-
ment; then he laughed a little, forgivingly.
“Duffy,” he answered. “Michael Duffy.”
The operator shook his head; the movement
85


36 THE CALL FROM WITHOUT
was followed by another minute or two of si-
lence.
“It might've come under the name of Cody,
Richard Cody,” explained the intruder. Some-
thing in the younger man’s smile caused him to
add: “You see, that's our firm name, Duffy
& Cody.”
An alias, south of the twentieth parallel, oft-
en enough carries its own explanation. The
Laminian’s bow was pointing towards a land of
patriots where a change of name only too often
synchronised with a change of continents. But
McKinnon merely gave a shake of the head. It
was several minutes before he glanced about at
the other man, with a closeness of scrutiny that
might have been impertinent had it seemed less
frankly impersonal.
“There’s nothing in for passengers this
trip,” he announced as he turned back to his
“tuner.” He drummed impatiently on the ta-
ble-edge for a moment before readjusting his
helmet-receiver. But the huge-shouldered in-
truder was not to be so easily shaken off.
“Your machine’s working, isn’t it?” he
asked, preoccupied with an inspection of the
end of his cigar. This cigar was soft and thick
and short, like his own fingers. Despite its dark
and baleful colour, he kept inhaling and expel-
ling great lungsful of it as he talked. The


THE CALL FROM WITHOUT 37
operator idly registered the mental decision
that cigars such as those were surely of Hon-
durian make.
“I saw you giving a message to the captain,
didn't I?” And again the bellows-like lungs ex-
pelled their languid cloud.
“That was not to take on coffee at Puerto
Locombia !” answered McKinnon. He delivered
himself of this information casually, almost
with amusement, though his half-averted eyes
were not unconscious of the effect produced by
what he had said.
The stranger was suddenly offering him one
of the thick, short cigars. A shadow seemed
to have lifted from his face.
“I don’t smoke,” said the ungracious man at
the key, seeming to draw back into his shell of
reticence. “And I’m busy sending.”
“You mean you’re actually talking to New
York now?” amiably persisted the other. The
operator’s hand went out to the switch, black
against the unpainted boards, and flanked on
either side by a fuse.
“I’ve been tuning for Atlantic City. We’re
just picking him up,” he answered as his fin-
gers hovered over the starting-box lever,
clamped to the same pine boards, above the
switch. A sudden deep buzzing filled the cabin.
It grew louder and louder as the lever crossed


38 THE CALL FROM WITHOUT
farther and farther down on the contact-pins.
It sounded like a hive of bees stirred into anger.
The stranger peered in at the dynamo under the
operating table.
“So you’re talking!” he murmured medita-
tively, appreciatively.
“How long will you be in communication with
them?” he went on after a second or two of
thought.
The other raised an earphone to listen, as
the question was repeated. Then he turned back
and bent over the carborundum tip between his
responder-points.
“We’re never really out of touch with 'em, on
this run,” he retorted. He seemed to resent
his own increasing concessions to the other’s
imperturbable good-nature.
“You mean you can call up New York from
the Caribbean?”
The operator put down his earphones and
shook out his small cardboard box of carborun-
dum fragments, picking through them for a
fresh piece for his responder-points. It seemed
apparent enough, to the patient-eyed man across
the cabin from him, that he was neither friendly
nor unfriendly; it was simply that he was busy.
“No, I don’t mean that, exactly. New York
never works south of Atlantic City, as a rule.
He’s got too much to handle there, too many


THE CALL FROM WITHOUT 39
ships going in and out. But New York can re-
lay to Galilee and then down to NF—that’s Nor-
folk—and from there on to Hatteras. Then
Hatteras could throw a message over to Charles-
ton, and if we’re depending on land stations
alone, Charleston can relay to Savannah, and
then Savannah can get in touch with the naval
station at Saint Augustine.”
“And then where?” asked the stranger, lean-
ing back against the cabin wall.
“Then Key West could catch it up, and if
there wasn’t a gunboat or an Atlas fruit liner
crawling somewhere around Cuba, why, the
navy yard at Guantanamo could get it relayed
over to Limon, and from Limon, in decent
weather, you’d catch the navy yard operator
at Colon. And if the night was clear, you’d
run one chance in a hundred of waking up the
Cocoanut Trail aerials behind Puerto Locom-
bia.”
There was a moment or two of silence.
“Could Puerto Locombia get anything out-
side of a passing ship? Kingston, for instance?”
“Kingston never had wireless—it’s prohibit-
ed by the British Government.”
“Then there’s New Orleans, on a pinch.”
“There’s too much map between,” explained
the operator. He gathered up his box of scat-
tered carborundum.


THE CALL FROM WITHOUT 41
“By the way, could you take a message for
New Orleans to-night?”
“I could take it all right, if you’re willing to
prepay land charges.”
“I’ll pay anything you say, so long as you
get me in touch with my people there. I want
to ask Jean Careche, at the St. Charles, just
when a shipment of oil and mill shafting got out
of that port.”
“Wait a minute, then, until I get Atlantic
City again. You can be writing out your mes-
sage and I’ll get the time-check on it.”
McKinnon bent over his table, with a wrinkled
brow, and started to “call.” As he caught the
lever-handle of the huge key in his fingers and
worked it deliberately, yet slowly, up and down
—he was sending “strong”—the sudden blue
splash of flame exploded and leaped and
hissed across the spark-gap, from one brass-
knobbed discharging-rod to the other. It filled
the roughly improvised station with a sound
like the rattle of musketry. The ceiling and
walls of the room, crusted with many paintings
of white lead, mirrored and refracted the pur-
plish-blue flashes. A faint ozonic odour, not un-
like a subliminated smell of brimstone, filled the
all".
The operator threw off his switch again and
listened intently, with his two handkerchiefs


42 THE CALL FROM WITHOUT
muffling his earphones. Then he suddenly
swung about and looked at the man behind him.
“That cruiser’s going to Culebra, off Porto
Rico. She's ordered south on account of the
Locombian trouble.”
“You don’t mean she’s going to mix up in
that mess?” the intruder cried with a note of
disgust.
“No; Atlantic City says she’s just going to
lie there and wait for instructions from Wash-
ington.”
The operator turned back to his table without
apparently noticing the interest in the other
man’s eyes. He sat seemingly detached and un-
conscious of any presence in the room except
that of the mysterious spirit which came and
went at a touch of his hand. A smile began to
play about his mouth as he listened. It was
held there in suspension, while his gaze shifted
from side to side, vivaciously, in response to
that far-off and mysterious voice that was
winging its invisible way across so many miles
of rain-washed sea and emptiness, to creep
along a slender thread of metal into his closed
and crowded cabin.
He still seemed unconscious of the mounting
look of determination, of obdurate belligerency,
that smouldered up into the square-jawed face
of the watching stranger as his eyes travelled


THE CALL FROM WITHOUT 43
from a wall map of the Caribbean down to the
brass key, and then back to the map again.
“You’d think our Uncle Samuel had enough
troubles without trying to play school-teacher
to those dinky little fire-eaters down there,” he
meditatively ventured as he took out another
of his black Hondurian cigars, and once more
fell to studying the map of the Caribbean.
The operator, bent low over his apparatus,
did not deign to answer him.


CHAPTER IV
TEIE MAN ON BOARD
“You’ve made this trip before?” observed
the stranger, studying the man before him with
the same calm and half-closed eyes that he had
bent on the faded wall-map. He seemed as
strangely disturbed by his companion’s note of
quiet authority as he was by his incongruously
sunburnt face and his unseemly length of limb.
“Never on this tub!” McKinnon responded,
with a contemptuous side glance about his
station.
The stranger followed that glance as it circled
the crowded and disordered room. It was both
a sleeping-cabin and an operating office. Under
the wide shelf that supported a double row of
Leyden jars, surmounted in turn by the De For-
est helix, was the operator’s narrow berth. To-
ward the foot of this berth, below the condenser,
stood an enameled washbowl and a litter of
tools. Next to these was a wooden-Slatted trunk,
on which lay a clutter of recently unpacked
44


THE MAN ON BOARD 45
clothing, a pair of canvas-covered dumbbells, a
shaving set, and a tin box of photographs.
Against the farther wall, half way to the door,
and directly in front of the dynamo, stood a
broken steamer chair. In front of it was the
rough pine table at which the operator sat and
worked. On this table stood the tuning-box, with
its mysterious rows of numerals along the three
slots in which lever-heads moved back and forth,
the great, long-handled despatching instrument,
like a Brobdingnagian model of a telegraph key,
and the delicately mounted little responder, the
nerve center of the wireless system. Above
this, on the outside wall, stood the switchboard.
It was of unpainted pine, like the table. Set
in it, near the top, was the starting-box, with
its broken and roughly spliced lever, and below
it the switch-arm itself, standing between its
two protecting fuses. At the end of the table
was the faded wall-map of the Caribbean and a
shallow clothes-locker. Above this was tacked
a lithograph of a stage dancer, pointing with a
pink-satined toe to other and brighter worlds.
It was a strange medley of the obvious and the
inscrutable, of the commonplace and the mys-
terious.
“How'd you get aboard this tub, anyway?”
the stranger suddenly asked, with a sympathetic
wag of the head.


46 THE MAN ON BOARD
‘‘I needed the money. But I never thought
I’d have to face a mess like this.” And the
new operator disgustedly waved an arm about
the room.
The stranger was meditatively rubbing his
pendulous chin.
“You don’t like the work, eh?”
“It’s good enough when you’ve got a decent
station. But this room isn’t fit for a pig to live
in Look at that box of a sleeping-berth! It's
worse than a coffin' And I’m going to kick a
board out of that cabin wall if they don’t get
a ventilator tube in here—it’s like sleeping in
a dough-box! And look at that bunged-up tu-
ner! And that operating-table, that’s never seen
a coat of paint; and that switchboard—nothing
but raw pine! Why, nine of the connecters in
those Leyden jars turned out to be broken, after
I’d struck this place at noon. I had to patch
them up with all the washbowl chains from the
first cabins as we came down the bay. I got
on to that dodge aboard the Prinz Joachim.”
“She’s a real boat!” interpolated the stran-
ger.
The young operator was wistfully nodding
his head. “They carry a German band, and an
ice machine, and free beer for the officers.”
“But you can make this snug enough,” the
other soothed.


48 THE MAN ON BOARD
became more light-hearted, more suavely con-
solatory.
“But it’s so deucedly mysterious—sending all
kinds of messages for all kinds of people,” he
argued.
“What’s so mysterious about it?” the man
at the table demanded. “I think it’s confound-
edly simple.”
“The machinery is, I suppose, when you un-
derstand it; but I mean the mixing up in the
big events, the getting next to life with the shell
off.”
“Oh, it’s mostly weather reports and “sweet-
heart’ messages and captains giving distances
and saying they’re coming into port or passing
lights or wanting wharf room, if it isn’t the
Navy people asking for Sunday papers and
news from home.”
“But think what a swath you could cut with
wireless if you wanted to,” pursued the other
in his placid disregard of all side issues.
“Me?” said McKinnon, turning slowly about.
“I mean as a side line,” interposed the stran-
ger with a shrug. Still again McKinnon’s nerv-
ous grey eyes swept the figure in the steamer-
chair.
“But I have a side line,” explained the oper-
ator as he noted the other man’s puzzled gaze
resting on his box of models.


50 THE MAN ON BOARD
“Models cost money, of course,” McKinnon
continued more deliberately. “I have to go
slow. But once I get that apparatus where
I want it you’ll never see me south of Hatteras
again.”
He stopped, and waited for the other man to
speak.
“It’s not a white man’s country,” admitted
the stranger with a nod toward the South.
“The only good thing in it’s the mules.”
“We’ve got to take that as it comes,” McKin-
non said with an unlooked-for placidity of tone.
Then he leaned back, with half-closed eyes, and
linked his long forefingers together behind his
head. “You see, I can always save money on
a coastwise run like this: there’s no way of get-
ting rid of it.”
“Well, money’s worth having now and then,”
the stranger remarked as his sagely ruminative
eye fell on the little varnished box that held the
wireless responder.
He was silent for a moment or two, though
McKinnon watched him closely out of his half-
shut eyes. Then the stranger swung slowly
about and touched the operator on his soiled
shirt-sleeve. McKinnon felt the heavy forefin-
ger on his arm, but he did not move.
“See here,” said the stranger, and both his
voice and his expression had undergone some


THE MAN ON BOARD 51.
quick and pregnant change, “see here; d'you
want to make ten times what you get out of
this key-operating business? D'you want to
make a good round sum, helping me out of a
hole?”
The Laminian’s operator looked closely at the
man who had invaded his cabin. He had ap-
parently been afraid of some such undercurrent
of self-interest in the other’s advances. He
seemed to possess the man of thought’s persist-
ent horror of material and entangling alliances;
he seemed to feel that some secret web of in-
veiglement had been woven about him.
“How could I help you out of a hole?” he
curtly demanded.
The stranger did not answer at once. The
other’s suddenly aroused suspicion had warned
him to go slow. Instead of speaking he leaned
back in the steamer-chair and studied his com-
panion. The path before him seemed a preca-
rious one. His pursed-up lips worked slowly
in and out as he sat there temporising. There
was something suggestive of the ruminant in his
large and heavy silence.
“Could we talk here—us two, man to man?”
he finally asked, with a look at the door.
“Of course we can,” the operator retorted,
nettled by the sense of mystery the other was
conjuring up about so simple a situation. This


52 THE MAN ON BOARD
vague feeling of irritation seemed to merge into
something that was almost anger as he watched
the stranger slowly rise to his feet and cross
over to the cabin door, held back against the
wall-plates by its brass hook. He lifted the
end of this hook on his toe and let the freed door
swing shut with the slow dip of the steamer's
deck. Then he ruffled out the faded denim cur-
tain and came back and sat down. The two men
continued to look at each other guardedly.
“I’ve got a hard job ahead of me,” began
the intruder, seeming to feel his way as he went.
“A hard job—and you’re the only man on this
ship who can help me along.”
“Go on,” McKinnon commanded with an im:
patient reach for his discarded coat.
“That's just it. I’ll be hanged if I know
how to go on!” the other explained. He gave
vent to a guttural laugh of uneasiness and sat
stroking his pendulous, turkey-cock throat.
The operator, drumming on his pine table-
edge, waited in silence. The other man was also
silent. The pulse and throb of the engines crept
into the white-walled cabin.
“Well,” said McKinnon with a significant
glance toward his large and authoritative sil-
ver watch. The stranger’s eye, following him,
passed on to the key-lever and then on again
to the helix wires.


THE MAN ON BOARD 53
“You may recall that you sent a couple of
messages out for me this afternoon,” he finally
began.
McKinnon recalled the fact of the two de-
spatches.
“Maybe you happen to remember the word-
ing of those two particular messages?”
McKinnon, with wrinkled brow, turned to his
“send-hook.” He found the two sheets, and
straightened them out on his knee. Then he
looked up to say: “We never hold these things
in our head, you know. We can’t, any more
than a wire can.”
He let his gaze run over the sheets of paper
before him. The other man sat watching him
as he read. For just a moment, as he made note
of what seemed the operator’s half-forbearing,
half-cynical indifference, a shadow of disap-
pointment flitted across his face, typifying, ap-
parently, some passing regret for a reconnais-
sance at last recognised as unnecessary. But he
pulled himself together at once, as though de-
termined to face the problem immediately be-
fore him.
“Would you mind reading that first despatch
out to me?” he asked with the placid authority
of a prestidigitateur sure of his trick.
McKinnon rattled through the message at a
breath: “Warrel, sixty Wall Street, New York.


54 THE MAN ON BOARD
Our man on board Laminian, bound Puerto Lo-
combia. Wire Washington. Will have him held
by authorities to await instructions. DUFFY.”
The operator put the message on the table
and calmly weighted it with his carborundum
box. The other man suddenly realised, as he
made note of McKinnon’s attitude of unmoved
neutrality, how automatic the human mind can
become; how, when once immersed in the meth-
od of doing a thing, it can lose all sense of the
thing itself. The man of the key had seen noth-
ing but a string of words to be “sent.” It was
only too apparent that their meaning had es-
caped him.
“I suppose I’ve got to explain that,” said
the stranger, fondling one of his thick, short ci-
gars in his thick, short fingers. “You’ll no-
tice that this message went to 60 Wall Street.
You may or may not know that that's the Infor-
mation Bureau of the Consolidated Fruit Con-
cern. And if you’ve knocked about the Banana
Belt long enough you’ve found out that those
people just about own those little yam-eating
republics down there.”
McKinnon nodded as a sign that he under-
stood.
“They’ve got a good many millions of money
locked up in that export business o’ theirs. And


THE MAN ON BOARD 55
when you’re doing business in a republic that’s
built on bullets you’ve got to watch where
you’re walking. It means that you’ve got to
keep your ear to the ground; see that your gov-
ernments are stable, I mean; and your marion-
ettes in their nice little red and gold uniforms
running smooth and true. That’s why they re-
tain a big man like Warrel for their information
bureau—just to know who’s poking a finger into
the political pie down there, and to be ready for
trouble when it blows up.”
It was all obvious enough to the listening op-
erator.
“Well, I’m here acting for Warrel and the
Consolidated Fruit people. The Locombian
charge d'affaires at Washington tipped our
office off some five weeks ago about trouble
ahead in Guariqui.”
“Where’s Guariqui’” quietly asked McKin-
In OII. -
“Guariqui’s their capital—the capital of Lo-
combia. Since we’ve heard that, of course,
we’ve been co-operating with the department at
Washington, keeping an eye on any Locombian
likely to be interested in the Guariqui mix-up.”
McKinnon confessed that he had known of
detectives engaged in the sole pursuit of shad-
owing Latin-American exiles.


56 THE MAN ON BOARD
“And it’s right here under this deck”—Duffy
tapped the floor with his heel as he spoke—“it’s
right here on this ship o' yours that we’ve got
Ganley—the one and only Ganley!”


CHAPTER V
THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
THE stranger peered across the cabin at the
unperturbed operator.
“Who’s Ganley?” asked McKinnon.
The man in the steamer-chair let his aston-
ishment explode in a ceilingward belch of smoke.
“Ganley! Why, Ganley’s the biggest gun-
runner doing business in the Caribbean!”
“Gun-runner?”
“Yes, the slickest revolution-maker that ever
shipped carbines and smokeless into a Latin-
American republic!”
“He’s new to me,” McKinnon protested.
“He’s the man who’s always smelling out a
country that’s looking for a liberator. And he
gets a rake-off from the patriots and a rake-off
from the Birmingham gun people, and another
rake-off from the nitro-makers. Why, he’s the
man who’s been engineering this Locombian up-
rising for the last seven months! But now
57


58 THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
we’ve got him good, and got him where we want
him.”
“Then what’s he doing on a steamer like
this? Couldn’t he see he was going to be cor-
nered?”
The disposition of the operator was not alto-
gether an inflammable one.
“That's just the point, my friend. He
couldn’t get out of Charleston or Mobile or
New Orleans. We had those ports watched. So
he slipped quietly up to New York, engaged a
passage on Saturday's Hamburg-American
steamer for Colon, and then slipped over to the
Laminian in a closed cab when he thought we
weren’t keeping tab on him. But, pshaw! you
know all this already, don’t you?”
“Not all of it,” replied McKinnon.
“But you saw that yellow-skinned man who
was helped aboard? The sick-looking fellow
with the Spanish servant, who was almost car-
ried up from that cab on the wharf?”
McKinnon confessed to some vague remem-
brance of the incident.
“That man is Ganley!” said the other. “And
he's under this deck, down there in cabin four-
teen, and you’ll find that he’s going to stay there
until we slip into the roadstead at Puerto Lo-
combia.”


THE WEB OF INTRIGUE 59
A meditative silence filled the little white-
walled cabin.
“But what have I got to do with all this?”
McKinnon at last demanded. His face seemed
to carry the complaint that he had always found
dissension on shipboard hard to endure; it was
never easy to get away from disturbances in a
world so small, or to put hate behind one in a
life so circumscribed. Yet he smiled a little,
in spite of himself. A ship, he had somewhere
heard, must be either a heaven or a hell. The
next fortnight, he felt, would find little of the
celestial about the Laminian.
“That's just what I’m coming around to,”
the intruder was saying to him. “This Ganley,
remember, has got his “fences’ and confederates
and small-fry helpers. He works the thing thor-
ough when he does it. And as likely as not, be-
tween here and Puerto Locombia, he’s going to
get messages sent in to him, or he's going to
send out some despatches on his own hook—
so as to keep in touch with his people.”
The stranger came to a stop and sat regard-
ing the younger man as though he looked for
Some word of encouragement or comprehension
from him.
“The thing I’ve got to guard against most,”
the stranger who called himself Duffy contin-
ued, “is the department at Washington. If


60 THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
they sent something in, and it got out all over
the ship, it would be likely to spoil everything.”
“But it won’t get out all over the ship,” the
operator corrected.
“You’ll promise me that?” asked the other
with a look of relief.
“Of course I’ll promise you that—it’s part
of my business.”
“But there’s the other side of the question,”
the stranger discreetly continued. “Ganley is
almost sure to be sending or receiving some-
thing. Why, I shouldn’t be surprised if you’ve
been handling something for him already.”
The operator reached out for his message-
hooks. The movement was merely perfunctory,
for the hooks were all but empty.
“What name would he be travelling under?”
McKinnon looked up to ask.
“He’s booked as John Siebert, cabin four-
teen,” was the answer.
The man in the steamer-chair looked relieved,
but only for a moment, when he learned that
nothing had come or gone.
“Of course I may be wrong about his trying
to keep in touch with those people of his. And
it may happen the department won’t even try
to have him held. Perhaps they won’t do any-
thing until we get him ashore at Puerto Locom-
bia. But we’ve got to get him there—it’s our


THE WEB OF INTRIGUE 61
last chance. We’ve worked too hard on this
thing not to see it put through to a finish.”
“And?” asked McKinnon, waiting.
“All I want you to do is to keep tab on any-
thing that comes in for this man Ganley, or
about him and his tin-horn warfare down there
—and on anything that’s to go out, until we
land.”
“Are you acting officially?” McKinnon de-
manded, with a studied effort towards imper-
sonality. “I mean, are you acting for the de-
partment at Washington?”
“I’m acting as the confidential agent of the
Consolidated Fruit people, and the Consolidated
Fruit people have been co-operating with the
department for several weeks now.”
“And you simply want to know what these
messages are?”
“Yes, that’s all; I mean that’s all, unless
they’re of such a nature as to defeat the ends
of justice. We don’t want anything to get
through that's going to help our man slip away
from us.”
* “You mean for me to hold back everything
that looks suspicious until you O.K. it?”
“And couldn’t you do that if I made it worth
while for you?” quietly inquired the stranger.
“How do you mean worth while?”


62 THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
“Why, I’ll pay you for your trouble.
I’ll—”
But McKinnon's seemingly indignant start
brought the older man to a stop.
“You don’t suppose I’m going to take money
to hold up the company’s business?” he de-
manded.
The stranger raised a thick, red hand protest-
ingly. McKinnon noticed a scar in the centre
of the wide palm. He inappositely wondered if
it could be a bullet wound. -
“Hold on a minute!” he warned the other,
appeasingly. “This isn’t a matter o’ messen-
ger-boy tips. It’s out and out business. You’ve
got to remember they’re big things involved in
this, and big people, too.”
“Why do you want to mix me up in the mess,
whether it’s big or little?” complained the oper-
ator. The other man permitted the protest to
go unanswered.
“But can’t you tell me what it's worth for
you to co-operate with us in this?” he blandly
insisted.
“It would be worth my job!” McKinnon
cried. The other man, eyeing him closely, could
not rid himself of the impression that the oper-
ator was acting a part, that he was feigning re-
luctance for some potentially better bargain yet
to be driven.


THE WEB OF INTRIGUE 63
“Well, what’s your job worth?” was the old-
er man’s undisturbed query. In fact, there was
an undertone of contempt in his guttural ques-
tion.
“Oh, it’s not what the job’s worth,” protest-
ed McKinnon. “It’s the putting outside busi-
ness before the business I’m paid to do. It’s
the acting against regulations and getting the
company officers down on me. It’s the doing of
something I’m not here to do.”
“But this is merely a matter between us two,
man to man. The company doesn’t have any-
thing to do with this.”
“They own this junk,” broke out the oper-
ator, with a wave of the hand that designated
the apparatus about him. “And they about
own me, too, as long as I’m on their pay-roll.”
“Of course they do,” the other soothed tran-
quilly. “But you’re here, and they’re in New
York, and you’ve got the running of this appa-
ratus until we dock at Puerto Locombia.”
The operator sat looking at the other man in
silence.
“Why, you told me yourself, a few minutes
ago, that your machinery doesn’t always work
right. And you say you haven’t a tape, or any-
thing that registers the messages as they come
to you. Isn’t that right?”
The operator nodded.


64 THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
“Then why couldn’t you accidentally miss a
message? Or why couldn’t you send it out with-
out being sure that it was going to carry clear
across to the next operator?”
McKinnon still looked at the other man.
There was something so placid and intimate
about the tones of the stranger’s voice that the
very purport of his suggestion had seemed
robbed of its enormity.
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that for five hun-
dred dollars!” the operator at last declared.
The stranger looked back at him without a
move of his great body in the steamer-chair. Mc-
Kinnon’s glance of open contempt in nowise
disturbed him.
“I’ll give you one thousand dollars if you
do it!” he said. His voice was quiet and casual
as he spoke, but again the operator swung about
and peered at him. He opened his lips to reply,
and then suddenly became silent. He shifted in
his chair, as though to draw away from some
tangible and precipitating temptation.
“I’ll give you one thousand dollars,” repeat-
ed the stranger, “and I’ll promise to stand be-
tween you and any trouble you’re afraid of.”
“It’s not what I'm afraid of,” the other re-
torted.
“Then what is it? You fail to catch a mes-
sage or two, and no one’s the wiser. What of


THE WEB OF INTRIGUE 65
that? Good heavens, man, you’re not doing
anything crooked! Nobody’s cut a throat back
there in New York! Nobody’s trying to get
away from your Centre Street people. You’re
not doing anything against the penal code.”
“Why didn’t you go to the captain about
this?” complained the operator. The tacit note
of concession in that complaint did not escape
his companion.
“That low-brow!” he grunted in disgust.
“Being a low-brow, as you call him, ought to
make him all the easier to handle,” suggested
McKinnon, with his short and puzzling laugh.
“And he’s still the master of the ship.”
“The captain has no more to do with this
than De Forest himself! And I imagine he’d
rather be soaking in brandy pawnees than talk-
ing business to outsiders. This is something
between us two. You’re not cheating anybody.
You’re not hurting anybody. All you do is to
help me win a big case, and get well paid for
your trouble. And a twist of the wrist is what
it costs you. For I’m assuming, of course, you
can put that machinery of yours out of business
for the time being without exactly showing
how.”
“That's easy enough,” said the operator,
with a stare at his apparatus. “There are a
dozen ways of throwing a complicated thing like


66 THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
that out of kilter. It’s my getting out of kilter
with the company that worries me.”
“The company doesn’t count, my friend.
They’re outsiders in this. And you get your
thousand dollars in cold cash, to work on that
reed-disk of yours for half a year, if you want
to.”
McKinnon laughed a little. Then he grew
more thoughtful, and was about to speak, when
the quick tread of feet sounded on the deck with-
out. He caught up the 'phone “set” hurriedly
and bent over the pine table. The steps passed
on, but the betrayal of disingenuousness re-
mained a consoling and obvious fact to the man
in the steamer-chair. It left him no longer in
doubt.
He reached down into his capacious trouser
pocket and produced a roll of treasury notes,
held together by a double rubber band. He
peeled off three orange-tinted twenty-dollar
bills and folded them neatly across the middle,
lengthwise. Then, with equal deliberation, he
thrust them into McKinnon’s still hesitating
fingers. The operator looked down at the money
doubtfully and then up at the stranger.
“That’s just a trio of twenties to bind the
bargain,” the latter explained. “You’ve got
to get something for me taking up your time
like this.”


THE WEB OF INTRIGUE 67
“But how are you going to clear me—I mean
how are you going to make them see I haven’t
been acting against the ship, if it ever comes
to a showdown?” asked the operator, not so
much with timidity, but more as though he took
a morbid joy in toying with the dangers of the
situation.
“There’ll be nothing to clear, and nothing to
show,” the other retorted. “All you’ve got to
do is to have a bad ear when a certain message
or two happens along. But I’ll go further than
that just to put your mind at rest. To-morrow,
when I pay over the balance, I’ll put it down
On paper, with my name to it, that I guarantee
to protect you. We can both sign a note show-
ing we’re acting straight and where we stand.
Then you’ll have me tied down in black and
white. That seems square enough, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, it’s square enough. But suppose this
man Ganley comes to me with a message to send
out. I’ve got to show it to you, and if you don’t
approve of it I’ve got to act the lie that the
message has been sent and keep lying to him
every time he asks me about it.”
“You’re not paid to be a “fence’ for a gun-
runner, are you?”
The older man laughed a little. Then he rose
heavily to his feet. His head almost touched
the cabin ceiling. “There’s not much danger


68 THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
he’ll ever ask about it. And when you know
the man and his business you'll never let things
like that worry you.”
“That doesn’t excuse me—his being a gun-
runner.’’
“Well, if you felt that way, of course, you
could send the message. Only you might send
it as I mentioned—with the risk of falling short,
I mean; some time when the engine-room
doesn’t happen to be giving you quite enough
power.”
The operator weighed and pondered the ques-
tion. The man beside him was anarchistic
enough in his ideals of conduct. He recognised
no authority beyond the dictates of expediency.
He went back to primal and feral conditions—
went back to them with the disquieting direct-
ness of a savage.
“I’d have to call until I got my station,”
temporised the operator, “and the other fel-
low’s O.K. after he’d got my call. Then he’d
signal “Go ahead,” to show he was ready to re-
ceive, and if I failed to reach him he'd keep
‘coming back’ for me to repeat. Then, too, what
I was trying to send might be picked up by any
stray operator behind the skyline. On the other
hand, if I let the message die, after getting my
‘go-ahead’ signal, the thing would be reported


THE WEB OF INTRIGUE 69
and looked into. And that would mean trouble
with the company when I got back.”
“Then when you get your “go-ahead’ signal
why couldn’t you just lay low and complain
that your receiver or coherer, or something, was
out of order—that you were cut off from receiv-
ing?” -
“I hate to lie about my machinery,” retorted
the operator with what seemed a blind and fool-
ish pride in his tools.
The older man’s curl of lip showed a slowly
mounting dislike for further argument. Then
he lifted his wide shoulders with a movement of
resignation.
“Of course, I don’t want you to lose either
your job or your self-respect just because my
official duty’s been making me shadow a man.”
The wireless operator seemed groping about
for an answer when the quietness of the ship
was broken by a sudden sound. It was the
Laminian’s foghorn, hoarse and mournful
through the darkness, tearing the quiet with
its slowly repeated call. The two men stood side
by side, listening, as the bass-noted complaint
was repeated.
“We’re running into thick weather,” said the
operator, turning to take up his earphones. The
two men, immured in their own ends and aims,
had lost all thought of time and environment.


70 THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
A moment later heavy footsteps sounded on
the deck and the captain appeared in the door-
way. He stood in the narrow opening, red-
nosed, gnome-like, with the white light glisten-
ing on his waterproofed figure.
“Are you keeping an ear open for everything
in there?” he demanded, with a scowl of dis-
approval at the man beside the steamer-chair.
“I’m listening for anything,” McKinnon an-
swered, with the “set” over his head. The door
shut again. McKinnon turned back to the lit-
tered pine table. The foghorn sounded and
grew silent; the dynamo purred and buzzed as
the starting-box lever crossed down on the con-
tact-pins.
The stranger beside the steamer-chair but-
toned his coat. Then he crossed the cabin and
turned back to peer at the operator, bent low
over his table as he called and listened, and
called again.
“So I can count on you in this?” he asked in
his quiet and reassuring guttural. His hand
Was already on the cabin door-knob.
“To the finish,” answered the other man
pregnantly, replacing his earphones and holding
them close to his head with his muffling handker-
chiefs.


CHAPTER VI
THE SECOND VISITOR
McKINNoN was oppressed by the thought that
the hour was late and his body bone-tired. But
he did not close communication with the Royal
Mail operator who had “picked him up.”
through the fog until he had been duly warned
of heavy weather southeast of Hatteras.
Through the night came also the news that one
of the Royal Mail passengers, an American
consul from Aregua, had broken his thigh-bone
against a bulkhead, and the Laminian was asked
to relay the news to New York. This meant a
call for ambulance and doctors to be at the land-
ing-wharf, together with an order to have a
hospital-room made ready.
So the key was kept busy again while the be-
neficent resources of science were being mar-
shalled so many miles away. The Laminian’s
operator had bidden his far-off fellow worker
a sleepy “good-night,” and was still stooping
absently over his tuning-box—which had not
71


72 THE SECOND VISITOR
adapted itself to the thick-weather work—when
a knock sounded on his cabin door.
“Come in 1” he said, lifting off his earphones
with a little sigh of mingled weariness and res-
ignation. He suspected that his undisclosed
caller was a junior officer, much given to gar-
rulity. He began to dread the thought of being
kept out of bed for another hour or two.
The door opened slowly and the look of frank
annoyance as slowly faded from the operator’s
face, for standing there, confronting him, blink-
ing in the strong glare of his electrics, was a
young woman.
Her skirts, gathered up in one hand, and held
high from the wet deck, showed in a sweeping
cascade of white against the gloom behind them.
On her head was a blue seagoing cap, swathed
in a long, cream-coloured motor-veil. Behind
her stood a stewardess, fat and untidy, carry-
ing a cloak, with the outward and studious so-
licitude of a servile nature exalted by the con-
sciousness of having been overtipped. She
would have made an ideal figure, the operator
felt, for the nurse of the Capulets.
McKinnon put down his 'phone and rose from
his seat, still peering at the figure nearer him,
the woman in the doorway. He looked at her
closely, perhaps too closely, for he had not im-
agined any such woman aboard the Laminian.


THE SECOND VISITOR 73
He noticed that she was wearing a gown of dark-
blue pilot-cloth, and that she was younger than
he had at first supposed. One of her hands had
been thrown out to the door-jamb to steady her
against the roll and pitch of the deek. The clear
oval of her face—and it seemed more the mature
and thoughtful face of a woman than the timid
and hesitating face of a girl—was shadowed and
softened by a crowning mass of brown hair.
Her teeth, as she ventured her sober yet oddly
conciliating smile, impressed him as being very
white and regular, vaguely hinting at a bodily
strength which the softness of her eyes, at a
first glance, seemed to contradict. Yet these
deep-lashed eyes were alert and alive with the
fires of intelligence, and set wide apart under
the low and thoughtful brow. They carried an
inalienable sense of wisdom in their almost au-
stere steadiness of outlook, McKinnon felt, as
the woman still stood in the doorway, puckering
her face a little at the strong light. Yet what
most impressed him was the sense of ebullient
vigour, of intrepid and Aprilian vitality, which
brooded about her. She was by no means Ama-
zonian in stature—she was even smaller than
he had at first suspected—but she gave him the
impression of being youthfully and buoyantly
full-blooded.
Then she stepped boldly in across the high


74 THE SECOND VISITOR
door-sill and held out a tinted form-pad sheet
to the operator. The solicitously purring stew-
ardess, at a gesture from her benefactor, had
already disappeared.
“You are still sending, are you not?” asked
the young woman, stepping still nearer the oper-
ating-table.
Her voice betrayed no trace of foreign origin,
as McKinnon had at first expected it might. The
speech was that of a well-groomed New York
girl, the type of girl that McKinnon had so often
noted about the Fifth Avenue shops and the
theatre lobbies. The voice was the New York
voice, yet with a difference. It was the slight-
est and thinnest substratum of accent, of modu-
lation, that made up this difference. Yet in do-
ing so it imparted to her words a mild and be-
witching gentleness of tone that seemed to hint
at some indefinably exotic influence of education
or environment. It seemed to impart to her the
crisp piquancy of the Parisian, persistently yet
mysteriously accounting for her birdlike alert-
ness of poise and movement, for some continu-
ous suggestion of schoolgirl youthfulness that
belied her actual years. It seemed to convert
what he had at first accepted as audacity into
fortitude touched with discretion.
“Then you are sending,” she said, as though
in answer to her own question.


THE SECOND VISITOR 75
“I’m sorry,” said McKinnon, backing away
from the chair that she might take it if she
chose. “I’m sorry, but I’ve just stopped for
the night.”
For the first time he was conscious of the fact
that he had been at work in his shirt-sleeves,
and that these sleeves were wofully soiled. He
took down his coat and struggled into it. The
young woman noticed the movement gratefully
and sank into the chair he had abandoned for
her.
“But can you not get somebody?” she asked.
There was no note of pleading.in her voice, but
the mute appeal of her eyes as they rested on his
made him suddenly change his mind.
“I’ve been having trouble with that tuner of
mine,” he explained. “It’s rather hard for us
to pick up anything on a thick night like this,
you know. But I’ll try.”
She bent a little to one side as he leaned over
the table and threw down the switch-lever. They
were side by side, almost touching each other.
“Why is it hard?” she asked.
“It’s not easy to explain without being tech-
nical, but wireless works ‘heavy’ in damp weath-
er. You may have noticed it with telephones,
even, on rainy days.”


76 THE SECOND WISITOR
“Yes, I have,” she said with a preoccupied
nod, turning her gaze from the switch-lever to
McKinnon’s face.
He caught the key in his fingers and the blue
spark once more leaped and exploded across the
spark-gap. The girl watched him with intent
eyes and slightly parted lips as he fitted the
“set” to his head and listened with the 'phones
pressed against his ears.
McKinnon was keenly conscious of her pres-
ence there so close beside him. There was some-
thing perversely and insidiously exhilarating
in it. It made him forget the hour and the fact
that he was bone-tired. The orderlylike stew-
ardess fluttering about, he supposed, somewhere
beyond the closed door, alone took the romance
out of a visit so deliberately secret. He turned
to his key again, and again called through the
night. Then he adjusted his 'phones and list-
ened. He finally put down his “set,” with a
shake of the head.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to wait until morn-
ing,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she answered, with her studi-
ous eyes on the dancing-girl lithograph above
the faded wall-map.
“If you’ll leave the message, I’ll file it,” Mc-
Kinnon explained, to hide his resentment at the


THE SECOND VISITOR - 77
half-derisive touch that had crept into her
glance.
The woman handed him the message-form,
with her intent eyes now on his.
“Must I pay now?” she asked.
“It will be charged against your stateroom;
the purser will collect it before you land,” ex-
plained the operator as he jabbed the message
on his send-hook with a businesslike sweep of
the hand.
“But you will see that it’s sent?” she asked
as she rose to her feet.
“It will be off before you’re up,” McKinnon
answered, watching her as she drew the heavy
folds of her veil close down over her face. She
looked back, at the door, with a timidly auda-
cious nod of the head. The next moment the
door closed and she was gone.
McKinnon, still conscious of the subtle fra-
grance that filled the room, swung about to his
table. He paused only a second to wonder a
little at this faint but persistent perfume that
seemed to have charged and changed the very
atmosphere about him. Then he crossed the
cabin and reached up and ripped a brightly col-
oured lithograph from the wall, bisecting the
terpsichorean figure with one impatient tear of
the paper,


78 THE SECOND WISITOR
He stood in the middle of the room for a mo-
ment or two without moving. Then he crossed
to his table, reached out to the send-hook, and
quickly unspeared the message.
He looked at it for several moments. Then
he passed his hands over his tired eyes and re-
read the words. They were addressed to En-
rique Luis Carbo, Locombian Consulate, New
Orleans, and they said:
Am on board Laminian, bound from New York to Puerto
Locombia. Advise necessary quarters. ALICIA BOYNTON.
McKinnon was still peering down at the mes-
sage in his hand when he was startled by the
sound of someone at his door. Even before he
could restore the message to the hook his door
was opened and as quickly closed again.
It was the girl who had just left him. He
noticed that she held one hand on her breast and
that she was panting. She leaned against the
jamb for a minute or two, as though weak from
fright.
“What is it?” the operator asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she faltered, struggling
bravely enough to regain her composure. Her
answer was not altogether convincing.
“What has happened?” persisted the star-
tled operator.


THE SECOND WISITOR 79
She moved away from the door, in a listening
attitude.
“It was a man,” she tried to explain, inade-
quately. “He frightened me.”
“But What man?”
“A stranger—somebody outside.”
“You mean that he dared to speak to you?”
There was a moment’s silence.
“No,” she answered in her low voice. “But
it was the shock of seeing him so—so unexpect-
edly.”
McKinnon stepped across the cabin and stood
near her. His efforts to catch some clearer
glimpse of the veiled face were fruitless. She
reminded him of a ruffled bird.
“Won’t you sit down until you feel better?”
“No, no! I must go! It’s so late! I must
go !”
But she still hesitated.
“Shall I take you to your cabin?” he ven-
tured.
She showed actual alarm at this.
“Oh, no; that is out of the question. But if
you will turn down your lights until I have
slipped away—”
He snapped out the electrics. He could hear
her in the darkness quietly opening the door.
She stood there looking out for several mo-
ments. “Good-night,” she whispered grate-


80 |THE SECOND WISITOR
fully as she slipped across the deck and was
gOne.
McKinnon stood looking after her, deep in
thought.


CHAPTER VII
THE TANGLING SEEIN
IT was early the next morning that the Lamin-
ian ran into a coastwise gale that left her decks
clear of passengers and her funnels white with
salt. The intermittent crackle of “static” from
the humming aerials kept obliterating the
etheric “splash” of the Laminian’s low-pow-
ered coils. The ship was left inarticulate and
alone on her course. Beyond the erratic
‘‘sneeze” and “cough” of the atmospheric elec-
tricity there was no answering voice within Mc-
Kinnon's sternly delimited radius of communi-
cation.
The weather disturbed McKinnon much less
than did his own state of mind. The day, which
was one of brain-fogging pitching and tossing
about his cabin, left everything connected with
the night before still in suspense. The ship
seemed a deserted one. Captain Yandel and his
officers sat alone before the “racks” of the
musty-odoured tables, between musty-odoured
81


82 THE TANGLING SEEIN
walls that outraged the nostrils like the efflu-
vial dampness of a nighthawk's cab. No one
ventured on deck.
McKinnon, during that enforced armistice,
escaped a day of total inaction by packing away
his belongings. That task accomplished, he
overhauled his helix and drafted a casing for
his dynamo. As the afternoon deepened into
evening, and the wind fell, he coerced his atten-
tion on his Ruhmkorff-coil models. He was still
studying over his reed-disk apparatus when an
unexpected tap sounded on his door.
Even before he had time to answer, the door
itself was opened. It was the girl in the pilot-
cloth gown, his visitor of the night before. She
looked back one intent moment, as though to
make sure she was not being watched or fol-
lowed. Then she quietly closed the door and as
quietly slid the brass bolt that stood under the
knob, locking herself in the cabin.
She smiled, a little nervously and yet spirit-
edly, as she caught sight of the other’s con-
cerned and puzzled face. Then her own face
became quite sober. Again McKinnon was con-
scious of a faint perfume pervading the place.
It seemed as finely feminine to him as the rust-
ling of skirts. And again he was impressed by
the ebullient sense of buoyancy, of youthful


THE TANGLING SKEIN 83
vigour, which persisted about her, even in shad-
ow, like a penumbra.
“Could I speak to you?” she asked, a little
disturbed at the other’s continued silence. “J.
have something to explain,” she continued,
“something in which you might help me.”
The flow of her English seemed as even and
liquid as the flow of a river, yet there still re-
mained that puzzling and piquant undercurrent
of the exotic.
“You do not mind?” she asked, obviously
puzzled by his continued aloofness. It was plain
that she was not a woman who frequently asked
favours of men.
“Of course I don’t mind! It's only that a
visit like this might be misconstrued—”
She shrugged her shoulders ambiguously and
sank into the steamer-chair. McKinnon dis-
creetly slid back the shutter of his cabin window.
He took the further precaution of drawing the
faded denim curtain. The woman watched the
operation with her mild and meditative gaze
still on the figure before her. Then she mo-
tioned for him to sit down. She noticed his
eyes on the door, apparently in apprehension,
and she smiled a little. Then she became serious
again and peered studiously about the room.
“You could put me in there?” she suggested,


84 THE TANGLING SKEIN
with a satiric motion towards the operator’s
closet-door.
McKinnon seemingly took her query in good
faith, for he threw open the door and peered
inside. His troubled look returned to him.
“There would scarcely be room,” he ex-
plained. “It’s so crowded and shallow, you
See.”
“It would be an adventure,” she maintained,
making due allowance for his lack of humour.
He could see that she was wringing some inap-
posite amusement out of the situation. It threw
him on his guard for a moment, but only for a
moment. The open candour of her glance dis-
armed his abashed suspicion.
He agreed with her that it would indeed be
an adventure. He even laughed at the thought
of it, infected a little by her spirit of quiet au-
dacity. Yet, in spite of himself, as he let his
eyes rest on hers, there remained with him the
stubborn yet vague impression that her pres-
ence there was the preamble for some deeper
and undivulged purpose. The seconds length-
ened themselves into a minute, and still neither
spoke. They were still gazing at each other
when the sound of a quick step on the deck with-
out fell on their ears.
The woman stood up with a little gasp. The
look on her face changed into one of appeal. Mc-


THE TANGLING SKEIN 85
Kinnon, impressed with her fear, also rose to
his feet. They could hear the locked cabin door
being impatiently shaken.
“What shall I do?” whispered the woman.
The operator pointed towards his clothes-closet.
It was the only resource. He motioned for her
to step into it as he himself crossed the cabin
towards the outer door, on which someone was
now openly and impatiently knocking.
There was a fleeting rustle of drapery, a
warning pressure of one slender finger against
the woman’s lips, and a moment later she had
disappeared into her place of hiding and had
swung back the door. McKinnon, as soon as
he saw she was safe, withdrew his bolt. In the
frame of light stood the great, wide-shouldered
figure of Duffy. He waited there, without ad-
vancing, for several seconds. McKinnon could
see his slowly roving eye as it took in each de-
tail of the stateroom. He betrayed no surprise
and no curiosity, but across his face flitted a
veiled look of apprehension.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
McKinnon nodded.
“Busy?” he next demanded.
The single word bristled with something more
than interrogation. But McKinnon felt that he
was not in a position to resent it. He stooped


86 THE TANGLING SKEIN
over the last of his wireless models and lifted
the box back against the closet door.
“I am packing away my stuff for the night,”
he answered as he turned back to his operating-
table and caught up his earphones. His action
in doing so was simply a rite of repudiation.
The gesture was not lost on the other man.
“I guess you’re busy to-night,” he said; “I
won’t take up your time. All I wanted was to
close up that agreement of ours.”
He reached into his pocket and drew out his
roll of bills placidly, with the businesslike un-
concern of a man contemptuous of small trans-
actions. He counted off nine hundred and forty
dollars, folded them together, and flung them
on the pine table. McKinnon, all the while, was
thinking of the half-shut closet door.
“That puts us even, doesn’t it?” Duffy said,
backing away a little. His movement brought
him nearer to the ever-menacing door.
McKinnon was not in a state to argue it out
with him. His strangely self-frustrating wish
was still to cry everything off. But he was
afraid of some second complication. And he
had his own reasons why these should not arise.
“Yes, that makes us even,” he admitted, sud-
denly remembering he had a witness to the
strange business in hand. The intruder stepped
back to the table again.


THE TANGLING SKEIN 87
“Then we’ll both sign this slip of paper, so
we’ll know where we stand,” he suggested.
After Duffy had ponderously signed his name
with a heavy, gold-banded fountain-pen, the op-
erator took his place. The paper seemed noth-
ing more than a receipt, yet something about its
wording was repugnant to him. He did not
take time to analyse his feeling; he was too
oppressed by the thought of the woman and the
near-by door. He ventured one half-hearted
objection, however, as Duffy thrust the pen in
his hand.
“I can’t say I altogether like this,” he com-
plained.
“Why not?”
McKinnon forced a laugh.
“It sounds like an army commission.”
“Where d'you want it changed?” Duffy de-
manded as he fell to pacing the cabin. His wan-
dering threw McKinnon into a sudden panic.
“It’s not the wording—it's the signing of a
thing like this.”
“Of course it is,” the other agreed, mild and
indulging, as a doctor might be with a peevish
and restless patient. “But weren’t you saying
you wanted to make this every-day work of
yours a little more romantic?”
He had stopped in front of the closet door


88 THE TANGLING SKEIN
and was apparently studying the faded map of
the Caribbean. The position was perilous.
“Where do I sign?” demanded McKinnon,
bringing the other man back to his side at the
table. -
The ink was scarcely dry on the paper before
a change crept into Duffy's manner. He seemed “
more sure of himself, more conscious of mastery
over an ally, who, if a reluctant one, was still
an ally.
He folded the receipt and dropped it into his
leather wallet. Then he placed the wallet in
his breast pocket; his movements were always
ponderous and deliberative.
“Remember, this means a devil of a lót to
me. I’ll have to depend on you to do the right
thing when the time comes.”
“It’s not that bad, is it?” the operator asked,
still with an effort at humour.
“It may be as bad as either of us could im-
agine,” Duffy retorted.
“If that’s the way it’s shaping I’d better
draw out of it.”
McKinnon seemed more and more resentful
of the other’s attitude of masterfulness.
Duffy slowly tapped the pocket which held
his wallet.
“It’s too late for you to draw out of it,” he


THE TANGLING SKEIN 89
declared with heat. Then his mounting tinge
of anger went suddenly out of his face.
“Pshaw! what’re we squabbling about, any-
way?” he cried. “We’re both making easy
money out of this, and that’s an end of it. We’ll
have time to talk later on. And I guess you’re
busy to-night.”
There was a veiled tone of mockery in his
voice that seemed to leave McKinnon a little
troubled. He followed his visitor to the state-
room door in silence.
“We’ll pull together,” assuaged Duffy large-
ly, suavely, as he stepped out on the deck.
“We’ve got to, eh?” He laughed a little as he
said “Good-night.”
“Good-night,” answered the operator.
The stateroom door had scarcely closed be-
fore the woman had pushed aside the model-case
and was out of her hiding-place. Her face had
lost its last vestige of colour.
“Oh!” she cried pantingly, and nothing more.
“Hush!” said the alarmed operator, listen-
ing at the closed door.
She stood there, breathing hard, with her
hand on her breast. Her attitude reminded him
of the night before, when she had so suddenly
and disturbingly stepped back into his cabin.
“What is it?”
“That man!” the woman exclaimed. She


90 THE TANGLING SKEIN
looked older now under the trying white light
of the electrics. Her aura of belated youth had
in some way fallen away from her. “Madre de
Dios/ Do you know who that man is?”
“He’s an agent named Duffy,” explained Mc-
Kinnon.
& 4 Duffy !” 9
“Yes—he is acting for the information bu-
reau of the Consolidated Fruit Concern.”
He was about to say more, but on second
thoughts he kept silent.
“Duffy l’’ once more cried the woman in de-
rision, “Duffy!”
Then she drew herself up and gazed at her
companion with what seemed a look of mingled
wonder and contempt wrinkling her low, white
brow.
“And you two are working together?” she
murmured.
“Yes, in a way.”
“But how?” she demanded. “How are you
acting with him?”
Her alarm did not seem to disconcert him.
“It’s not exactly a partnership. He's simply
shadowing a man on this boat. I’ve promised
to help him out when the time comes.”
“How help him out?”
“Only in a trivial way.”
“But how?”


THE TANGLING SKEIN 91
“If you must know, by holding back certain
despatches.”
“But whose despatches?” still demanded the
WOrnan.
“Despatches for the man he’s shadowing, of
course.’’
“But still you don’t tell me who this man is!”
cried the impatient woman. McKinnon obvi-
ously found it hard to fathom the source of her
anxieties.
‘‘I mean this man called Ganley,” he ex-
plained, concealing his growing impatience.
“Ganley !” echoed the woman.
“Yes, Ganley,” retorted the other. He no-
ticed that her breath was coming in short gasps
by this time and that her face was as white as
his cabin walls.
“Ganley !” she cried. “Why, the man who
went out of this cabin five minutes ago is Gan-
ley!”


CHAPTER VIII
THE PAWN AND TELE BOARD
THERE was a silence of several seconds.
“That man was Ganley?” foolishly repeated
the operator. His eyes, as he peered back at
the woman, were almost vacuous. He studied
her face, perplexed and uncertain, like a trav-
eller studying a road-map. He had expected
Surprises, he had prepared himself for emergen-
cies: but this, apparently, was more than he had
Counted On. -
The frightened-eyed woman still confronted
him, her face seeming one of pity touched with
fear. When she next moved, her gesture was
almost that of a person wringing their hands.
“And you have promised to act with this
man?” she little more than whispered.
“But he came to me as a man named Duffy,
the man who's got to turn Ganley over to the
*uthorities at Puerto Locombia.”
Still again the woman's wide and pitying eyes
"ested on his face.
92


THE PAWN AND THE BOARD 93
“They are making a tool of you,” was all she
said.
“Of me?”
“Of you! They are deceiving you—they
mean to make use of you.” *
“But how?”
The woman remained silent. McKinnon stood
before her, lost in a moment of troubled thought,
puzzled as to how much he should say and how
much it would be best to leave unsaid.
“But who are you?” he suddenly demanded,
noting her quick glance down at her little jew-
elled watch. He felt, as she stood there com-
pelling herself to calmness, that there was some-
thing epochal in the moment, that in some way
the uncomprehended was about to reveal itself.
He turned slowly about and relocked the cabin
door. Then he sat down opposite the broken
steamer-chair in which she was already seated.
“You want to know who that man is?” she
said at last, perplexed a little by his sudden de-
cisiveness, disturbed by the hardening of his
face.
“I want to know who you are.”
“That will come later,” she explained.
McKinnon studied her face, line by line, from
the pale ivory of her dark-browed forehead to
the tender curve of her almost statuelike chin,
for the shadowy and thick-planted lashes did


94 THE PAWN AND THE BOARD
not lift from her cheek until she began to speak
again.
“You want me to explain everything?” she
asked.
“Everything!”
“The man who was in this room is Kaiser
Ganley—King-maker Ganley they call him ev-
erywhere south of Guatemala. His business is
to make revolutions. He has agents in almost
every one of the Central American republics,
in New York, in Cuba, in New Orleans—every-
where. When he sees signs of unrest he sends
a man to strike a bargain with the enemies of
the government. He waits like a buzzard on a
housetop until his meal is ready. Then he is
given money, and he brings so many men and
so many carbines, and so many mules and ma-
chine guns. Sometimes it’s for the patriots,
sometimes it’s for railway charters or for mine
rights. Sometimes it’s for rubber and coffee
concessions. A more conciliatory man must be
made dictator, or a more dependable friend
must be set up as president. That’s the way he
won the Caqueta Asphalt concession; that’s why
he never dares land in Brazil or be seen in
Venezuela again.”
She paused for a moment. Then she added:
“And now he has the rebellion in Locombia.
The Locombian president has been called the


THE PAWN AND THE BOARD 95
‘Friend of Foreigners’; he has been good to the
Americanos. He is modern and progressive; he
is—”
“Are you a Locombian?”
“I am not a Locombian,” answered the wom-
an, after the slightest pause, “but I have my in-
terests in that country. Oh, believe me, I know
this man to be its enemy. He is fighting for
the downfall of its government. His plan is
made. He is only waiting for the end. Now,
to-night, while we sit here, his men—deluded
peons and beachcombers and paid mercenaries
—are drawing up closer and closer on Guariqui.
They are to wait there; they are to be moved,
like wooden pawns on a chessboard, when he
orders it, and in the manner he orders.”
“Can’t you tell me how or when? Can’t you
be more specific?”
“On the thirteenth of the month a revolution-
ist, wearing the uniform of the government, is
to assault an American citizen in the Prado of
Puerto Locombia. A Mobile ore-boat is to take
the assaulter on board openly. He is to be
dragged ashore again by government officers.
Roof-tiles are to be flung down on these officers
as they pass through the town. Arrests, of
course, will follow. That will arouse the peo-
ple—they are so foolish in their hate for the
Americanos! And while this is going on, many
**


96 THE PAWN AND THE BOARD
miles up the coast machine guns will be landed,
and tubs of cartridges, and two thousand ri-
fles.”
“But how do you know all this?”
“It became my duty to know it.”
“But why?”
“Because my brother is Arturo Boynton, the
Locombian minister of war,” she answered, aft-
er a moment's silence.
McKinnon gazed at her in a mingling of won-
der and perplexity.
“Is he a Locombian?”
“No.”
“Then why the Arturo?”
“That was a concession to local prejudices,”
she answered, after still another moment’s
pause.
“But why such concessions? You see, you’ll
have to be perfectly frank with me.”
She smiled a little. It was not a smile of con-
descension, for her earnest eyes were almost
deprecative as she looked at him.
“That will mean a sad lot of family history,”
she said with a little shrug, as exotic, almost,
as the Southern inflection of her voice.
He laughed a little, too, for all the anxiety
that was weighing on him.
“But you see we have to understand each
other’s position in this.”


THE PAWN AND THE BOARD 97
“My brother went to Guariqui seven years
ago,” she said, quite sober by this time. “He
was compelled to go there to look after my
father’s nitrate claims.”
“Your father, then, was an American?” in-
terrupted McKinnon. He felt glad, in some
vague way, as he saw her head-shake of assent.
“He was an American soldier,” she said, and
McKinnon noticed the almost phosphorescent
kindling of her eyes as she uttered the words.
“Yes,” he responded encouragingly.
“We are—or, rather, we used to be the New
Orleans Boyntons,” she answered. “But father
had interests in Argentina, cattle lands and
things, and property in Belgrano, where the
English-speaking colony is, just outside Buenos
Ayres. So for nine years Buenos Ayres was
our home—if you could say we ever had a home.
But as I wanted to tell you, my brother Arturo
was a mining engineer. I think, too, he had a
good deal of father’s spirit of adventure. He
saw great chances in Locombia, but what was
more important, he found that the altitude of
Guariqui agreed with him. So he stayed on
and on, and kept working harder and harder,
and getting newer interests, until finally he un-
dertook to work the abandoned government
mines with Doctor Duran. They were copper
mines.”


98 THE PAWN AND THE BOARD
“Do you mean Duran the president?”
“Yes; but that was before he had been made
president. Indeed, when Duran first actively
entered Locombian politics he persuaded my
brother to join him. I was at school then, in
France—but I know that when their party came
into power my brother found himself in Duran’s
cabinet, as minister of war.”
“And you are going down there to face all
this?” McKinnon asked, with a vaguely com-
prehensive wave of the arm.
The woman said “Yes.” She looked, for all
her inalienable aura of vitality, very slender,
and unsuited to the ways of war, above all
things, to the ways of Latin-American guerilla
War.
“But that seems as brutal, as unthinkable, as
a girl going into a ring with two prize-fighters,”
he tried to explain to her.
“Yes, I know; but I’m not going into the
ring,” she answered. “All I can do is hover
about the outside edges of it, and do what I can
when I know there is underhand work, when
there is foul play like this going on.”
“Foul play like what?”
“Like this!” she averred, tapping the deck
with her shoe-heel.
“Do you mean the Laminian? Or do you


THE PAWN AND THE BOARD 99
mean certain persons who are on the Lamin-
*an 3”
“Both,” she retorted.
“Then that brings us to the question of just
why you are going back to Locombia in such
a way and at such a time,” McKinnon patiently
insisted.
“But Guariqui is my home—it is the only
home I have, now.” She noticed the fleeting
look of concern, that amounted to anxiety, over-
spreading his face, and she hastened to add,
with her slow and almost mournful smile: “You
know, they often speak of it as the Paris of
America! We don’t actually tattoo each other
down there! And there’s something appealing
in the life, when you’ve got used to it—the stir
and colour and romance and movement of it
all.’”
“But you see you haven’t yet quite explained
why you are going back to Locombia.”
Her deep and troubled eyes seemed to be
weighing him; she seemed to be pondering his
possible weakness and strength.
“How can I explain to you, when you’re a
paid agent of Ganley’s?”
“Don’t be too sure of that!” McKinnon ejac-
ulated, with more feeling, apparently, than the
woman had expected.
“You mean you may not work with him?”


100 THE PAWN AND THE BOARD
“If you like to take it that way.”
“But he has won you over to his side—he has
captured you against your will!”
“I don’t quite understand,” persisted the op-
erator.
“No; but Ganley does. That’s why he has
bought you over, and led you into his power
in this way.” She was speaking more rapidly
now; a brightened colour had come into her
cheeks.
“But how am I in his power?” McKinnon
asked.
“What was the paper you signed? What
have you promised? What was the money paid
over to you for?”
“To hold back certain messages.”
“Yes, to hold back messages. And why do
that?”
“So that this man Ganley—the man he calls
Ganley—can be held at Puerto Locombia.”
“You mean the other man, the man in the
cabin? Then you don’t believe what I have said
about the real Ganley?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” the non-
committal McKinnon complained, studying the
woman’s face. The only conclusion he came to
was that it was a disturbingly beautiful one.
She was silent for a moment, apparently deep
in thought.


THE PAWN AND THE BOARD 101
“I don’t ask you to believe me now—it's not
fair. But do you realise where you stand?”
The solemnity of her manner, more than her
words, prompted McKinnon to ask: “Where
do you think I stand?”
“Before danger you scarcely dream of,” an-
Swered the young woman, returning his gaze.
“It’s not so much that you have formed an al-
liance with a criminal, an outlaw, who would
have to face a fusilado the moment he was
caught in Guariqui. But it’s the fact that he’s
as treacherous with his friends as with his foes.
You have declared yourself his partner. He will
hold you to it. He will use this paper you signed
as a proof that you accepted hush-money, if it
suits his purpose to do so. He will claim you
agreed to work with him. He will hold this over
you and force you to act for him.”
“But why should I stand for coercion like
that?” asked the undisturbed McKinnon.
“What would you do? You can’t go to your
captain; nor to your company. It’s too late
for that. You’ve cut yourself off from them.
But that isn’t the real danger. The real danger
is that Ganley's the actual head of the revolu-
tionary Junta, and that he can now show that
you, too, are one of them!”
“That I'm one of them?” almost laughed the
other,


102 THE PAWN AND THE BOARD
“He holds a document which practically
brands you as a Locombian revolutionist. We
are being carried to a country where things
move strangely and quickly. If Duran has the
upper hand when we reach Puerto Locombia,
you dare not make one move against this man
Ganley.”
“I dare not, you say?”
“If you do, he will have you handed over to
Duran’s officers as an enemy of the government
—and he will have his document to prove it.
If Duran has been deposed, then Ganley is the
open and undisputed master, and what he or-
ders you will have to carry out.”
“But I’m not going down there to be that
government’s catspaw!”
“How will you escape it?”
“Well, one way would be to call Ganley up
here and get that paper back.”
Alicia Boynton laughed quickly and quietly,
with an upthrust of her shoulders.
“Can’t you see that it’s too late? The price
has been paid; the bargain’s been struck.”
“Not necessarily!”
“But a man like Ganley never trades back.
The mistake was in the signing of the paper.
It was a manifesto, a confession. It was the last
will and testament of your good name.”
McKinnon, who had been pacing the cabin,


THE PAWN AND THE BOARD 103
suddenly swung about and faced the young wom-
an in the steamer-chair.
“Why are you saying all this to me?” he de-
manded.
Her troubled eyes once more rested on him,
almost in pity.
“Because we are facing a common danger,”
she answered at last. “Because we may yet
have to work together to escape from that dan-
ger.”
“But you haven’t told me anything. You
haven’t explained how or why you are in this
danger.”
Again her studious eyes seemed to be weigh-
ing and judging him. He knew by the anxiety
that crept slowly into her face as she watched
him that her decision was not altogether a flat-
tering one.
“I am here because there was no one to take
my place,” she answered, simply enough. “I
can’t explain everything now, but I knew they
were plotting against Guariqui and against my
brother. I knew, at the last moment, that Gan-
ley was hurrying to Locombia, and I knew that
the authorities at Washington were sending a
cruiser to the Caribbean, to be near in case of
trouble.”
“You mean the Princeton?” McKinnon asked.
The woman nodded.


THE PAWN AND THE BOARD 105
onment—they are afraid of. This ship will be
the only one in the roadstead.”
She watched his face with almost a touch of
impatience. She looked for some glance or ges-
ture of enlightenment on his part. But he gave
no sign of comprehension; so she was forced to
go on, explicitly, like a tutor slowly demonstra-
ting the obvious to a perversely backward pu-
pil.
“You are equipped with wireless. That
means you will be able to talk with Guariqui.
If Duran and my brother are shut up there,
calling for help, you will be the only person to
hear their messages. Can’t you understand?
The Guariqui station is not one of high power.
It can’t possibly call beyond the coast. Yet
the cruiser is to be lying somewhere between
Culebra and Locombia, waiting to help, only too
anxious to interfere at the first official call. But
that call can never reach them without being re-
layed from the roadstead, out across the Carib-
bean. You may be the only person who can hear
and understand Guariqui's cry for help.”


THE CONVERGING TRAILS 107
“But I’m not free yet. That schemer still
has me tied down to him, as you say. We
haven’t got that paper out of his hands.”
The woman nodded her head slowly, without
any outward emotion.
“He could still discredit me with the captain
of this tub, if that happened to be part of his
game! He’d show us both to be a pair of liars
the moment we tried to corner him!”
“And once at Puerto Locombia, if his plans
have worked out as he wants them to, he can
have us dragged ashore! And if Guariqui falls
he can have us held as enemies of the new gov-
ernment!”
“This is a nice mess!” calmly meditated the
long-limbed man standing before her, facing
her, for the moment, with abstracted and unsee-
ing eyes. He even seemed to have forgotten
the presence of the woman.
She rose from her chair and stood before him.
“We have to get back that foolish paper,” she
said. “Before everything else we must get back
your receipt.”
The quiet determination of her voice startled
him a little. He stood regarding her with a new
light in his eyes. All his training had been re-
pressional; his life had taught him to resist
every threatened surrender to the emotional.
Yet, as he saw her there, so isolated from her


108 THE CONVERGING TRAILS
kind, so apparently unfitted for the tasks before
her, so insidiously appealing in her tender wom-
anhood, a warm and winelike current of sympa-
thy began to creep incongruously through his
veins. She must have caught some inkling of
that soft invasion, for suddenly, and without
apparent reason, her face deepened in colour
and then grew paler than before. She held out
her hand as though to bridge the awkward
silence that had fallen between them. McKin-
non saw it was a gesture of farewell.
“Will you promise me to do nothing until I
have got this receipt back for you?” she asked
as he still held her outstretched hand.
“But why should you fight my battles for
me?” he asked, wincing a little before her open
and courageous gaze. “I can’t have you turn
highwayman for me?”
There was welling up in him a wayward sense
of guardianship over her isolated and fragile
figure, of responsibility for her safety and well-
being.
“It must be done,” she declared with a bit-
terness that surprised him a little. “There are
two doors to Ganley's cabin. It is one of a suite.
I can get in through one of those doors.”
“Through one of those doors?” echoed the
man before her.
“Yes; to-night.”


THE CONVERGING TRAILS 109
“To-night?” cried McKinnon, looking down
at her in mingled protest and astonishment.
“Hush!” she warned, with her fingers held
up close before his face. Their accidental con-
tact with his lips sent a responsive thrill
through his nervous body.
“But I won’t hear of you doing this sort of
thing just because I’ve been all kinds of a fool.
I’m going to this man Duffy, or Ganley, or what-
ever his name is—I’m going to face him myself
and make him put this whole thing right.”
“That is impossible,” she warned him in her
tense whisper. “You do not understand. You
don’t know this man’s ways.”
He could see some definite yet mysterious fea
shadowed on her face. -
“But think of what you’re threatening to
do!” McKinnon argued. “You have to break
into this brute’s cabin and steal back a receipt!
Think of the risk you’d be running!”
“It has to be done; the sooner it’s done the
better.”
“But why does it have to be done in this
way?” persisted McKinnon.
“Because you must not do it!”
“Why not?”
“It would be like cannonading canaries—you
must save yourself for the bigger risks!”
Her unuttered misery, her inarticulate anx-


110 THE CONVERGING TRAILS
iety, more and more disturbed and depressed
him. But there were many things on which he
was still uncertain, and above all things he knew
that he must go slow.
The woman confronting him must have seen
some flash of doubt on his face, for she caught
at his arm with a sudden little movement that
was as imploring as it was feminine.
“You don’t trust me? You don’t believe what
I have told you?” she cried in her hurrying,
low-toned whisper.
“No! no! It’s not that!” McKinnon an-
swered. “But I can’t quite see my way out—
I can’t see what it’s all leading to.”
“But nothing can happen now, here at sea.
And you will understand later. Promise me
you’ll wait!”
“Yes; but wait for what?”
“Until you are free to act, and you know
what I have said is true.”
He took a turn up and down the cabin. “Is
this paper so important? I mean, isn’t this a
lot of fuss and feathers about a small thing?”
“It’s one of the small things that count in
war—and this is war.”
Still again he felt the inapposite and insidi-
ous appeal of her womanhood. It wound about
him and tugged at him, eroding away his self-
will, his old-time careless audacity of spirit, like


THE CONVERGING TRAILS 111
a current eating under a sand-bank. It made
sacrifice on her behalf seem a burden to be al-
most gladly borne.
“Only promise me that you’ll wait!” she
pleaded. His career had been one of much con-
tention; but never before had he been compelled
to fight against what seemed his own self-inter-
est. He felt, in doing so, that he was being
thrust and involved in entanglements which
should have been evaded as mere side issues.
He even marvelled at his sheer lack of resent-
ment against capitulation so indeterminate and
yet so complete.
“Promise me!” she whispered. He wanted
to beg for time, to think things out, but her
troubled face was bewilderingly close to his, and
the memory that he was not innocent of the anx-
iety weighing upon her made him more and
more miserable.
“I promise,” he answered. The clasp of her
hand sent a second inapposite tingle of joy
through his body.
“You will wait?” she insisted, as though
doubly to impress on each of them some future
course of action. “You will say nothing until
I have done what I promise?”
“There's nothing I can say or do,” he re-
plied, still demanding of himself if it could be
right to put her to such a test.


112 THE CONVERGING TRAILS
“Then remember,” she said, and her voice
was little more than a whisper, “we are acting
together.”
McKinnon still stood there, watching her, as
she opened the cabin door and stepped out to
the wet and gloomy deck. Something about her
departure so paralleled that of the man who had
gone before her that the coincidence struck him
with a start. It brought the thought through
him like an arrow that he had openly pledged
himself to two opponents, that he had made a
promise to act for two enemies. This was fol-
lowed by a second and an equally disturbing
thought: he had not once been honest or open
with her; he was letting his lack of candour
make her path a harder one than she deserved.
He sprang through the door after her, swept
by a sudden fierce fire of self-hate, of contempt
for the things in which he found himself in-
volved.
A moment later he had called her back across
the midnight gloom of the dipping and rocking
deck. -
“What is it?” she asked, as she stepped into
the cabin, her eyes wide with wonder. He made
sure the deck was empty, and closed the door.
Then, with an obvious effort, he wheeled about
and faced her.
“It may not be too late for us to get out of


THE CONVERGING TRAILS 13
this mess,” he told her, “and get out of it in
the right way.”
“But what way?” she asked, puzzled by his
unheralded change of front.
“The quick way, and the sure way,” he an-
swered, swinging across the cabin until he stood
before his switch-lever. His hand hovered about
the apparatus as he went on. “I mean our way
out is to get the Princeton now, to-night, before
she’s out of touch with us! I mean it’s best for
us to play our card at once, when it’s not too
late! The Princeton has already passed us on
her way to Culebra, to replace the gunboat
Eagle; she’s leaving us farther and farther be-
hind every hour!”
“But what do we gain by getting the Prince-
ton now?” Alicia Boynton demanded.
He was at the key by this time, and the “crash
—rash—rrrrash” of the great spark as it leaped
and exploded from the discharging-rods filled
the cabin with a peremptory and authoritative
tumult of sound. The woman stood watching
him, spellbound. A moment later McKinnon's
left hand was fidgeting above his tuner, while
his right pressed a 'phone-receiver close to his
ear".
“What we’ve got to do is to get that cruiser
to Puerto Locombia,” he hurriedly went on, as
he waited there, without looking up. “She will


114 THE CONVERGING TRAILS
be needed; she is needed; and she may as well
be told of it now. I mean we’ll do what we’ve
got to do while the way’s still clear.”
“But how can you order about an American
warship as though it were a street cab you’d
hired?”
“It won’t be me—it’ll be the wireless that
does the ordering.”
“But who are you?”
“That’s just it—I’m nobody! I’m like those
canaries you spoke of; I wouldn’t be worth can-
nonading.”
| “But you have no power to do this!” de-
murred the still puzzled woman. “You are not
the President of the United States! You have
no authority to order about a battleship!”
“I’ll make the authority!” he cried as he
Sprang to his key and once more called through
the night. “You’ve said just enough to give
me my chance to make my course plain. Ameri-
can interests are threatened in Guariqui at this
very moment; American property has already
been destroyed in Puerto Locombia. It’s only
forestalling the inevitable. I mean I'm going
to send an official call for that cruiser myself!”
The woman looked at him in amazement as he
swung about and clapped the 'phones once more
to his ears. * S.
“If we can only get her!” he half groaned


THE CONVERGING TRAILS 115
as he stood with bent head and fixed eyes, lis-
tening, while the seconds dragged slowly by.
“If we can only get her!” he repeated less hope-
fully.
He turned to his switch again, and still again
the great blue spark erupted and crashed and
volleyed from the discharging-rods. Then again
he waited and listened, the lines on his face
deepening in the hard light from the electrics
above him.
“The night’s against us!” he exclaimed al-
most despairingly as the switch came purringly
down on the contact-pins and his hand once more
went out to his key-lever. His fingers closed on
the handle, but the intended call was not sent.
No nervous flash of blue flame bridged the wait-
ing spark-gap. For even before he turned, Mc-
Kinnon knew that his cabin door had been sud-
denly opened and that a squat and thick-set fig-
ure stood there peering in at him.
“What’re you workin’ that key for?” de-
manded the figure. It was the thunderous voice
of the ship’s master, Captain Yandel. McKin-
non remembered that he must have overheard
the spark-kiss at the masthead, from the bridge.
“What’re you tryin’ to send out there?” re-
peated the officer. *
“I’m getting distances from a Standard Oil


116 THE CONVERGING TRAILS
tank,” answered the man at the table after Just
a moment of hesitation.
“Distances at this time o’ night?”
“You heard what I said, didn’t you?” cried
the defiant McKinnon.
The enraged officer let his glance wander to
the woman, who had backed away a little, as
near to the door as possible. McKinnon did not
move, but he was thinking both hard and fast.
He had already seen the look on the other man’s
face.
“What's this woman doing here?” demanded
Captain Yandel.
The long-limbed operator shot up out of his
chair angrily at the barb in that thunderous
voice. He kept telling himself to keep cool. It
was plainly to be seen that he was still untu-
tored in accepting insolence without protest. Yet
still again the challenge was flung at him.
“What’s this woman doing in this station at
this time o’ night?”
McKinnon turned slowly about.
“Shall I tell him?” he asked. His voice was
So quiet and seemingly self-contained that the
woman’s first blind panic of fear slipped away
from her.
“Yes, tell him,” she answered.
The captain strode into the cabin. He stood
behind Alicia Boynton, a little to one side; Mc-


THE CONVERGING TRAILS 117
Kinnon, from the operating-table, faced the in-
truder. The tones of his voice as he spoke car-
ried a tacit reproof to his superior, a reproof
for the boisterous note that had been thrust
upon their quiet and orderly talk.
“This woman is my wife!”
“Your what?” cried the captain.
“This woman is my wife!” repeated the op-
erator, without so much as a glance at the pant-
ing girl’s colourless face. “As you may have
the discernment to discover, she is a civilised
being, and brutality has no particular fascina-
tion for her !”
“And what’s all that to do with it?” demand-
ed the captain, warming up to a scene from
which he could usually wring his sardonic de-
lights.
“It has this to do with it—that she is making
this trip as a passenger. I mention the fact be-
cause you may see her in this cabin again, at
many times, and at hours quite as unusual as the
present.”
“I will, will I?” retorted the other.
“You will! And what’s more, so long as I
do my duty by this ship, and by my company,
her presence here calls for no insolence, either
official or unofficial!” f
“You be damned/’’ roared the master of the
ship, aghast at such effrontery.


118 THE CONVERGING TRAILS
“There again I'm afraid I must both disap-
point you and disagree with you. And at the
same time I’d like to call your attention to the
fact that this is a wireless station, and that it
stands under the protection of the Berlin Inter-
national Concordat!”
“To hell with you and your Concordats! This
is my ship—”
“Precisely; and I, unfortunately, have been
put here to do my work, and I'm—”
“Yes, by Heaven!” broke in the irate captain,
“you’re here to do your work! You were stuck
in here under my nose, for reasons I don’t un-
derstand; but when you’re here you’re goin’ to
do your work as I say! And what's more, I
want you to bear in mind that I intend to stay
master o’ this ship! And while I'm master o'
this ship I want no insolence from upstart wire-
stretchers! So you do your despatchin’ in reg-
ular hours, and when I say so, or I'll ship you
back to your company in irons!”
- ---------------


CHAPTER X.
THE REVERSE of THE SHIELD
THE captain of the Laminian wheeled about
and strode out of the cabin, swinging the door
shut with a slam that loosened flakes of white-
lead paint from the ceiling-boards.
“So he’s against us, too!” murmured the op-
erator.
There was a moment of unbroken silence be-
fore the woman looked up.
“Why did you say that to him?” she demand-
ed, trembling with indignation. Even her voice
shook a little as she spoke. “How dare you say
a thing like that?”
McKinnon crossed the room until he stood al-
most at her side.
“I had to say that,” he answered. “It was
the only way out.”
“A lie—a base lie like that—the only way
Out?”
“Yes, the only way, for now that man must
not suspect.”
119


120 REVERSE OF THE SHIELD
“Suspect what?”
“What each of us knows!”
“But you have just challenged his power;
you’ve disclaimed his authority! What can he
do?”
“He can do anything! On the high seas he's
king over this little floating kingdom of his.”
“And you, too, are under him?”
“As much as one of his stokers, in a way.”
“But what have you gained by a lie like
this?”
He found it hard to understand her scruples,
to fathom her indignation. He stopped her as
she started to speak again.
“Wait! Don’t say anything more until I try
to explain what it means to you.”
He peered out along the deck and then slipped
the bolt in the cabin door before he turned to
her again.
“Listen! What I have to say is only the other
half of your own story, of what you yourself
have said. If Duran and his army are shut up
in Guariqui, it’s because they’re there without
ammunition!”
“You know that?” she cried.
“Yes; and this man Ganley knows it. He
knows it because he’s been the cause of it. Six
hundred thousand rounds of ammunition went
out of Mobile for the Locombian troops, for


BEVERSE OF THE SHIELD 121
Ulloa and his men. They were carried to Puerto
Locombia on the Santa Anna, secretly, in bar-
rels that were labelled and invoiced as cement,
so they could be shipped on to Guariqui with-
out suspicion. But Ganley or the Junta or their
spies got to know of it. The Santa Anna was
scuttled in the roadstead at Puerto Locombia.
Those cartridges went to the bottom—forty-six
barrels with double heads, the heads holding a
sprinkling of cement and the main space full of
cartridges packed in excelsior. Every pound
of it went down.”
“This can’t be true!” almost groaned the
girl at his side.
“Every word of it’s true. But let me go on.
De Brigard and his men have been in almost
as bad a predicament. This advantage was use-
less unless he had ammunition for his own men.
That’s where Ganley came in. His agents found
that ground iron slag, packed in cases, weighed
up to just about what a case of cartridges would.
So they bought eighty-eight cases of iron slag
from a Hudson River factory town and ferried
it down to New York. It was consigned to Lo-
combia, properly enough, as basic iron silicate
for fluxing purposes. The law compels all such
exporters to file with the port collector a distinct
declaration of the goods shipped, the country
shipped to, and the name of the consignee. This


122 REVERSE OF THE SHIELD
has to be accompanied by oath. Besides the due
inspection of the shipment, the shipper has to
make his declaration before the consul of the
country to which any such goods are sent. All
this was done.”
“But how do you know this?”
“Let’s say that I stumbled upon it in my
work as a wireless operator. But here is the
real point: in some way, which needn’t now
concern us, those innocent boxes of powdered
slag were tampered with. They became cases
neatly packed with ammunition, with just
enough iron silicate thrown in to fill up the
chinks and cover the real contents. In other
words, Ganley and his men have sent out of
New York five hundred and eighty thousand
rounds of ammunition, consigned to the revolu-
tionary Junta at Puerto Locombia !”
“But how do you know this?” once more de-
manded the listening woman.
“Let me finish, please. Along with those car-
tridges were sent eight cases of ‘structural
iron.” These cases, in reality, contain eight hun-
dred Remington rifles. And not only has this
stuff been sent out of New York by Ganley and
his men, but these guns and cartridges at this
very moment are on this ship, and under this
very deck!”
Alicia Boynton sank slowly down into the


REVERSE OF THE SHIELD 123
steamer-chair against which she had been lean-
ing. McKinnon could see that her breath was
coming fast and short.
“This can’t be true!” she whispered, letting
her hands fall weakly between her knees. “They
may have said this, but it was only to deceive
you, to point out some false trail!”
“One moment, until I explain. I am only the
wireless operator on this boat. I am a new-
comer, as well, for this is my first run. One
hour before the Laminian sailed her old opera-
tor failed to report, and could not be found. The
De Forest Company at once hurried a new man
over to the ship. I am that man.”
“Still I don’t understand. Why are you
Here???
“That’s what the captain of this ship is so
uncertain about. That’s why he’s so down on
us! That’s why he’s sneaking about and spy-
ing on this cabin like a cat on a mouse-hole! I
don’t mean that he’s a paid agent of the Junta
—I don’t even believe he knows what this ship
is carrying. He’s only soured with alcohol, and
jealous—bullheadedly jealous—of his little
world of authority.”
“But still you haven’t told me who you are,
or why you came here.”
“I am a wireless operator,” he said after a
moment’s glance into the girl’s clear eyes, as


124 REVERSE OF THE SHIELD
though to fathom just how brightly the old-time
fires of intelligence were burning there.
“What were you?” she was asking him, her
note of frustration seeming to merge into one
of distrust.
“I’ll have to go back, away back, to make
even that clear to you.”
‘‘Please do.”
“Well, it was over five years ago that I
first went to Peru, to look after the electri-
cal equipment of the Pachita Water Pow-
er Corporation. They had to protect the forests
on their power watersheds, so I wired their
whole countryside and equipped their fire-ran-
gers with portable telephones. That meant they
could cut in anywhere and send for help in
case of emergency. But a peon or a gaucho
wouldn’t stand for witchcraft like that, and the
mandador sorrowfully intimated that I was too
modern.
“So I next found myself in Nicaragua, with
the task of superintending certain telegraph-
construction work for Zelaya. When that was
finished, for two years I was in the intelligence
department of the Brazilian government, but
the climate wasn’t the sort that a white man
could thrive on, and I had to give it up. Then,
when the Masso Parra trouble first broke out
Magoon invited me over to Pinar del Rio and


126 REVERSE OF THE SHIELD
“In one way it is, but still it's hard to ex-
plain how the unattached man from the North
is held by the tropics. That’s what made me
catch at the old bait when I had a chance to go
to the Cantonese District to look into the Chi-
nese boycott affair. And it’s the same thing, I
suppose, that’s taking me south to Locombia.”
The girl gave vent to a gesture of impatience,
“That doesn’t explain.”
“What more can I say?” he demanded. He
struggled to conceal the fact that he was afraid
of her, that life had always taught him to be
wary before the unknown factor in the equation
of adventure, that her very softness was some-
thing against which he had to steel himself,
grimly and resolutely.
“You can say everything you have so care-
fully left unsaid,” was her unexpectedly spirit-
ed answer.
“There’s nothing more,” he protested, feel-
ing the silence grow heavy about him.
“I trusted you!” said the girl at last.
“And I would trust you!” he said quite open-
ly and honestly.
“You mean you are not free to speak?” she
persisted, evading the personal issue which his
declaration had thrust before her.
“I mean that it’s worse than foolish for us
to quibble over side issues when we’re confront-


REVERSE OF THE SHIELD 127
ed by things of so much more importance. I
mean, for instance, that this steamer is carry-
ing ammunition to De Brigard and his men.
If that ammunition is delivered into the hands
of the Locombian Government instead of to
their enemies, Ulloa and his army can at once
re-enter the field.”
“But why re-enter the field? They are free.”
“In a way, yes; but they are now shut up
in Guariqui, practically, with only a few thou-
sand reserve cartridges and a half ton of use-
less cordite. But the moment they have made
sure that the Laminian is safely tied up at the
pier in Puerto Locombia they plan to run a
banana-train, armoured with boiler-plate, down
through De Brigard’s lines to the coast. They
will fight their way down, probably under cover
of night, run their cars out on the pier next to
the Laminian’s berth, seize their slag-boxes as
contraband of war, and fight their way back to
Guariqui.”
“You know this?’”
“It is the knowledge of this,” he guardedly
replied, “which makes me say that you and I
are compelled, or will be compelled, to act to-
gether.”
Alicia Boynton did not speak for several sec-
onds, but her studious eyes were fixed on Mc-
Kinnon’s face.


128 REVERSE OF THE SHIELD
“You mean that you might be able to warn
them?” she asked at last.
“I mean that it might be possible, under cer-
tain conditions, for Duran's palace operator to
get a message from me. It might also be pos-
sible for your brother's men to be aboard this
boat five or six hours after that message was
received. So why not explain the whole situa-
tion by saying that both of us chance to be act-
ing for the same cause? We’re fighting for the
same end, so no matter how it hurts, or whatever
may happen, we must stick together!”
“But why leave any mystery between us, if
we are already that close?” asked the girl.
“Why can’t you still tell me everything?”
“I’m beginning to learn that you can’t tell
things, in my calling, until you’re sure of your
ground. That’s why I had to fling that lie to
the captain. It’s warfare—and I’ve got to be
true to my people before everything else.”
“But who are your people?” she persisted.
He laughed, a little wearily, a little ambigu-
ously. “I have no people,” he said. “But
we’ve got to fight for Guariqui, whatever it
costs l’’


CHAPTER XI
TEIE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT
IT was the next morning that McKinnon came
unexpectedly face to face with Alicia Boynton
in one of the Laminian’s narrow companion-
ways. He was hurrying up to his operating-
room after a brief mockery of a breakfast in
the ship’s musty-odoured dining-saloon, and
would have passed on with nothing more than
an unbetraying nod. But the anxious-eyed
young woman, with a barely perceptible gesture,
signalled for him to turn back.
He followed her at a discreet distance as she
stepped into a damp-carpeted side corridor
flanked by white-leaded cabin doors. She quiet-
ly opened one of these, with a half-obliterated
“7” on its lintel, and motioned him inside.
He surmised at a glance that it was her state-
room. He next noticed that she had closed the
door and locked it. Something in the quick de-
cisiveness and directness of her movements
touched him to a fleeting moment of admiration.
129


130 THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT
He was conscious of the fact, as he turned to
her, that his earlier sense of uneasiness had de-
parted from him.
“Listen,” said the quiet-moving and clear-
eyed girl, peering impersonally up at him as she
spoke, and yet standing so close that her sleeve
brushed his hand. “I’ve been thinking a great
deal about that foolish receipt. It’s the only
thing, now, that stands between us and our free-
dom of action. We have cleared away so much;
but this is still one of the things that stand be-
tween us. I mean it’s still a danger to you—
much more a danger than I can make you under-
stand, unless you know how treacherous and
vindictive this man Ganley can be.”
“But why should I be afraid of Ganley?”
McKinnon maintained. “I can fight him in
his own way. I am fighting him in his own
way.”
“You might do it at home, in your own coun-
try,” she warned him, “but not in Locombia–
not anywhere in Latin America. He knows his
ground too well, his tricks and his chances, his
burrows of escape when he needs them. He
would never give you a fighting chance. That's
why we must do what we can, at once, without
delay.”
Still again he marvelled at her directness of
purpose and movement, at her unequivocating


THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT 131
frankness of outlook. It implied, he felt, a cour-
age seldom demanded or met with in the im-
mured and upholstered walls of a modern wom-
an’s World. .
“I thought it could be done this morning,”
she went on hurriedly, yet in a tone so low that
he had to stoop a little to catch her words.
“Ganley left his cabin early; I was ready and
waiting. The moment he was away I let myself
into his room.”
She stopped to smile at his start of astonish-
ment.
“I had won over my stewardess,” she went
on. “A few dollars completed the conquest and
made everything so much easier. She even
found a pass-key that fitted. I could see it was
dangerous, and I had very little time. But I
failed. The receipt was not there.”
“But you can’t do this sort of thing,” Mc-
Kinnon expostulated. He remembered an earlier
speech of hers: “It’s one of the small things
that count in war—and this is war.”
“Isn’t it rather late for going back over that
ground?” she was saying.
“But this sort of thing involves too much
risk! It's too unfair to you!”
“I looked through everything, as far as I
could,” the girl at his side went on, not heeding


132 THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT
his protest. “I could find no trace of the re-
ceipt.”
“Of course not! He shows the value he puts
on it by carrying it about on his person, in his
Wallet.”
“But there was something else I did find
out,” she said, lowering her voice; and again
he was struck by the aura of sheer vigour that
seemed always to float and cling about her.
“It’s the fact that eight mountain-guns are to
be shipped out of Mobile this week, invoiced
and crated as steam-laundry equipment. They
are Hotchkiss rapid-fire guns, breech-loading,
and with fixed ammunition. Those are the guns
that are to be landed somewhere in northern
Locombia. They can be taken apart, piece by
piece, and carried up through the hills to Guari-
qui on burros.”
“And he had the coolness to send out a wire-
less about that equipment!” commented McKin-
non. The woman, with a warning look, mo-
tioned for him to speak more quietly.
“My second discovery was even more impor-
tant. It began with what seems to be a note
from one of De Brigard’s generals. They are
still afraid of some counter-movement to seize
their cartridge shipment. I mean they are wor-
rying about the very ammunition on this ship,
the cartridges in the slag-boxes you spoke about.


THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT 133
As far as I can make out, they intend to com-
mandeer a certain track-motor from the Con-
solidated Fruit Concern. They are to seize it
and take it from the roundhouse just north of
Puerto Locombia.”
“What kind of track-motor?” broke in the
thoughtful-eyed operator.
“It’s a specially built sixty-horse-power Bir-
mingham motor, belonging to the railway de-
partment of the Fruit Concern. I can remem-
ber when it was first imported, a year ago. The
new railway construction engineers have been
using it instead of a coach and locomotive for
inspecting the ore-road extensions and the nar-
row-gauge banana lines that have been run out
into the Parroto plantations. You see, it’s so
light in weight that six or eight peons can lift
it about on the track; they can reverse it with-
out a turntable. De Brigard’s men intend to
run this motor out on the railway along the
pier, at night, and keep it hidden in the Fruit
Concern’s weigh-scales shed, not forty feet from
where the Laminian will be sure to dock. Then,
as far as I can make out, the slag-boxes are
to be quietly dropped over the side and piled
up in the motor’s tonneau. Then it is to be
hurried out along the railway track to Cocoanut
Hill, where everything is to be stored in the


THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT 135
easily enough keep him there with you for ten
or fifteen minutes!”
“You mean the chances are that he’ll simply
throw on anything that’s nearest him—a blan-
ket or a bathrobe, if it’s late enough?”
g ‘Yes.”
“But there’s the captain!” objected McKin-
non. “There’s the scene we went through last
night.”
“Then wait until the captain has gone to his
cabin for the night. The later it is when you
call Ganley the better. I can be waiting. The
moment he has left his cabin, locked or unlocked,
I can be there making my search.”
McKinnon looked down at her, puzzled, not
by her proposal, but by the sheer fact that she
could make it. He began to feel that some kin-
dred and companionable love for the casually
adventurous linked them together; he began to
realise that, for all her sex, she was not without
her youthful and full-blooded relish for the haz-
ard of any true game that was worth its can-
dle.
“Suppose Ganley suspects something?”
“He can suspect nothing if we only do our
part of it in the right way,” admonished the
youthful intrigante before him. “He lives in
daily dread that you may receive messages
about the Locombian uprising, or his own con-


136 THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT
nection with it. Then why not assume that a de-
spatch has come in, one, for instance, stating
that De Brigard and Ulloa have met, that this
revolution about which you understand so lit-
tle has actually begun? You have no suspicion
as to who these men really are. It will only be
natural for you to make inquiries. You might
even be sending for further particulars. That
would keep him in suspense: that would hold
him there and give me the time I need!”
“But if he insisted on not waiting?”
She stood for a moment or two in deep
thought.
“Then you would have to warn me.”
“But how?”
Again she stood gazing at him with medita-
tive eyes.
“Why not by the sound of your spark? You
could start to send quickly. I could hear it
quite plainly through the open port-hole.”
“But even in that, again, is a risk. I might
be sending to hold Ganley, and not to warn
you.”
They stood in thought for still another mo-
ment or two. McKinnon was not altogether un-
conscious of her presence, so companionably
close to him. Until that day he had faced the
isolation of the man who plans and fights alone.
There was something vaguely consoling in the


THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT 137
thought of comradeship so unlooked for and yet
So sustaining.
“Wait,” he said, as a sudden thought came
to him. “I might send one word, a simple word
like ‘Go.’ You could easily recognize it, then,
as a warning. That would be simple enough,
if you could only remember the Morse.”
“Would it be hard?”
He tapped out the dots and dashes with his
finger-tip on the rod of brass from which the
berth-curtains hung. She listened closely as he
repeated them. Then she stooped and repro-
duced the signal with her own finger-tip on the
wooden edge of her narrow berth. The light
and alertness of her inquiring eyes as she looked
up into his sent a quick and inapposite thrill
of appreciation through McKinnon.
“That will be the danger-signal,” she agreed.
“When I hear it I’ll understand.”
But McKinnon was held back by a sudden
disturbing thought. -
“Suppose Ganley himself is able to read the
Morse???
“But don’t you see that is impossible! He's
shown that already. He never would have come
to you as he did when the Laminian was leaving
New York if he had been able to stand on the
deck and read your spark at the masthead, or
if he had caught the sound from your cabin as


138 THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT
you sent. All that talk of his was only to blind
you to his real end; it was only to find out if he
himself had been found out.”
“But even if we have the good luck to get
back this paper he's holding,” began McKin-
non, once more marvelling at the quick coher-
ence of her reasoning, “that is only the begin-
ning of things.”
“Yes,” she agreed, dropping her intent and
troubled eyes before his steady gaze. “But why
should we cross our bridges before we come to
them?” -
He still had to confess to himself that there
Was Something almost enigmatic in that persist-
ent yet febrile energy of hers. It was so vastly
different from what life had taught him to ex-
pect from women whom the hardening years had
not touched with bitterness and left old and
wise. It seemed a contradiction of everything
about her—her youth, her Aprilian softness, her
obvious honesty of outlook, her childlike can-
dour of face and character.
Intuitively, as she stood there studying his
"anging expression, she caught at the feeling
"at was still challenging and bewildering him.
“This is puzzling you—that a woman can
face such things as this?” she demanded, with
what Was only a moment’s hurried and unhappy
*ile. “But you must remember that I have
---


THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT 139
lived in the midst of such things for nearly three
years.”
“Were they always this bad?” he asked her,
with an answering smile that unedged the so-
lemnity of the question.
“No,” she replied; “but all the while I was
in Guariqui I breathed nothing but an atmos-
phere of intrigue and counter-intrigue. It was
the same with my brother Arturo, ever since he
went south to fight for father’s claims. We
talked and worked together often in Guariqui.
It must have crept into my blood in some way,
for even when I was away from it, even when
I was safe and happy in New York, I wasn’t
altogether sorry when a Locombian planter’s
son, studying in the School of Mines there, came
and gave me the first inkling of what was going
on. I believe I was almost glad when I found
Arturo needed me again, and needed me so bad-
ly. It appealed to something dominant in me;
it made idling seem so empty and foolish. Then
I found it was more than an escapade, a game
—that it was a peril, and I couldn’t stand off. I
couldn’t hold myself away from it a moment
longer.”
He moved his head slowly up and down as
a sign of comprehension. His sympathy brought
the fleetest shadow of a smile to her still trou-
bled lips.


140 THE MOVEMENT IN RETREAT
“It’s not that I like it,” she said. “It’s more
that I can’t bear to see anything that's near to
me suffer undeservedly. I hate the thought of
Arturo being dealt with so unfairly. It—it—
Oh, I think it must be because my own father
was a soldier himself!”
“I rather imagine I know the feeling,” Mc-
Kinnon told her. “I think I’ve carried the same
fighting madness in my own blood for quite a
number of years.”
“But you’re a man, and you're still young,”
she murmured, looking up at him a little sor-
rowfully, wondering at the touch of bitterness
that had crept into his voice. “You do it from
choice; I must do it from necessity. You can
glory in it—it's unselfishness with you; it’s the
spirit of adventure. With me it’s only selfish-
ness—it's only fighting for my own.”
“But isn’t that enough?” asked McKinnon
comprehendingly as he took her hand and
turned away toward the door.
He could imagine nothing less militant and
predaceous than that soft and birdlike warmth
which lay for a moment between his fingers.


CHAPTER XII
THE BULL-BAITERS
McKINNoN waited until he knew Captain
Yandel had turned in from the bridge. Seven
bells of the first watch had already sounded
mournfully out of the gloom qf the dipping fore-
castle, and to wait longer would only add to
the danger of the enterprise in hand. The wind
had somewhat lessened, so that the seas on the
Laminian’s quarter were less thunderous than
during the day, and comparative quietness
reigned on the ship’s upper deck.
McKinnon, as he stepped out and glanced to—
wards the bridge, felt that this quietness was not
without its touch of the ominous. Yet he quick-
ly hooked back the cabin door and adjusted his
helmetlike receiver. Then he deliberately
pushed the call-button that summoned a steward
from below. This done, he turned back to his
operating-table, drew up his form-pad, and
wrote a sentence or two on it, studiously knit-
ting his brows as he decided on the name and
141*


142 THE BULL-BAITERS
distances of the sending ship. Then the pencil
once more flew over the form-pad. He did not
look up until he heard the steward’s repeated
knock on his door-frame. -
“Tell the passenger in stateroom eleven to
come to the wireless-room,” he requested. “Get
him here quick, for it’s important.”
Even before the sleepy-eyed steward had
turned away the operator had his 'phones once
more over his ears. Then his eyes travelled to
the watch lying on the table before him, and an
increasing spirit of uneasiness both concealed
and revealed itself in the studied and deliberate
slowness of his movements as the minutes
dragged away.
It was not until he caught the sound of ap-
proaching steps that he reached languidly out
and swung down his switch-lever. He stood,
then, in an attitude of studied preoccupation,
waiting to send the “splash” of his blue-flamed
spark out into the night. Yet the one sound
that came to his anxious ears was that of slip-
pered feet shuffling nearer and nearer to him
along the deck. It was not a hurrying sound.
There was no touch of anxiety or eagerness in
the heavy and methodic tread, even as it en-
tered his very cabin. Yet McKinnon knew, be-
fore he so much as looked up at the intruder,
that it was Ganley who had come in answer to


THE BULL-BAITERS 143
his call. And he had to restrain a smile at the
thought of how identical were the tactics adopt-
ed by both his enemy and himself.
“Well?” demanded the non-committal and
titanlike figure as McKinnon worked his key for
a preoccupied moment or two, switched off, and
Once more took up his earphones.
It was at least a minute before the operator
deigned to look about. When he did turn, his
first movement was a peremptory sign for his
visitor to close the cabin door. Yet before the
man with the 'phones had once more turned
about to his key and closed communication with
a studiously weak-powered “Good-night,” he
had made careful note of the intruder’s figure.
It suggested, as he had hoped, that of a sleeper
turned unexpectedly out of his berth.
Ganley was still in his pajamas of braided
Chinese silk. Over these he had thrown his
great black raincoat. This he held together at
the waist in an attitude incongruously feminine,
though the operator could still see the fat, dead-
white flesh where the sleeping-jacket stood apart
beneath the pendulous and weather-darkened
throat. There seemed something gigantically
and incongruously Columbinelike, something
shaming and over-intimate and repulsive in
the waiting figure and its accidental exposure
of dead-white flesh.


144 THE BULL-BAITERS
“Well?” the titanlike visitor draped in black
once more demanded. He seemed to show no
undue haste, no exceptional interest as he stood
there with his great shoulders hunched impas-
sively up. Between his fingers, strangely
enough, he held one of his thick-bellied, short
Hondurian cigars, as yet unlighted. He made
a picture of guarded and judicial unconcern, a
picture so complete that McKinnon stopped for
a moment to admire it in secret. And every
second that passed was a second gained. But
the limit of delay had already been reached.
“You said you wanted to look over anything
special that came in,” began the operator, lay-
ing down his 'phones.
The Columbinelike giant in pajamas nodded
his head.
“I’ve got news, big news,” McKinnon con-
fessed. “Yet it’s not exactly about Ganley.”
He could see the other man’s eye-flash of im-
patience, but still the attitude of wary uncon-
cern was not relaxed.
“Well?” was all Ganley ventured.
The man at the table, as he tore the written
sheet from his form-pad, knew that he was be-
ing closely and keenly watched. This prompted
him to toy with the situation for another mo-
ment or two, for he had his own watching to
do.


THE BULL-BAITERS 145
“Do you know anything about this Locom-
bian mixup?” was McKinnon’s casual question
as he peered momentarily down at the sheet in
his hand.
“Not a whole lot,” guardedly answered the
man in the raincoat. “And what’s more, I
don’t want to. They’re all the same, those trop-
ical revolutions; the same fireworks, the same
brass bands, the same bad ammunition and gold
braid and bombast, and the same eternal coun-
tryful of starving peons!”
McKinnon, watching him covertly and close-
ly, was a little disappointed at his enemy’s apa-
thy. The red-rimmed eyes seemed to grow no
more alert or alarmed, the heavy lips continued
to chew the end of the unlighted and thick-
waisted cigar. Yet time was slipping away min-
ute by minute.
“I seem to have picked up pretty bad news
from down there,” began the operator, waving
his message-sheet.
“You mean bad news for me?” mildly in-
quired the other, with a languid uplift of his
shaggy, iron-grey eyebrows. The two men
looked directly at each other for a silent mo-
ment or two. McKinnon had a twofold end in
view, and his line of advance was not an easy
OL18.


146 THE BULL-BAITERS
“There's been hard fighting in Locombia,” he
slowly asserted.
Again the pajama-clad figure merely nodded.
“I’ve picked up a Savannah liner bound
north; she relays the news from an Atlas fruit-
er. They’ve got this revolution of Ganley’s in
full swing.”
The speaker did not allow his eyes to stray
from the other’s face. Yet he could still de-
tect no unusual betrayal of concern. Beyond
the spasmodic and habitual working of the
heavy iron-grey eyebrows, the huddled hulk of a
body in the steamer-chair made no movement
that could be interpreted as a sign of surprise.
“They report that the revolutionary forces
under De Brigard met the government forces
under Ulloa on Tuesday.”
“Where?” asked the other, casually enough.
“It was twenty miles southwest of Puerto
Locombia; De Brigard was convoying eight
mountain-guns up towards Guariqui.”
McKinnon stopped and waited. The other
man slowly took his cigar from his lips and
looked at the tattered end. Any current of emo-
tion that may have been awakened in him re-
mained shrouded and subterranean. Whatever
he might be, concluded McKinnon, he was at
least a consummate actor.
“Well?” the stolid and guarded figure de-


THE BULL-BAITERS 147
manded; and that was his only comment. Mc-
Kinnon bent over as though to consult the mes-
Sage-sheet.
“They report that De Brigard has pounded
his way through the Locombian lines and occu-
pied Itzula.”
The other man sat down, with a scarcely audi-
ble sigh, in the broken deck-chair beside him.
There was an appreciable space of silence, un-
broken except for the breathing of the two mo-
tionless figures.
“Itzula !” at last purred the black-coated
man, as though uncertain of the name. Then
he peered down at his slippered toes for several
meditative seconds, slowly stretching the gross
legs clad in Chinese silk. McKinnon knew he
was digesting his victory, but only to the in-
itiated could the movement have been interpret-
ed as the very core and essence of any such
luxurious mental easement. Then he looked up
and repeated the word “Itzula?”
Before McKinnon could realise it he was on
his feet.
“One moment,” he called back as he crossed
the room.
McKinnon caught up a message-sheet and in-
tercepted his enemy at the door.
“I want you to see this dispatch,” he said,
catching at the other’s arm and talking against


148 THE BULL-BAITERS
time. “I want you to understand what this
‘Three-four-five-two—six Refunfuno’ means.
You'll see it here in the A B C Telegraph Code.
It means ‘Revolution broken out here.” I
want you to see it for yourself. Then you’ll
know—”
“I’m taking your word for it, young man,”
retorted the other as he shook his arm free and
started through the door. McKinnon knew it
would be madness to try to hold him by force.
“What’s up, anyway?” he asked instead, fol-
lowing the other out on the deck.
“I’ve got a map of that country down in my
cabin,” answered the huge figure in the Chi-
nese silk.
“But we don’t need your map!” persisted
McKinnon.
“I guess we may as well find out where
they’re having all that fun we’ve had to miss,”
called back the other from the stair-head. And
he was gone before McKinnon could get to his
side. \
The operator knew only too well what the
man’s return to his cabin meant at such a mo-
ment. He did not take time to determine in his
own mind the cause of that return, whether his
enemy had suddenly remembered his unlocked
door and his unguarded papers, or whether


THE BULL-BAITERS 149
something had cropped up to arouse his sus-
picions.
But McKinnon, without a moment’s loss,
sprang back into his wireless-room and faced
his switch-lever. He threw the ebony handle
of his starting-box down across the contact-pins
with a force that seemed almost to explode the
dynamo into a roar of droning protest. It was
like the burst and sound-rush of an ascending
rocket. Then his hand darted out to his key
and he broke and closed the great current, quick
and strong, sending the huge blue spark explod-
ing from his coils until it cannonaded through
the closed cabin with a crash and throb like the
quickened thunder-claps of a tropical storm.
Madly he repeated the call, again and again,
wondering, as he feverishly worked the key in
that one brief word of warning, if he had been
too late; praying, as the moments dragged away
and nothing broke the midnight quietness about
him, that the girl in the cabin below had heard
and understood his warning.
He suddenly began to reprove himself as he
stood there counting off the seconds, and listen-
ing to the interminable muffled throb of the far-
off engines, for not thinking in time, for not
hoiding Ganley back, even though it had to be
by force. Or he might have done it, he felt,
by the mere pretense of some fresh message


150 THE BULL-BAITERS
coming in. He might have kept him there for
another precious five minutes if he had only
acted as a man in his place ought to have acted.
But he had missed his chance.
He crossed to his open door and paused there
to listen. He knew that by this time Ganley
was in his cabin, and that, unless Alicia Boyn-
ton had caught the warning signal, she had al-
ready been trapped. This gross, malevolent, red-
handed enemy of whom she stood in such fear
must already have confronted and caught her.
The mere thought of it was too much for him.
McKinnon started back to his cabin, remem-
bering he was unarmed, thinking of the revolver
that still lay in his trunk.
But something in the quietness of the mid-
night ship filled him with some sudden keener
sense of impending disaster. Without the loss
of another second’s time he turned and darted
below decks.


CHAPTER XIII
THE RECOVERED GROUND
IT took McKinnon but half a minute to reach
the passageway that led to Ganley’s cabin. He
felt, as he paused for an instant before his en-
emy’s closed door, that his entrance into the
room before him involved a final and unequivo-
cal betrayal of his own position. His line of
advance from that time forward could no lon-
ger be the circuitous and subterranean one he
had hoped to make it. The contest between him
and Ganley, thereafter, would have to be open
and aboveboard.
Then, preparing himself for the scene he was
to face, he turned the knob and swung open the
door.
The cabin was empty. The electric lights
were turned on, the disordered berth stood be-
fore him, and Ganley’s massive pigskin wallet
lay on the floor. But the room was without an
occupant.
McKinnon, now thoroughly alarmed, turned
151


152 THE RECOVERED GROUND
and ran to the second door farther down the
passageway. This door, he remembered, led
into the cabin of Alicia Boynton, and for just a
second or two he hesitated about entering it.
Then a great sense of gratitude welled up
through him, for as he stood with his hand still
on the knob the sound of the girl’s voice came
out to him. He had no time to resent the tumult
and poignancy of this newer feeling, for it was
the woman’s words, and not her voice, that co-
erced him into sudden attention. “How dare
you!” cried the voice beyond the closed door.
“How dare you come into this cabin l’” she
was crying. McKinnon could hear her gasp of
what might have been either indignation or in-
creasing fright.
“This is a little dose of your own medicine,
young woman l”
It was Ganley who had spoken. His voice was
still low and unhurried. It seemed almost cas-
ual in its studied deliberateness. Yet it held
a tremolo of restrained passion that made the
deliberating McKinnon wait there for a min-
ute or two with his hand still on the door-knob.
It was Alicia Boynton’s voice that sounded
out of the quietness. -
“How dare you!” she gasped again.
“Cut out that play-acting and stand back


THE RECOVERED GROUND 153
against that wall there! So! Now hand out
that stuff of mine—every line and rag of it!”
It was the woman who spoke next.
“I have nothing to hand out.”
“I’ll give you ten seconds,” protested Gan-
ley. “I’ll give you ten seconds to get those
papers of mine into my hand here, every shred
Of 'em!”
“I have no papers of yours,” declared the
more and more terrified woman.
“I’m no fool—I saw 'em—I caught you at
it!”
“Will you leave my cabin?”
“Then explain what you’ve got stuck down
your waist there!”
“It’s nothing of yours.”
“Hand it out, or I'll rip those clothes off
your back!”
“There’s nothing to hand out.”
“Hand it out—or I’ll blow it out!” came the
low-toned threat, driven home with an oath.
“I can’t,” came the woman’s answer, scarce-
ly more than a whisper.
“Hand it out !”
Then came a second or two of unbroken si-
lence.
“You’re going to shoot!” gasped the woman.
It was only too evident that Ganley had stepped
closer to her.


156 THE RECOVERED GROUND
“Have you anything of this man’s?” McKin-
non deliberately demanded of the girl, reali-
sing that his intrusion had not yet amounted to a
complete betrayal of his own position.
The upturned gaze of the girl against the
wall and that of the wireless operator met. Gan-
ley moved closer to the door, as though to guard
it. No one spoke until McKinnon repeated the
question.
“Yes,” said the panting and puzzled woman,
“I have something of his.”
“What is it?” asked the operator.
“A slip of paper.”
“Where is it?”
“I have it,” was all the girl answered.
“Then hand it out to me,” ordered Ganley.
Her eyes were still on McKinnon’s as her
hand went to her breast.
“No, hand it to me,” interposed McKinnon
as he watched the slowly withdrawn hand that
held a crumpled sheet of white paper. The
wide, troubled eyes of the girl turned from one
man to the other. Then she opened the slip of
paper and glanced down at it. Ganley’s hand
went out for it authoritatively. The look in
McKinnon’s eyes was equally imperative.
It was then that the girl fell back a step or
two along the cabin wall. She held the paper
between her hands, as she did so. Then, with a


THE RECOVERED GROUND 157
quick movement of her trembling fingers, and
before either of the men could stop her, she tore
the sheet in two, again and again.
“I’ll kill you for that!” choked Ganley, his
face contorted like a wrestler’s, shaking and
twitching, but not moving from where he stood.
McKinnon, with the revolver still in his hand,
stepped between them.
“There’s been enough of this prize-ring
work,” he cried as he faced Ganley. “I want
to know what all this means.”
“It means I’m going to get that woman,”
panted the other man, his face still grayish pur-
ple with rage.
“How get her?”
“Get her in irons, where she belongs.”
• # stole nothing,” interrupted the white-faced
girl.
A stab of inapposite remorse went through
McKinnon as he remembered that he himself
was the cause of this last and unlovely scene.
“She lies!” Ganley was saying.
“Hold on there!” said McKinnon, getting a
firmer and firmer grasp on both himself and the
situation. “I came into this cabin and found
you beating a girl over the head. Say what
you’ve got to say about it. Then the girl can
say what she has to say.”
Ganley stared at his self-appointed judge.


158 THE RECOVERED GROUND
“Are you the master of this ship?” he de-
manded.
“I’m the master of this situation,” calmly
replied the wireless operator with a pregnant
upthrust of the revolver which he still held in
his hand. “And before our little party breaks
up I’m going to understand what it means.”
“Then ask this woman what she stole from
me.’’
McKinnon had to feel and test his way as he
went, like a man on thin ice.
“You mean for the woman to speak first?”
“Yes,” retorted Ganley; “and she’s going to
do more than speak.”
McKinnon turned to the woman, who stood
still staring at him in unbroken and puzzled si-
lence.
“Well?” he said at last.
“What must I explain?” she finally asked,
still studying his face.
“What you carried out of my cabin,” an-
swered Ganley.
“You want me to explain that?” she asked,
her eyes on the younger man’s face.
“Yes,” answered the operator.
“Must I tell you?” still parried the perplexed
WOIman. -
“You must,” McKinnon replied.
“It was the contract made between this man


THE RECOVERED GROUND 159
and the wireless operator of this ship,” she de-
liberately answered.
“A contract?” said McKinnon.
“It was the agreement you signed to become
a partner of this man.”
“And you tore this agreement up?” demand-
ed McKinnon with an assumption of incredibil-
ity. He waited for her glance of intelligence
to show him that she had caught some vague
inkling of his position, of the attitude of armed
neutrality he was struggling to retain in that
strange tangle of interests; but she did not seem
to understand.
“You saw me tear it up,” she replied, won-
dering in turn just what was expected of her,
anxious not to endanger him by any foolish mis-
step on her part.
“Why?” asked McKinnon.
“I could not see any one tied to a man whose
hands are stained with blood.”
Ganley laughed a heavy and mirthless laugh,
as though resenting the theatricality of the
woman’s phrase.
“That’s a hell of a reason!” he mumbled in
his sullen guttural.
“I did it because I know what this man is,”
went on the woman, turning her slow and puz-
zled stare from the operator to Ganley.
McKinnon, now in perfect control of himself,


160 THE RECOVERED GROUND
wheeled about to the Columbinelike figure in the
black raincoat and the Chinese silk pajamas.
“You are Richard Duffy, acting with the Con-
solidated Fruit Concern and the authorities at
Washington for the capture of a man named
Ganley, are you not?”
“I am,” answered the man in the raincoat,
doggedly facing the young woman. McKinnon
could see her lip pucker up with its little curl
of unspeakable scorn.
“The man lies!” said the girl in her calm and
deliberate tones. “This man is Ganley, “King-
maker Ganley,” himself!”
The man in the raincoat once more laughed
his sullenly derisive laugh. His contemptuous
defiance seemed to nettle and anger the woman
into more coherent thought. When she spoke
next she uttered her words more incisively, more
quickly.
“This man,” and her scorn was infinite, “is
the buzzard of the tropics, the creature who
waits and watches over sick republics, who
prowls about after dying governments to pick
their bones!”
“You’re crazy!” scoffed the man she was ac-
cusing. -
“He’s called ‘Kaiser Ganley, the gun-run-
ner, “Pasha Ganley, the agent of every Central
American patriot,” she continued. “He’s the


162 THE RECOVERED GROUND
ously. “He even confesses it is true. It sur-
prises him that I should know so much. But
there are other things I know. I know that he
was the instigator of the Orinoco Colonisation
frauds. I know he was once a Cuban blockade-
runner, and once an agent of Don Carlos, the
Spanish pretender. I know that he was a gun
smuggler into the Balkans at the same time that
he was being made a pasha by his friend, the
Sultan of Turkey.”
She paused for breath and pointed mocking-
ly at her enemy’s short, thick fingers as they
slowly clenched and unclenched.
“Look at his hands and you will see! He went
to Lhassa in the pay of a Russian secret agent.
And they caught him and crucified him on one
of their convent walls—they nailed him there
through the hands. You can see the marks!
He can’t lie those away, for he hung there
twelve hours until a tribesman set him free and
spirited him across the frontier. And this is
the great soldier who gave you money—”
Ganley once more broke in on her as she
stopped to pant for breath.
“These are a pack o’ lies!” he cried, and his
voice was rasping and forced, as though it re-
quired a great effort for him to utter the words,
“These are all damned lies!”


THE RECOWERED GROUND 163
The woman pointed to the little particles of
white paper scattered about the floor.
“And that was not an agreement with this
man?” she derisively asked.
“This man made an agreement with me, an
open and honest agreement.”
“Honest!” interpolated the scornful woman.
“And he had the right of saying yes or no
to it. He’s past the age of being wet-nursed
into what he wants to do.”
“Then he had the right to know what he was
tied up with,’’ parried the scoffing woman.
“He still has the right of saying yes or no
to that agreement,” declared Ganley as he
brought his great, russet-coloured hand down
on the berth-edge with a sudden blow. “But
what’s he to you, anyway?”
She looked from one to the other of the two
men before her. But McKinnon gave her no
chance to reply. The moment he had been wait-
ing for had already arrived.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he said as he held
his hand out towards the sullen-faced Ganley.
In this outstretched hand was a roll of bills held
together by a rubber band.
“What’s this???
“It’s your money!” said McKinnon.
“I won’t take it!” retorted the other.
“You won’t take it?”


164 THE RECOVERED GROUND
“Not until you show me a reason why we
should split.” He jerked a contemptuous thumb
towards the staring woman. “And I don’t call
that a reason l’’
“The whole thing’s too tangled up for me,”
equivocated the operator.
“There’s no tangle when it’s pared down to
the truth.”
“But we can’t argue about that all night, and
I’ve got my key to attend to,” complained the
watchful McKinnon.
A new look of anxiety flashed across the other
man’s face at the mention of the key. It was a
flash, and nothing more.
“Then you believe what she says?” asked
Ganley more soberly, looking from the paper-
littered floor to the woman still standing mo-
tionless against the cabin wall.
“You haven’t disproved it,” said the opera-
tor with a gesture of simulated bewilderment.
“I’m proving and disproving nothing,” was
Ganley’s reply. “I haven’t been doing the talk-
ing. I’m not the talking kind. But I’ve come
into touch with this kind o’ woman before. I
know her, and she and her whole gang can’t
hoodwink me!”
“Well?” said McKinnon a little impatiently.
“Oh, I’ve known her ever since she hitched


THE RECOVERED GROUND 165
up with that crooked little concession hunter
called Boynton.”
“Stop!” cried the girl.
“For three years now she’s been a feeder for
that one-lunged climber, that Yankee renegade
who’s been trying to pose as a Spaniard.
They’re the team who went down yonder with a
cooked up claim on the Cornruche Rubber
Treaty territory.”
“Stop!” cried the indignant girl, more
shrilly. The scene in some way reminded Mc-
Kinnon of a meeting between a cat and a mas-
tiff. More and more he grew to resent the fact
that this fragile and isolated figure should be
dragged through such demeaning mires of
scurrility. But Ganley was not to be stopped.
“And when they’d wrung their money out of
that,” he declared, “they dished up a Locom-
bian nitrate claim and drained that dry. And
when that was picked clean they wheedled their
way into Duran’s good graces. And then, to
cinch her graft, this woman, this pink-and-white
beauty right here before you, married a Santo
Domingan half-caste filibuster who’d made a
half million out of brandy smuggling and coun-
terfeiting!”


THE PYRRHIC VICTOR 167
sense of unlooked-for and undefined conspira-
cies beyond conspiracies, of bewildering and in-
scrutable forces at play all about him.
“Is this true?” he demanded of the woman
before him.
His question was almost a prayer for its own
denial. He could see that the scene through
which she had passed had sorely taxed her
strength. She was no longer a girl, but a wom-
an who had known and confronted life.
“Is this true?” he repeated, and even as he
asked it he felt that whatever part she might
be playing in that crowded drama he would in
the end be compelled to stand by her.
“No,” whispered the woman, white to her
lips. “It is not true.”
“Have you a husband?”
“No,” she still answered in her low voice.
The monosyllable was emotionless, yet he could
see by her face that she was suffering.
Ganley laughed outright. It was not a pleas-
ant laugh.
“And you never married a mangy, half-caste
diamond-wearing Santo Domingan named De
Perralta?” demanded the man on the berth
edge.
‘‘I married a man named Perralta,” answered
the woman slowly, her unwavering eyes on Mc-
Kinnon as she spoke.


168 THE PYRRHIC VICTOR
“Then it is true?” A note of involuntary
bitterness rang through McKinnon's sharp
query.
“Yes,” she answered.
“But you have just said you had no hus-
band!”
“He was dragged from the carriage half an
hour after the ceremony.”
“What ceremony?”
“After our marriage. I have not seen him
since that day. Seven weeks later he died of
yellow fever.”
“And tell why he was dragged from that
carriage,” prompted Ganley, with his guttural
and mirthless laugh, as he saw the woman’s
wide eyes watching him closely, almost chal-
lengingly.
“He had shot the wife of a government offi-
cial named Gurmanito, in Bogota,” she an-
swered in her listless monotone. “That was
only one of other things.”
“Other things which made him almost worthy
of the family he'd married into,” interpolated
the scoffing Ganley, in luxurious appreciation
of her misery.
McKinnon could see that she was shaking,
that her whole body was quivering. When she
spoke again, hurriedly, her voice was higher in
pitch, as though the strain upon her was becom-


THE PYRRHIC VICTOR 169
ing a tension she could no longer control or
endure.
“I have never spoken of these things,” she
said in her tremulous soprano, facing McKin-
non, “but I want you to understand. It was
three years ago, when I was little more than
a schoolgirl. I was under a great debt of grati-
tude to this man who—to this man Perralta. I
had been left in care of the American Consul
at La Guayra; I had taken an English steam-
ship to Venezuela, after two years in a French
school. I was to re-embark from La Guayra
for Puerto Locombia, but quarantine was estab-
lished on account of bubonic plague, before I
could get away. I had to live at the consulate
on short rations—the American consul had re-
fused the demand of the Venezuelan Govern-
ment for a certificate that La Guayra was free
of the plague. He and his family were taken
off by a United States gunboat, the Paducah,
and I would have been sent to the detention
camps, had it not been for this man Perralta.”
“Go on!” prompted the other, as she paused.
“He seemed a gentleman then, and had
money and influence. He played his part well.
He leased a seagoing tug and had me and my
companion, a young German woman, carried
out of the infected district. After we had
passed the necessary period of quarantine, for


170 THE PYRRHIC VICTOR
observation, in the English hospital at George-
town, he was there, waiting for us. I was weak
and ill—I think it was of coast-fever. He
bribed or bought over the German woman, I
don’t know how. I was tricked into a ceremony
I did not understand. I scarcely knew what to
do when I found out. But it was decided for
me—he was dragged from the carriage as he
sat beside me. . . . . . I tell you all this
because—because I want you to understand.”
“I do understand,” answered McKinnon.
“And is that all?” asked Ganley, with his
careless sneer.
“Yes; that is all,” she answered. The in-
solence of the gross-limbed gun-runner was like
a whip-lash to McKinnon.
“And is that all on your side?” he asked,
with a sudden movement of disgust.
“Not by a long shot!” retorted the man in
the raincoat, with unlooked-for energy. “I
want later history than all this. I want to know
just what this woman’s got of mine.”
“She has explained that she took this paper,”
replied the othér, pointing to the littered cabin
floor.
“What do I care what she said, or says, or
is going to say. You’ve got to show me—I’m
from Missouri!”
McKinnon pondered the situation. It was


THE PYRRHIC VICTOR 171
plain that Ganley had regained his self-control,
that he could no longer be counted on to act with
the unthinking directness of the outraged sav-
age he had seemed.
“There’s a very simple way to settle this
problem,” McKinnon suggested. “We’ll lock
this cabin, so nothing in it can be interfered
with. The three of us will step into your cabin.
You’ll then go through your belongings, these
documents and papers of yours, and I’ll check
them off as you do so, one by one. It will be
easy enough to tell then if anything is missing.”
The proposal aroused no enthusiasm in
Ganley.
“This is not the hour o’ night I care to go
into the general-auditing business,” was his
reply.
“Nor altogether the hour of night for keep-
ing a young lady out of her bed!”
Ganley peered at the speaker for several
seconds before replying.
“I like to see you being nice and consider-
ate,” he said at last, with his mild and studied
laugh. “And I imagine you enjoy being judge
and jury in a case like this. And I also im-
agine, just because this woman’s flashed her
lamps at you a couple o’ times, that you’ve got
an idea that she’s all right and I’m all wrong.
You’ve both concluded that this little talk-fest


172 THE PYRRHIC VICTOR
has settled the whole case. But it hasn’t. And
I guess it’s not going to.”
He rose to his feet heavily and slowly and
thoughtfully, and then turned to McKinnon.
“Remember, I’m not trying to hold you in
any way. You’re free. You can do what you
like. But if anything unexpected should hap-
pen, just bear in mind I gave you a chance to
stand in with me, and you wouldn’t take it!”
“Is that a threat?” asked McKinnon.
“Threats? Why should I make threats?
Talking’s cheap, and there’s been a good deal
of it handed round here to-night. And, as you
say, we’ve rather tired the lady.”
There was no longer any trace of mockery
in his voice as he drew himself up and spoke
more directly to the younger man.
“And now I’m going to turn in. But don’t
you forget that I’m still trying to be a friend
o’ yours!”
“I know it!” said the younger man, meeting
his eyes without flinching.
“Then there’s nothing we need to worry
about,” declared Ganley. And before the other
quite realised it the man in the black raincoat,
with a benevolent and all-forgiving arm-wave,
crossed the room to the cabin door. No one
spoke as he passed out through it and closed
it after him.


THE PYRRHIC VICTOR 173
It was the watching and motionless woman
who finally emitted a little gasp in which anger
seemed to override astonishment. Her com-
panion was startled by the look of bewilder-
ment, mounting almost to open distrust, that
crept slowly over her face. There seemed to
be something akin to pitying contempt in her
eyes as she slowly turned about and gazed at
him.
“What does this mean?” she demanded.
“Does what mean?” he parried, disturbed by
the hostility of her gaze.
“The way you have played into Ganley's
hand—the way you have sacrificed everything
for your own safety l’’
“But nothing has been sacrificed,” persisted
the unhappy McKinnon.
“I have been sacrificed—you have watched
him humiliate me—you have helped him to
humiliate me!”
“It was hard to bear, I know. But it could
not be helped. It’s a part of the price we have
to pay for our victory. It’s a part I would
have borne myself, a thousand times over, if I’d
only been able.”
“The price for what victory?” she demanded.
“The victory we wanted; the thing we’ve
been working for, all along. It’s settled—and
he doesn’t even understand it’s settled!”


174 THE PYRRHIC VICTOR
“Yes; it’s settled,” she echoed, unhappily.
“But this leaves us free!”
“You do not know this man as I do,” was
her answer.
“But it’s over—we're through with him!”
“He is not through with us!”
“But what can he do, when once I’ve got in
touch with the Princeton?”
She looked about the small cabin, from side
to side, fornlornly. It was the first time McKin-
non had seen actual fear in her eyes. He even
felt that she had been vaguely weighing the
place’s possibilities against assault.
“Are you afraid?” he asked, not compre-
hending the source of her distrust. She shook
her head in negation.
“This is an American ship,” was her answer.
“Then what is it?” he asked, oppressed by
some new-born isolation of spirit that barred
and walled him away from her.
Again that look of almost contemptuous pity
crept into her eyes.
“I’m afraid of you,” she replied; “I’m
afraid of the future, and how you will surely
fail.”
There was no sign of tears in her eyes, though
he had felt, from her voice, that an outburst was
imminent. Yet he found it hard, cruelly hard,
to meet her open and unwavering glance.


THE PYRREIIC VICTOR 175
“Why have you treated me like this?” she
asked him, almost without emotion. “Have you
nothing to say, nothing to explain?”
McKinnon did not answer for a moment or
two.
“I can’t explain,” he said, at last, his face
distorted, under the strong side-light, with some
unuttered misery of spirit.


- - - -->
CHAPTER XV
TELE, LULL IN THE STORM
fT was not until the Laminian was well down
off the coast of San Salvador that she rode into
settled weather. Then, in a night, she seemed
to emerge from a world of wind and unrest and
tumult into a world of brooding quietness. As
she crept on, forging ever southward under the
high-arching azure sky, this sense of quietness
and completion grew deeper. The air became
warm and soft. The sun streamed down on the
patched awnings, on the worn deck that seemed
bone-white in the flat, strong light of noonday.
Through the ventilators, all day long, came the
purposeful throb and beat of the engines,
muffled, like the throbbing of a great heart.
There seemed something inevitable and ordered
in that unhurried and undeviating pulse, as
though the ship and all she carried were forever
at peace with the world.
A passenger or two moved slowly about the
level decks or sat listless in the dark shade of
176


THE LULL IN THE STORM 177
-*-*=
the canvas, listening to the plaintive hiss of the
ship’s bow as it parted the turquoise sea into
two widening simitars of curling foam. Cinders
rained gently down on the slowly flapping awn-
ings, on the bone-white deck boards steaming
with sea-water sprayed from a leaking hose in
a foolish effort to keep their cracks from widen-
ing, on the eddying and milk-white trail behind
the threshing screw. From somewhere forward
the bells sounded out, lazily, sadly, ghostlike,
as though recording time in a world where all
things slept. The ship’s brasswork flashed and
burned in the hot light. From the silence of the
bow, at times, came the sound of a calling voice,
mournful and measured. Naked-shouldered
stokers, blanched and wet with sweat, crept out
to the mid-deck rail and let the draft that al-
leyed along the companionways cool their moist
skin. Now and then a flying-fish rose and cir-
cled away, off the bow, and fell shimmering back
into the turquoise sea. Piloting the ship’s cut-
water, ever raced and dodged a band of por-
poises. Now and then a creeping dorsal fin cut
the surface of the water and slunk away again.
It seemed to impart something ominous and sin-
ister to the unrelieved brilliance of the arching
sky. It left the oily and unruffled sea menacing
and cadaverous-like in its calm.
The ship crept on, the centre of its circle of


178 THE LULL IN THE STORM
water overhung by its circle of sky. Along the
flat fringe of this sky were ranged low tiers of
cumulus clouds. They seemed as fixed and or-
derly as the clouds on a painted stage-drop;
they stood like floating flecks of cotton, making
a circling amphitheatre of the lonely sea.
And in the ever-shifting centre of this amphi-
theatre throbbed and pulsed the thing of flash-
ing brass-work and bone-white decks, of sadly
flapping awnings, of quiet men with watching
and melancholy faces, of a world complete in it-
self. As the long afternoon waned and the sun
dipped behind the orange-red sky-line and the
light passed away, the orderly and sentinel
lamps were hung out. Along the pitted side-
plates writhed blurred lines of phosphorus.
The sea became a circle of inky blackness fur-
rowed by two ghostly lines of foam. The sky
melted into a maze of velvet and lonely light-
points. Along the shadowy hatches sat and
crooned vaguely outlined groups of seamen,
and from somewhere below decks rose the sound
of string-music, mournful, outlandish, touched
with mystery, as the lonely ship and the huddled
lives she sheltered drifted farther and farther
southward.
The outward sense of peace that brooded over
the Laminian was not shared by certain of her
passengers. Alicia Boynton, after a feverish


THE LULL IN THE STORM 179
night and a day in her berth, emerged from her
cabin a little paler than before, with a soft hol-
low of anxiety under either cheek-bone. But
otherwise she showed no sign of the ordeal
through which she had passed, or of the chaos
of uncertainty which still confronted her.
McKinnon’s own nights, since Hatteras had
been left behind, had been equally unsettled.
His restless and broken sleep was disturbed by
dreams wherein he thought he was engulfed in
burning quicksands, and held fast there, when
he ought to be at his key. The more he strug-
gled and raged to reach his instrument, just be-
yond his touch, the more firmly the engulfing
quicksands seemed to hold him. Then troubled
visions of firing-squads and blindfolded pris-
oners of war would run through his brain, of
dark-skinned little soldiers in ragged denim
shouting bravas to a beautiful woman in navy
blue, of imprisonment in a small and fetid
quartel, or huge, red-handed conspirators and
drunken and cursing ship-captains. In his wak-
ing hours he was oppressed by a continued sense
of suspended action, like that ominous impres-
sion which creeps over a ship when her engines
stop in mid-ocean.
The drama about him seemed at a standstill.
But only too well he knew that this suspense
was for the time being alone. It was not peace


180 THE LULL IN THE STORM
into which they were drifting. Things had gone
too far for a long-continued armistice. And
the longer a truce was maintained, McKinnon-
felt, the more decisive would be the final action.
Events were merely framing themselves for
that ultimate surprise which he was hopeless
to forecast. He was oppressed by the feeling
of vague conspiracies being enwoven about him.
What these conspiracies were, he could not even
guess.
His one escape from this wearing sense of
arrested action lay in his key and recorder. At
all times of the day he worked busily at his ap-
paratus or brooded patiently over his tuner and
coherer. Morning, noon, and night he remained
on the lookout for any word that might creep
in to him. And all the while he kept calling,
doggedly, hoping against hope to get in touch
with the Princeton or at least to pick up some
stray ship or station. He came to feel some-
thing forlorn, something poignant, in his re-
peated calls, fluttering out and dying away un-
answered in those vague etheric wildernesses
between a lonely sea and a lonely sky. They
seemed to endow the wandering ship with a
pathos like that of a lost ewe crying alone and
unheard in the night.
Ganley’s own attitude made this waiting
game a still harder one. He sauntered about


THE LULL IN THE STORM 181
under the Laminian’s gently flapping awnings,
smoking his flat-bellied Hondurian cigars, as
placid and unperturbed as a commodore pacing
his own yacht deck. He accosted McKinnon,
from time to time, with the off-handed geniality
of long-established comradeship. He appeared
to have buried all memory of those scenes in
which he had taken such a recent and such an
active part. He divulged nothing of the plans
which were fermenting behind the bulwark of
his low and massive frontal bone. He said noth-
ing of the doubts and uncertainties, if such he
had, which were preying on his mind. But all
the while McKinnon felt that he was being
watched, just as all the while he himself was
guardedly watching the other.
Once, as McKinnon stood alone at the ship’s
rail, Ganley sauntered over with his ponderous
and deliberate strides, and joined him in his
silent study of the star-strewn heavens. The
operator waited, feeling that at last his enigmat-
ic enemy was about to speak. But the gun-
runner’s meditative eyes remained turned up
to the stars, soft and warm and luminous
against a sky of velvety blackness. He seemed
utterly at peace with the world and his own soul,
as McKinnon left him there, contemplating the
intimidating vast dome of the tropical heavens.
It was only as the Laminian rounded the


182 THE LULL IN THE STORM
eastern coast of Cuba that McKinnon detected
any signs of unusual interest in the gun-
runner’s actions. He caught sight of him at the
rail, shadowed by one of the life-boats, scan-
ning the shore-line through his binoculars. He
could see him there for an hour or more, study-
ing the long, grayish-yellow littoral land-shelf
and the lonely and misty blue hills beyond it.
He stood there, expectantly, as though in search
for some signal which was not to be found.
Then he fell to walking the deck, impatiently,
between the engine-room skylights and the life-
boats. McKinnon, as he watched him striding
back and forth, with a touch of exasperation out
of keeping with his customarily ponderous
movements, could see that a little of the colour
had gone from his pendulous cheeks, and that
his deep-set eyes were more haggard and puffy
than usual. -
But nothing came to the quiet and sun-steeped
ship to relieve McKinnon’s accruing sense of
anxiety. His coherer wooed no response from
the silence about him; his aerials intercepted
no answering message. More than once he felt
tempted to confront his impassive and quiescent
opponent, if for nothing more than to end the
strain, to knock the chip off his shoulder and
bring things to an issue.
But Ganley gave him no opening. And again


THE LULL IN THE STORM 183
there crept through the younger man, as the
second long and sultry day ended in a black and
star-strewn evening, the feeling that he was
friendless and alone, far from his own kind.
With the coming of the calm and spacious
tropical night there came to him a more com-
pelling sense of his isolation. More keenly than
ever he felt the barrier that his own dissimula-
tion had built up between himself and Alicia
Boynton. There was a barb of mockery, he felt,
in the very manner in which he had been com-
pelled to relinquish a friendship that had
promised to mean so much to him. He tried
to tell himself that a man must fight alone, in
warfare such as that he was facing, that he must
learn to accept his loneliness as a natural part
of the game.
Then, of a sudden, his isolation seemed a
thing of the past. For, looking up as he sat
crouched before his tuner, he saw a figure
standing at his open door. And it did not take
a second glance to show him that this figure
was the figure of the woman of whom he had
been thinking. The moment he caught sight of
her, in her low-throated gown of white linen, he
felt the subjugating influence of her presence.
His heart began to beat faster, even before she
stepped in across his coppered door-sill. He
felt grateful for her companionship, for her


184 THE LULL IN THE STORM
mere presence there. He noticed the restless-
ness of her brooding eyes as she sank into the
broken-armed steamer-chair that he placed for
her. He wondered just where the thread of
their old intercourse would be taken up again.
“Are you in communication with anything?”
she asked, with an anxious glance at his ap-
paratus. Her tone was tentative and non-com-
mittal; it left everything still unanswered.
“No,” he said.
“You can’t get anything?”
“Nothing whatever,” he answered, “though
I’ve been calling regularly, twice an hour.”
“And not a message in two days?” she asked.
“Yesterday afternoon I picked up a few
words from an Atlas liner, bound north. She
seemed to be reporting distances. But I
couldn’t get enough power; my coils weren’t
strong enough to reach her.”
The girl rose to her feet, and crossed the
cabin and stood studying the faded map of the
Caribbean on the closet door.
“But aren’t there chances of still getting in
communication?” she asked. “There are so
many ships, nowadays, that carry wireless.”
McKinnon rose and stood beside her, regard-
ing the map.
“Yes, there are hundreds and hundreds of
ships, but, on the other hand, there is so much


THE LULL IN THE STORM 185
ocean, so much distance to swallow them up,”
he explained, indeterminately feeling that the
longer he could hold her there the more firmly
the tie of their old companionship would be re-
established. “Look at this map, for instance,
with all these islands that seem so terribly close.
In the Bahamas alone there are three dozen
good-sized islands, and over six hundred cays,
and nearly twenty-five hundred rocks of one
kind or another. You’d imagine, to look at
them on the map here, that you’d hardly get a
ship through without bumping into one of them.
But when you’re down here actually cruising
among them, going days without a glimpse of
land, you realise how far apart they actually lie.
And it’s the same with ships. It’s possible we
may not get another call all the way across the
Caribbean.”
“That means the Princeton won’t be at
Puerto Locombia?”
“Not unless I can pick her up.”
“Then it’s hopeless!”
“I can’t say the case is hopeless,” parried
McKinnon. “But the chances are against us.
All we can do is wait and be ready. Sometimes,
on clear nights like these, we can make wireless
carry a surprising distance.”
“There must be somebody—some ship!” per-
sisted the girl, as she sank into the chair again.


186 THE LULL IN THE STORM
He began to wish, as he watched her, that it
lay in his power to bring some touch of content-
ment to those unhappy and anxious eyes before
him.
“We’ll surely overhaul the Princeton,” he
had the hardihood to assert, “if she’s lying to
anywhere in the neighbourhood of Culebra.”
“And if that fails?” asked the girl.
“I’m hoping we’ll still be able to pick up
Puerto Locombia itself,” he ventured.
She shook her head meditatively, absent-
mindedly.
“There is no station at Puerto Locombia.”
“No station?” cried McKinnon.
“It will be dismantled—most likely it will be
burned to the ground by this time. If De Bri-
gard is fighting his way up to the capital, he
would never leave a coast-station behind him,
to be calling for help.”
Here was news, indeed, thought McKinnon;
and a sudden grateful look leaped into his eyes,
as he realised the misstep from which she had
saved him.
“Can you remember if there is a telegraph-
line between Puerto Locombia and that capi-
tal?” he asked, after a moment of deep thought.
“There was one, once,” answered the woman.
“But their poles rotted down in less than a year
—the heat and rain and insects of that climate,


THE LULL IN THE STORM 187
you know, will make a log as high as your table
crumble away in one season. So the govern-
ment brought in a shipload of street-car rails,
I think they were second-hand rails from Kings-
ton, and planted them for poles to carry the
line up to Guariqui. But the natives kept cut-
ting out sections of the wire for their own use,
to mend saddle-girths and tie up hut-wattles,
and it took three-quarters of Arturo’s govern-
ment troops to patrol the route and keep the
line open. So they gave it up, at last, and fitted
up the three wireless stations.”
She did not join in McKinnon’s laugh over
the untimely end of Locombia’s telegraph-
System.
“Where is the third station—the one besides
Guariqui and Puerto Locombia?” he asked.
“At Boracao—that’s the biggest of the
banana-shipping towns.”
“It’s hard to have to sit and wait for—for
the inevitable this way,” he said, with an as-
sumption of cheeriness.
“Yes, it is hard,” she said, out of the silence
that once more fell over them.
He felt, none the less, wordlessly grateful for
her presence there, talking or silent. She
seemed to bring a new and more vital atmos-
phere into his squalid little station. She seemed
to throw a warm and transforming tint on


188 THE LULL IN THE STORM
everything about her, as he had seen a rose-
tinted stage-light alter and enrich the canvas
and tinsel of a Broadway playhouse.
He saw her take a long and troubled breath,
look up at him, and once more look away. The
hum and whir of his electric fan was the only
sound in the cabin.
“I don’t think either of us has been quite
honest with the other,” she said, compelling
herself to meet his puzzled gaze.
“I know—and I’m sorry,” he replied, puz-
zling her again by his note of humanity.
“I’ve told you an untruth,” she said at last,
taking another deep breath.
“In what way?” asked McKinnon.
“I lied to you, when Ganley and you were in
my cabin. I can’t let it go on. I can’t endure
the thought of this lie standing between us like
—oh, like a quicksand that can never be
crossed.”
“But what is it?” asked the other.
She looked up at him again, very steadily and
very bravely.
“I told you that my husband was dead,” she
answered in her low and constrained voice.
“He is not dead.”
“He is not dead?” echoed McKinnon.
“I said that he died of yellow fever. He took
the fever and was ill with it. But he did not


THE LULL IN THE STORM 189
die. He was sentenced and sent to the Island
of Malpanto, on the Pacific coast. The Locom-
bian penal colony is there. He was sent there,
for life. He was dead, to all the world—he was
dead to me.”
“Then he is dead, to all—”
“Wait. I wanted to make sure of my free-
dom, to be foolishly sure of it. So I went North.
Then I went to New Orleans, to my old home.”
“But why?” he asked, as he noticed her
hesitation.
“A felony, in Louisiana, is a cause for ab-
solute divorce.”
“You mean you were set free in your own
country?”
“Yes, that is why I went to the United States.
That is why I was there when the news of this
revolution first reached me.”
“And Ganley knows this?” McKinnon de-
manded.
“Ganley knows everything,” she answered.
“And this is why you are so against him?”
She had to school herself into self-control be-
fore she could go on. -
“I have a better reason for being against him.
If he and his Liberal Party once acquire power,
Ganley will bring Perralta back to Guariqui; he
will commute his sentence. He will do this to
strike at my brother Arturo,”


190 THE LULL IN THE STORM
McKinnon looked at her in amazed and silent
comprehension. At last he seemed able to
understand, disturbed as he was by the thought
of so fragile a figure entangled in such brutal
and rudimentary conflicts. The lack of motive
for her presence in the same circle with Gan-
ley, whether facing or following such a man,
had been the underground yet actual cause of
more than one of his wayward suspicions. But
now he understood. And her confession, in-
stead of shocking and disturbing him, brought
into his softened eyes a sense of release, of more
perfect understanding. What she had told him
seemed to humanise her, to bring her into touch
with the world of realities as he had met and
known it. The last of his old-time fear of her,
his hampering awe of her, had vanished.
“We are both against Ganley,” he said, as
though speaking to himself. -
“You are against Ganley?” she questioned.
“To the end of time!” he answered, with a
solemnity that brought her great wondering
eyes up to his. She noticed that he rose from
his chair and closed the cabin door.
“Why have you changed?”
“I have not changed!”
**Then What is it?”
“It’s that I’m at last going to be half honest
with you—that I can’t continue not being


192 THE LULL IN THE STORM
leaned relaxingly back in the broken-armed
steamer-chair.
“Then we are acting together,” she mur-
mured, slowly, still a little mystified, still a little
sceptical as to this new issue which was reunit-
ing them.
“Yes, we’re acting together—and we’ll never
let Ganley win!” said McKinnon.
It was something more than the fire of foolish
ardour. And the woman at his side must have
seen and known it, for a touch of colour came
into her pale cheek. The electric fan purred
and hummed on its little bracket. The soft and
balmy night air beat on their faces. The gloom
and quietness of the ship was about them.
“Won’t you let me fight this fight out, for
you?” he asked, surrendering to the tide of feel-
ing that seemed tearing him from all his old
anchorages.
“If we only could !” she said, inadequately.
“We can, together,” he cried, with blind and
..unreasoning hope, resenting the look of some-
thing that seemed strangely akin to pity as she
gazed up at him.
She did not answer, in words, but some slowly
transforming emotion, some inner and unut-
tered capitulation slowly overbore the look of
trouble that weighed upon her. Then she closed
her eyes, as though shutting out some glimpse


THE LULL IN THE STORM 193
of happiness too great to be anything but a
mockery. Before she opened them McKinnon
had her hand between his great bony fingers,
and reckless fire and warmth and daring went
singing through his veins.
“I’m going to fight this out for you,” he said,
“and I’m going to win because you want me to
Win!”
“Oh, it will be hard!” she murmured, with
a vibrata of something that was almost hap-
piness in her voice.
“Hard!” he cried, in his new-born and un-
reasoning audacity; “I’d fight through Hell it-
self for you!”


CHAPTER XVI
THE VERNAL INVASION
GANLEY, togged out in a loose-fitting and
many-wrinkled suit of white duck, was pacing
the Laminian’s bridge-deck, like a polar bear
pacing its cage.
He watched the morning sun come up, bright
and brazen, like a newly minted penny. He
watched the aerials bridging the mastheads
and waiting like a seine to net any wandering
school of aeolian notes. He watched the bare-
footed sailors sluice the steaming deck-boards.
But most of all he watched the sky-line ahead,
with many ruminative uplifts of his heavy iron-
grey eyebrows.
It startled him a little to see McKinnon
emerge from the deck below, fresh from his
early bath in a rusty iron tub that had long since
parted with its porcelain, whistling like a sand-
boy as he climbed the brass-plated stairs." -
He emerged from the stair-head in a suit of
fresh linen, clean and cool-looking, as chirpy as
194


THE VERNAL INVASION 195
a city sparrow at a fountain-rim. It even dis-
turbed Ganley a little to behold him so cause-
lessly and so mysteriously happy.
But what more seriously disturbed the guar-
dedly watching man was the trivial discovery
that McKinnon took a key from his pocket as
he approached his station door, that he inserted
it in the lock and turned it before he gained
admittance to his narrow operating quarters.
It obviously meant that, for some reason or
other, the wireless-room was thereafter to be
kept under lock and key.
McKinnon himself knew there were more rea-
sons than one for that early morning mood of
his. It was not the mere thought that he could
now claim a definite and dependable ally which
brought his lightheartedness back to him. It
was more the consciousness of that new cama-
raderie which must exist between him and
Alicia Boynton, the promise of close and subtle
companionship with a young and lovely woman
whose interests were to be his interests. It was
the realisation that at last duty and desire had
been made one.
He found something wordlessly consoling in
the fact that as the long tropical morning wore
away he could look up from his tuner and
phones and rest his eye on the white-clad figure
of the girl, not a stone’s throw away from him.


196 THE VERNAL INVASION
It was understood that they were not to meet
openly. But he knew, as he looked out at her
from time to time, and saw her lying idly back
under the patched awnings of the bridge-deck,
apparently engrossed in a book, that she was
quietly coöperating with him in keeping a watch
of their common enemy.
The first-fruits of this quiet espionage was
the disturbing sight of Ganley making his way
to Captain Yandel’s stateroom.
What took place there it was impossible to
tell. All that Alicia could be sure of was that
he remained for half an hour with the ship’s
master. For the past few days, she suspected,
this thick-necked and bullock-minded officer had
been more than ever under the influence of
liquor. Alcohol, apparently, only served to
crown his sullen taciturnity with an animal-like
ferociousness when interfered with or even ac-
costed. That silent and friendless man, she
knew, was not one to be easily won over. He
had neither the brains nor the ambition to dis-
rupt the even tenor of his oxlike days by affilia-
tions with anything so disquieting as a revolu-
tion-maker. He was not open to a gun-runner’s
negocio, or he would surely have played his
hand earlier in the game.
Yet there was something terrifying to her in
the mere fact that Ganley could remain closeted


198 THE VERNAL INVASION
everything—he simply lives by fight and fric-
tion and opposition.”
“But think of his power!”
“I don’t think we need to, when we remember
he's nothing but a whisky-tippling and satur-
nine misanthrope.”
“Still, couldn’t he be bought over, if the
bribe were made big enough? As big as Gan-
ley could afford to make it?”
“I don’t pretend to knowledge as to what a
man will do when he's tempted enough,” an-
swered McKinnon, as he fixed his absent and
studious eyes on the troubled woman. “But
something instinctively tells me Captain Yandel
is not going to be our danger-point.” He was
silent for a moment or two, for her question had
sent his ever-active mind off on a new tangent.
“I must be the one to temporise with him and
keep him guessing until it's too late!”
“But it would only make things worse, in the
end.”
“Could they be any worse?”
“Perhaps not, but can you expect Ganley to
trust you now?”
“I don’t think he quite understands, yet.
And I’ll go to him and give him back his re-
volver. It’s no use to me—and I’ve noticed he
carries a second gun.”


202 THE PROFFERED CROWN
striking out titanic chords; it was like some
ghostly fingers playing on a harp of haste. Mc-
Kinnon sat between his four flashing white
walls and sent his Hertzian waves arrowing out
over the lonely acres of the Caribbean, hurling
his coil's mysterious and imponderable force
against the engulfing isolation of the sea. Then
came a space of silence and again the blue-
coloured sprite danced and jigged at the mast-
head.
As McKinnon had secretly hoped, that sus-
tained rattle and roar of his “spark” brought
to his open door the huge and white-clad figure
that had been meditatively pacing the bridge-
deck.
“Could you take a message for me, if you’re
in touch with anything?” asked Ganley from
the doorway.
The operator put down his earphones and
motioned for the other man to enter.
“I thought I had something then,” he ex-
plained, “but it’s only static breaking
through!”
“What’s static?”
“Lightning-flashes, somewhere beyond the
skyline. I can hear 'em go like a roll of drums
that bend up to what we call a cough or sneeze.”
“Perhaps you’re not in good running order,”
ventured Ganley, eying the apparatus as a


THE PROFFERED CROWN 203
street cat might eye a canary behind its cage-
bars.
“It’s working as smooth as oil,” answered
McKinnon, adjusting his receiver again and lis-
tening for a minute or two. “But we’re too far
away from things. We’re drifting too far
away from a white man’s world.”
Ganley sat down with his slow and ponderous
deliberateness. McKinnon found it hard to say
just what he wanted to say, for the weight of
their last encounter was still heavy on his spirit.
The other man seemed to understand the
Source of his embarrassment. He sat back, at
last, and diffidently remarked: “You had some-
thing to say to me?”
McKinnon reached a long thin arm over to
the back of his operating-table. -
“Yes, I’d forgotten to give you back this gun
of yours,” he said, as he held the revolver out
to its owner.
Ganley took it, diffidently, turned it over in
his fingers, puckered his heavy lips, and casu-
ally dropped the gun into his side pocket. Then
he looked up at the other man.
“That was pretty ugly talk you got about me
the other night,” he began, sliding low in his
chair until his attitude was nothing more than
a nonchalant lounge. “I suppose you swal-


204 THE PROFFERED CROWN
lowed it whole—everything that attractive
young woman said?”
It cost McKinnon an effort to hold himself
in, but the only line of procedure in warfare
such as this, he had learned, was the indirect
One.
“I don’t believe everything I hear,” was his
answer, as he assumed an equally indifferent
position.
“I guess most stories 've got their two
sides,” remarked Ganley, largely.
“This woman, though, claims you’re nothing
more than a gun-runner,” the younger man
carelessly reminded him.
“Well, I am,” suddenly declared Ganley, with
his little deep-set eyes squarely on the other
man’s. “Can’t there be two sides to gun-run-
ning?”
“The law side and the outlaw side, I sup-
pose,” suggested McKinnon.
Ganley stared at him, a little heavily, a little
impatiently, as the beetling iron-grey eye-
brows worked ruminatively up and down.
“Look here, son, I want you to understand
this situation | These bodega-hugging, labour-
loathing fire-eaters down here have got to have
their theatricals. And you’ve got to have some-
body set the stage and supply the coloured lights


THE PROFFERED CROWN 205
for 'em. And if one man doesn’t tote in the
fireworks, another damned soon will.”
“And toting in the fireworks is your
business?”
“That's my business! I keep supplying them
with the nicest little pin-wheels that money can
buy. They’ve got to have 'em, no matter where
they come from. So I'm keeping their show
going, and I’m making them pay for it good
and plenty.”
“You only supply the fireworks?”
“Not always; but ain’t even that enough?
It’s revolutions and revolution-talk that run
their cafés—for you’ll notice these little distrac-
tions always start in the cities, where there’s
plenty of vino blanco and spare time. There’s
not a republic down there that’s able to eat
right, if it hasn’t got a boundary dispute to
take up its spare time, or a junta-fed patriot
to keep handing out rebel proclamations. They
live on 'em. And I keep their vaudeville going
for 'em.”
“But hasn’t this particular calling its par-
ticular dangers?” McKinnon casually inquired.
“That’s part of the game! There are even
men down there who’d go so far as to call me
a lawbreaker. If that’s what I am, I’d like to
know what you’d call those Yankee concession-
hunters and wire-pullers and bribe-givers who


206 THE PROFFERED CROWN
burrow around for underground contracts and
then run squealing to Washington like a stuck
pig every time a peon slaps a banana-car with a
machete! No, sir, that’s my market, and I’m
going to hold it. I’m going to climb onto that
Guariqui gang's pay-car and hang the completo
sign over its dashboard l’’
“But isn’t this man De Brigard getting there
ahead of you?” ventured McKinnon, watching
for the effect of that softly exploratory probe.
“I guess I’ll be in time for a little of the
fun,” answered Ganley, guardedly. The other
was compelled to acknowledge there was some-
thing primordially massive about this uncouth
Caribbean king-maker. There was something
titanic and persuasive about this self-confessed
filibuster of petty republics. His very audacity
was a ponderable asset. The sheer force of the
man could still appeal to some substratum of
romance in the other’s none too emotional state
of mind.
Some trace of this feeling must have shown
itself in McKinnon’s half-smiling glance, for a
new confidence crept into the tones of the man
so closely watching him.
“I’ve been in my tight holes,” he placidly
declared, folding his arms over his great chest.
“And I’ve got out of 'em, every time, just as
I’m going to get out of this one!”


THE PROFFERED CROWN 207
“But where's the hole, this time?” mildly in-
quired the operator.
“Not bein’ dead sure I’ve got you on my
side,” said his candid enemy.
“But you have got me!” protested the other.
“Then why haven’t you been sayin’ so?”
“I can’t say so, openly! I’ve got to watch my-
self and go slow,” equivocated McKinnon.
“But what’s the use o’ falling between two
stools? Why not swing in with the right side,
nip and tuck, while you’ve still got the
chance?”
Ganley was on his feet by this time, stand-
ing over him.
“See here, you’re no piker. You're quick,
and you’re clever.
“You’re not afraid of a big thing, just be-
cause it is big. I’ve got my wires laid, and I’m
going to knock that Locombian government off
its feet, if it costs me half a million to do it.
I’m goin’ to blow it higher’n Gilroy’s kite.
They’ve got chromium-mines down there worth
more’n a million. I’m going to clean out that
Guariqui gang and I’m going to do it good when
I do it. That’s my country down there,” and he
waved a great apelike arm toward the south-
west, “and a week from now’ll see it made into
a white man’s land.”
McKinnon peered up at him, wondering if by


208 THE PROFFERED CROWN
any chance the man had indeed persuaded him-
self of the justness of his cause.
“I tell you you’ve got to swing in with us,”
Ganley was blandly declaring. “You haven’t
any show. This work is going to be done quick
and done quiet.”
“But how about leaks?”
“There’s not going to be any leaks. I’ve got
my plan for that.”
“What plan?”
Ganley laughed his short and mirthless laugh.
“A little plan to keep things quiet. The one
and only thing we don’t want is interference.
It’s our fight, and once we win it there’ll be no
trouble. We’re a nation then, damn it, the New
Liberal Party. We’re a government of our
own, and we can go back and patch up outside
quarrels when we see fit.”
“But what will you do with the Laminian?
How about our captain, for instance?” McKin-
non asked.
“I’ll give him more than aguardiente to
worry over!” declared the gun-runner, with a
snort of contempt for that saturnine ship’s
master. “Oh, I’ve got this thing figured out as
close as a sum in arithmetic. Some night this
week our men are to surround their little two-
by-four capital. Tuesday morning, by day-
break, if our guns and stuff are all landed,


CHAPTER XVIII
THE COAST OF MISCHANCE
IT was two days later that the Laminian
swung in toward the coast of Locombia. Her
rust-stained bow, under the lash of the sweep-
ing trade-wind, lifted and dipped again in a
sapphire-coloured sea streaked with yellow
wind-rows of drift-weed. The hot sun blistered
the painted woodwork; the air was like a back-
draft from an opened furnace.
The wind freshened, as the day wore away,
whipping spray along the bleached decks and
humming through the tight-strung aerials at the
masthead. It brought with it occasional driv-
ing showers that pelted on the sodden canvas
and steaming woodwork.
McKinnon, in his cabin, laboured in vain over
his tuning box and responder. He had held
Ganley off for another few hours, hoping
against hope that something might still be
picked up. The gun-runner had not accepted
this enforced delay with a good grace; there
211


212 THE COAST OF MISCHANCE
could be little more hope for quibbles or equivo-
cations in that quarter.
McKinnon, stooping to overlook his dynamo,
felt that he had at last reached the end of his
rope. The Princeton was still beyond his call.
When he stood up again he mopped his face
with a handkerchief, and irritably summoned
a steward and for the second time sent down
to the engine-room asking how he was expected
to operate his coils on less than a hundred volts.
Then he once more adjusted his helmet-re-
ceiver and sat back and sighed, letting the hot
current from his electric fan play on his face.
But the tropical air seemed devitalised, bereft
of its oxygen. He was dimly conscious of the
passage of time, of the muffled and monotonous
drone of the fan, of the casual ship-noises far
below deck. But nothing came to stir his re-
sponder into life. There was not a ship or sta-
tion to be picked up. The day had deepened
into evening, and nothing had come to help him
solve his problem. -
Already, on the ship’s bridge, the navigating
officer in soiled duck had picked up the Toajiras
Light. Behind that light lay the flat and mias-
mal Locombian coast. And somewhere, still
farther"to the southwest, armies were being ar-
rayed against each other. Somewhere, across
the deepening night, men were ambushing and


THE COAST OF MISCHANCE 213
shooting. Peons dragged out of peaceful val-
leys, “volunteers” commandeered at the point
of the bayonet, unattached citizens forcibly
seized in cafés and the open streets, were being
set at one another’s throats, because it suited
the plans of a placid-eyed and lethargic con-
spirator who wrung power and money out of
the optimism of a deluded and childlike people.
McKinnon, as he sat in his hot and stifling
station, wondered if his mission had failed. He
asked himself if he had not been outmaneu-
vered, from the first.
The weight of this seeming failure grew
heavier and heavier on his spirit. He felt as
though every dead body in that Locombian war-
fare was pressing down on him, as though the
blood from every gunshot wound was submerg-
ing him in a river of self-hate.
He turned back to his apparatus, sullenly,
wearily, desperately. But call and tune and call
again as he might, he could get nothing. He
wondered if, by any chance, Duran and his gov-
ernment were already a thing of the past; if
the Laminian and all she carried had come too
late; if Guariqui had already fallen. Then he
mopped his face again, and told himself that
the heat had got on his nerves. Any one, when
tired and half-cooked, he muttered, would feel
dispirited.


214 THE COAST OF MISCHANCE
He pulled himself together, with an effort,
and coerced his attention on the instruments be-
fore him. The thing was not over, he doggedly
maintained; he still had his fighting-chance.
His watch above the responder was inter-
rupted by a peremptory rattle of his cabin
door. He was, at Alicia's suggestion, keeping
his wireless station under lock and key, though
it had long since slipped his mind that he had
locked himself in. He opened his door, guar-
dedly, and was both relieved and disconcerted
to see the figure of Captain Yandel swaying
there.
“What’re you picking up?” demanded the
captain, thickly. His face was an almost apo-
plectic red, and a heavy odour of brandy drifted
into the close little cabin. Yet the squat, wide-
shouldered figure stood erect and steady enough
on the ludicrously short and wide-planted legs.
McKinnon wondered how many years he would
last, in such a climate. Then he marvelled at
the thought of how slowly men were able to
kill themselves; the sheer pertinacity of life
amazed him, as he peered up at the hulk before
him, and in some way knew that it would drag
on and on through its sottish years, that the
overheated blood and the hardening arteries
and the long-abused body would clamour for


THE COAST OF MISCELANCE 215
their own, would fight for life and movement,
to the bitter end.
“I haven’t picked up anything,” answered
the thoughtful-eyed man at the operating-table.
“And I’ve been hugging this coherer for four
hours.”
“Can’t you get that dam’ed Puerto Locom-
bia operator?”
“I can keep calling.”
“Well, keep at him till he answers. I want
to know what they’re doin’ with that tin-horn
republic o’ theirs. And as soon as you get any-
thing let me know.”
He turned away, looked up at the night,
swayed a little, slowly regained his equilibrium,
and wandered forward to the darkness of the
bridge.
McKinnon’s hand went out obediently to the
switch, his dynamo purred and hummed, and he
caught up the lever-handle of his key. The
great blue spark exploded from the coils and
leaped and hissed from knob to knob across the
spark-gap. “Pt-Ba,” “Pt-Ba,” he called, per-
functorily.
He looked up to see the restless captain back
at his door again, stupidly watching his
spark. The operator knew he was calling a
dead station, but he played out his part.
“I might do something, if they’d give me a


216 THE COAST OF MISCHANCE
little more power from that engine-room,” he
said, by way of excuse.
“Then you’ll get your power,” declared the
autocrat of his little world. “You’ll get power
enough, if that’s all that’s wrong,” he repeated,
as he made his way once more toward the
bridge.
McKinnon switched off and waited until Cap-
tain Yandel’s order had time to be acted on.
Then he tested his spark again. The eruption,
as the contact-points of his despatching-key
came together, seemed to stab and tear a sud-
den hole in the silence. It roared and cannon-
aded out through the little cabin, until the night
echoed with it; it spit and hissed from the mast-
heads, aggressively, incisively, as he continued
to move the contact-lever up and down, slow and
strong, and sent his call arrowing out through
the darkness: “Pt-Ba,” “Pt-Ba.” But inter-
polated between each call for “Puerto Locom-
bia’’ was an equally impatient and anxious
Morse prayer for “Cruiser Princeton—Cruiser
Princeton.’’
“That’s almost enough to wake the dead,”
he mentally assured himself as he adjusted his
“set,” switched off, and pressed the phones
close in to his ears.
Through these phones, as he listened, came a
sound as feeble and minute as the tick of that


THE COAST OF MISCHANCE 217
insect known as a death-watch. His first
thought was that it could be nothing more than
a mere “echo-signal,” from too high intensity.
His second thought convinced him that this was
out of the question; too long a time had elapsed
between his own send and those coherent dots
and dashes creeping into his startled ear. It
was an outside message, a call being intercepted
by his antennae. Yet the signal that he was
reading was the same as his own “Pt-Ba,”
“Pt-Ba.”
McKinnon’s hand once more darted out to his
switch, and his face was alert and changing with
his changing thought as he caught up his key-
lever. And again the blue spark exploded
across the spark-gap, and the cabin walls threw
back the lightning-like flash and pulse of the
illumination. Already he had forgotten the
heat, the depressing sense of frustration, the
brooding consciousness of impending defeat
that had weighed upon him. Switching off, he
sat with inclined head, intently, raptly listening.
He was startled to feel a huge and ape-like
hand suddenly take hold of his arm.
“What’re you getting?” demanded the owner
of the arm.
It was Ganley standing there close beside
him. His dark face, wet with perspiration,
shone in the strong side-light as though it had


218 THE COAST OF MISCHANCE
been oiled. His peering eyes showed in two thin
crescents of white, out of the heavy shadow
made by the projecting eye-bones. -
“Nothing,” was McKinnon’s sharp retort.
“I’m only trying to get something.”
He shook the detaining hand from his arm,
and gave all his attention to his call. But the
intruder was not to be so easily overridden.
“Are you with us?” he demanded, preg-
nantly, as the preoccupied operator again
caught up the phone-set.
“Yes—yes, I’m with you,” cried the man,
stooping over the responder. “But I’m trying
to operate!”
“What in hell does this operating count if
you’re with us?” persisted the placid-toned
Ganley, determined, apparently, on a policy of
obstruction.
“It’s this call that’s going to save both our
scalps,” was the abstracted yet hurried retort.
“How save my scalp?” demanded Ganley,
with a detaining hand on the other’s fore-arm.
The stooping McKinnon straightened up and
wheeled on him, every nerve ready to snap like
an overstrained bowstring.
“I’ve got to catch this call! Don’t talk—keep
away from me!”
Ganley looked at him heavily. He did not
speak. But a third voice thundered abruptly


THE COAST OF MISCHANCE 219
and unexpectedly through the hot cabin. It was
Captain Yandel's, belligerent, stentorian, bull-
like.
“Come out o’ that station!”
The man addressed did not move.
“Come out o’ there and stop interferin’ with
my men!”
Ganley turned his head slowly about and
gazed at the ship’s master. But otherwise he
showed no sign of having heard.
“Are you comin’ out o’ there?” demanded
that apoplectic-faced officer, in a roar of
inebriate and affronted authority. There was
no evading his blind and unreasoning anger.
Ganley shrugged a massive shoulder.
“Since you ask me so politely, I s'pose so,”
he conceded, with his mirthless laugh. Then he
placidly turned about and stepped to the door-
way, and from the doorway to the open deck.
“Now you get below-decks where you be-
long!”
The gaze of the two men met and locked; it
was like the clash and lock of elk-antlers.
In that interlocked gaze lay animal-like chal-
lenge and counter-challenge, threat and counter-
threat, malignant fortitude and an even more
malignant defiance.
Ganley, with a lip-curl of contempt, thrust


220 THE COAST OF MISCHANCE
his hands slowly down in his pockets, and then
turned on his heel and went below.
“What’re you gettin’?” Captain Yandel de-
manded of the man chapleted with the shining
band of steel ending in two small black knobs.
“They don’t answer!” cried McKinnon, with
a gasp of exasperation.
“Don’t answer?” demanded the captain.
“No, I’ve lost them!” was the bitter cry of
the man bent over his coherer.
The ship’s master’s blasphemy was both pro-
longed and voluble.
“And you ain’t goin’ to get ’em?”
“I’ve lost them,” was the repeated and al-
most hopeless answer. The morose-eyed officer
peered at the operator's drawn and sweat-
stained face.
“You’re makin’ a devil of a nice mess o’ this
business, between you!” he declared, with an-
other oath of disgust.
The wireless-operator only stared at his in-
struments, silently, challengingly, combatively.


THE INTERCEPTED CALL 223
with numerals. He could hear the operator’s
low mumble of disappointment as he lifted the
“set” from his head, disarranging more than
ever his already tousled hair. Then the lis-
tener drew closer, for a sudden little sound,
half-grunt, half-cry, had broken from McKin-
non’s lips.
The phones were once more held down hard
on his ears as he stooped forward, this time
wide-awake.
The coherer had stirred and quivered into
life. A faint and febrile little shower of ticks
was pounding minutely against his ear-drums.
Some one was “sending.”
He reached out and drew up the form-pad
before him as he listened. The call was com-
ing clearly now, repeated again and again.
“Pt-Ba,” “Pt-Ba,” came the query through the
night. McKinnon, as he listened and “tuned
up” to the other man’s tensity, could recog-
nise the nature of the “send” as one would
recognise the accent of a Westerner in Boston
or a Londoner in Dublin. It was the unmis-
takable yet undefinable inflection and cadence
of a navy man. It was an American battle-
ship of some sort, calling Puerto Locombia.
McKinnon was on his feet again, tingling
with excitement. He threw down his switch-


224 THE INTERCEPTED CALL
lever, caught up his key, and sent the answer-
ing call rattling and exploding across his spark-
gap, loud above the purr of the wakened
dynamo.
Then he turned again to his phones and lis-
tened. They had not tuned up to him; they
had not picked him up. For still again came
the call “Pt-Ba,” “Pt-Ba.” It was out of the
hours for sending. The engine-room had dimin-
ished his power, leaving him without voltage
enough to make a “splash” that would reach
the war-ship.
But his hand went out to his form-pad and
he bent over it, busy with his transcription, as
the noise pulsing and creeping in through his
receivers translated itself into intelligibility.
This is cruiser Princeton lying off harbor of Torreblanca.
Send word of Guariqui situation. Mobile despatch two
days ago reports protection wanted for American interests.
Please instruct our consul send immediate advice.
LIEUTENANT VERDU.
Then came a minute or two of silence, and
then the call again, followed by the repeated
message:
PT-BA: Are you asleep? Why does Princeton get no
anSWer?
LIEUTENANT VERDU,


THE INTERCEPTED CALL 225
And still again came the silence, and still
again the call, indignant, peremptory, to the ap-
preciatively trained ear as eloquent of impa-
tience in its microphonic dots and dashes as the
human voice itself could be.
Automatically, McKinnon wrote out the de-
spatches, word for word, as a matter of record.
His chance had come at last: all he now
needed was power. It would take him but a
minute to slip down to the engine-room, he con-
cluded, as he threw on a striped green bath-
robe with a hood like a monk’s cowl. Then
he could see for himself that they were sling-
ing the right voltage up to him.
He sprang for the cabin door, unlocked it,
and swung it open. As he leaped out across the
door-sill he ran head-on into the arms of Ganley.
He scarcely looked up. His one thought was
to reach that engine-room and to reach it with-
out loss of time. He accepted the momentary
obstruction as nothing more than a clumsy sea-
man who had scarcely been given time to step
aside. He struggled to edge about the unyield-
ing bulk, swinging to one side with a preoccu-
pied half-growl of impatience. It was not until
he found himself seized and almost carried back
into his cabin that he saw either the meaning
or the menace of the situation.
“Is that message for me?” demanded Ganley,


226 THE INTERCEPTED CALL
his huge figure blocking the doorway, his glance
on the top sheet of the form-pad.
“No!” was the quick retort.
Ganley reached back and swung the cabin
door shut.
“I’d like to glance over that message,” sug-
gested the man by the door. His tone was soft
and purring, but there was a suggestion of
claws behind the velvet.
“This is only ship's business,” explained
McKinnon, in an effort at appeasement. Yet he
quietly ripped the written sheet from the pad,
his spirit of latent obduracy now well stirred
into life.
“Could I look over that message?” repeated
Ganley, as quietly as before.
There was no mistaking the threat in his
voice. McKinnon, eying him, saw his hand drop
down to his side. The movement was quick and
casual. But when the hand was raised again
it held a revolver, a heavy, forty-four caliber
thing of blue gun-metal, with a sawed-off barrel.
The worn corners of the metal glimmered dis-
agreeably, in baleful little touches of high-light,
as Ganley held the barrel low, close in against
the other man’s startled body.
“What's this for?” asked McKinnon, his
skirmishing thought frenziedly exploring the


THE INTERCEPTED CALL 227
future, seeking for his next move and his rea-
sons for it.
“It’s for you!” was the quiet yet sinister
3InSWer.
“But what’s the good of fool by-play like
this?” protested the other, still wondering
where his chance was to come in.
“Could I look over that message?” reiterated
Ganley, with no trace of excitement in his voice.
The eyes of the two men met; they studied
each other for a second or two of unbroken
silence. Then the operator flung the sheet on
the pine table before the other man. The situa-
tion allowed of no further equivocation.
“Read it, of course—if you want to !”
Ganley pounced on it, like a cat on a cor-
nered mouse. He backed away to the door, but
kept his revolver still poised in front of him
while he read.
McKinnon, as he watched the gun-runner
calmly restore the sheet of paper to his table,
saw the chance he had at first hoped for slip
past him.
“Don’t you think we’d better kill that mes-
sage?” Ganley suggested with a pregnant
movement of his right hand.
“Why?” asked McKinnon. He was still try-
ing to think, to gain time.
“You know why,” retorted the gun-runner.


228 THE INTERCEPTED CALL
The operator looked at his apparatus, at the
sheet of writing, and at the opponent who had
his heel on the neck of the situation. Then he
laughed in the purely passionless way of the
man so submerged in bitterness that fate can
bring him no further sting.
“I don’t see why,” he answered, still clutch-
ing about for some forlorn straw of deliverance.
Ganley came a step or two nearer.
“I’ll tell you why,” he said, drawing his
gravely interrogative eyebrows closer to his flat
nose-bridge.
“I’ve decided to be up here on this deck of
yours to-night—it's going to be more comfor-
table than that cabin of mine.”
“That’ll only get Yandel down on you
again!” parried the other.
“Mebbe it will—but seein’ this is our last
night at sea, I’m going to enjoy it. And the
sound of any message, of any message what-
ever, going out on those wires up there, is going
to spoil my night! Is that plain enough for
you?”
He put the revolver back in his pocket and
waited. The operator did not answer him. He
knew that all he could do now would be to grope
forward slowly and blindly; he could only crawl
and test and wait, like a crustacean with


THE INTERCEPTED CALL 229
foolishly waving feelers. Ganley, watching him,
backed toward the door.
“I’ll not say good-night,” he purred, with
mock affability. “If you’re still in doubt about
anything, you’ll find me on the deck here all
right!”
The operator watched him as he went through
the door and as he wheeled about for one malig-
nant and admonitory stare into the cabin.
From the depths of his soul McKinnon resented
that smile.
“You own this ship?” he asked, with a quiet-
ness that might have disturbed a less intrepid
spirit. From that hour forward, he was begin-
ning to feel, dissimulation would be useless.
“No, but I’m going to,” was Ganley’s placid
retort. He had taken out one of his evil-look-
ing thick, black cigars, and was proceeding to
light it with the utmost leisure.
“And this is your apparatus?”
“And my particular little corner of the
earth,” responded Ganley, with the studiously
voluptuous satisfaction of the idealist who has
achieved his dream.
McKinnon’s eyes narrowed. The taste of
being beaten at the only game he knew how to
play was growing very bitter in his mouth.
“And supposing I can’t kill this message?”
he ventured. Had the words not been in the


230 THE INTERCEPTED CALL
form of an interrogation, they might have been
claimed to carry the weight of an ultimatum.
The huge, red-faced figure with the black
cigar leaned in through the narrow doorway.
“I think you will, though,” was the vaguely
menacing retort.
“And why?”
Ganley laughed a little.
“Do you s'pose I’m going to let a couple of
children like you”—and he threw a world of
contempt into the word “children” as he ut-
tered it—“step in and try to stop my steam-
roller?”
“You haven’t told me why?” mildly inquired
McKinnon, more and more becoming master of
himself again.
“Well, this is why,” said Ganley, and he
leaned closer in through the door as he spoke.
“If you don’t choose to put a padlock on that
wire, I’m going to put a padlock on you!”
“Just what does that mean?” was the quiet-
voiced inquiry.
“It means that you’ll kill that message, or
I'll kill you!”
Then Ganley shut the cabin door, quietly, and
the operator was left standing alone in his
station.


232 THE LISTENING ALLY
“What is it?” asked the operator, nettled by
the intent look on her listening face.
She made a second sign for silence. Then she
took a deep breath of relief. For the first time
he noticed that she was fully dressed, as
though for land travel. Something about her
conveyed to him the passing impression that
she was as disconcertingly well-groomed as she
was incongruously at ease. Her face, under the
heavy upturned veil, still carried its inalienable
touch of youth and vigour, for all the anxious
shadow about the eyes, which scarcely betrayed
the fact that she had been passing troubled and
restless nights.
“I have heard every word,” she explained,
in her low and intimate tones.
“Then you know what a mess we’ve made of
it!”
“I was leaning on the rail, under the bow
of the life-boat,” she went on, disregarding his
exclamation. “I waited until Ganley passed be-
hind the officers’ quarters. He's walking up
and down, smoking—and waiting.”
“Did he see you come in here?” asked
McKinnon, distressed at the thought that here
was no hospitality and no harbour he could ex-
tend to her, feeling that this fight was his own,
and his alone. -


234 THE LISTENING ALLY
“Then I’ll watch your key while you go be-
low,” she promptly suggested.
He pondered the problem for a moment or
two.
“No, that would only be exposing yourself
and inviting danger,” she amended. “You
must give me the message. I must take it to the
engine-room.”
“I couldn’t see you taking a risk like this,”
he protested, still puzzling over the problem.
“There’s no risk, with me, because no one
will suspect. And you must stay with your
key.”
He lifted his revolver from his bath-robe
pocket, after another moment of thought.
“Then I want you to take this,” he told her,
holding it out for her. He noticed her puzzled
glance up into his face, and then her quick and
unequivocal movement of repudiation. They
both knew, as they stood facing each other, that
the ever-narrowing apex of the dilemma was
crowding up to its final climacteric point.
“I could not use it,” she said, shrinking away
from the glimmering and intimidating little in-
strument of death. “I will not even need it.”
“Then you must not be seen leaving this
station.”
“But what will you do—when the power
comes?” she asked.


THE LISTENING ALLY 235
“I’m going to send,” was his reply. “I’ll
fight it out with him. Ganley can’t dictate to
the high seas of the world.”
Even in anarchy and outlawry, he felt, there
had to be some final substratum of reason. And
Ganley had fallen back on nothing but brute
force. |
“Why couldn’t I go to the captain?” she
pleaded.
“That’s worse than useless. He’s drunk.
And we’ll only get him against us, for he’d
order us to keep out of the mess. He’d fight shy
of entangling alliances. He’d forbid me to send,
for he's got his ship to clear from that port.”
“But the Princeton would be his protection,
as well as ours.”
“That’s true—but the man’s brain is too
brandy-soaked to understand such a situation.
We’ve got to act ourselves, and on our own
hook.”
He told her, briefly, the way to the engine-
room. Then he switched off his light, unlocked
his door, and glanced out to see that the way
was clear.
Yet he waited at that open door with his re-
volver in his hand, every moment of the time
until she had crossed to the stair-head, until she
had passed quietly down the brass-plated steps,


THE LISTENING ALLY 237
the cabin-window with a shelf-board wrenched
from his closet, and in drawing out his trunk
and standing it on end, to be shoved against the
locked door as a further re-enforcement against
attack from outside. The wall-plates them-
selves, he knew, could never be penetrated by a
bullet. It was the wooden-shuttered window
and the door alone that needed defense.
No touch of fear rested on McKinnon as he
worked out his plan, point by point; it was more
perplexity as to the outcome of the movement,
touched with wonder as to whether or not any
contingency had been overlooked. He was glad
of action, of something against which to direct
his stored-up nervous energy. He regretted,
vaguely, that Alicia had in any way been
dragged into this trial by fire, that she had in
any way been identified with a combat so sor-
did and demeaning. Yet he felt, in some way,
that this final combat was to subject her to the
acid-test of a final integrity. It would be un-
alloyed purity of purpose, he argued, that would
keep her at his side during such an ordeal. He
almost gloried in the thought that such an un-
equivocal and authentic seal was to be put on a
relationship that had once seemed little more
than fortuitous.


CHAPTER XXI
THE UNEXPECTED BLOW
McKINNON, ill at ease, tested his coils and
wondered if Alicia had indeed succeeded in
reaching the engine-room. Then he wondered
if she were once more safely back in her cabin.
Then all thought passed away from him, for the
light patter of hurried footsteps, followed by
an oath and an answering cry of alarm, sounded
from outside his door.
“You keep out o’ here!”
It was Ganley's voice, short and brusk. The
knob of the locked door twisted and moved.
The new-comer, whoever it was, must have
caught hold of this knob from the outside. It
was equally plain, from the sound of the sudden
gasp and the scuffle that followed, that Ganley
had flung this intercepted visitor aside from the
door. It was then, and only then, that the lis-
tening operator realised who that new-comer
must be.
McKinnon switched out his light before he
238


242 THE UNEXPECTED BLOW
ley swung out with the oak-framed steamer-
chair which he had already caught up as a
weapon of defence.
He swung it short and quick, with a forward
and elliptical motion, as he leaned out toward
the dimly discerned shadow. He heard it strike
home; he heard the inarticulate little half-
groan, half-sigh, as the stunned man crumpled
down over the door-sill.
Ganley also heard the woman’s cry of terror,
but he had other things to think of, other fish
to fry. He pawed frenziedly about the cabin
wall until he found the switch, and turned on
the light. He saw McKinnon still sprawled
half over his door-sill; he saw the woman
crouched shield-like over his body; he saw the
broken steamer-chair lying on the cabin floor.
He also saw the heavy iron dumb-bell, cov-
ered with rusted canvas, lying at his feet, not
six inches from the dynamo base. The terri-
fied woman, waiting for the unknown end,
screamed again, and still again, as she saw him
stoop and catch it up.
It was not until the great, ape-like arm of the
gun-runner brought the dumb-bell crashing
down on the operating table that she realised
her mistake, that his actual intention flashed
through her.
His fury now was not being directed toward


THE UNEXPECTED BLOW 243
McKinnon. It was the instrument that he was
attacking. For the heavy iron had struck with
a crashing blow on the delicately poised re-
sponder, with its fragile and mysterious co-
herer, crushing the flimsy mechanism of glass
and wood and metal as a mallet might crush
a bird’s egg. She felt McKinnon’s mumbling
and struggling body under her; but she gave it
no thought. She only saw and knew that this
maddened brute was beating the very heart out
of their wireless apparatus, that with every
blow he was crushing her last hopes. She
dragged and wrenched McKinnon’s revolver
from his outstretched hand. But before she
could so much as raise it, Ganley’s second blow
had fallen. This time it fell on the “key” it-
self, tearing the heavy metal lever free from its
binding-post. He had just caught it up and
flung it malignantly through the open cabin
door, whirling out into the sea, when she fired.
Her first shot went wild. Before she had time
for a second, Ganley had wheeled about and
sprung on her through the smoke-filled air. The
huge forty-four Colt seemed too heavy for her,
beyond her strength, for she had no second
chance of using it, of poising and adjusting and
aiming it, as she knew she should have.
But she caught at him and clung to him,
blindly, panting and screaming, wondering why


244 THE UNEXPECTED BLOW
no one came. She clung and clawed at him
like a cat, until, under the sheer fury of that
attack, he had to take thought to defend him-
self.
He fell back a step or two, and the movement
sent them both falling over the broken steamer-
chair, grotesquely, foolishly. But not for a mo-
ment did the woman cease to fight and scream.
The sound of it all seemed to sting the dazed
McKinnon into a consciousness of what was
going on. He pawed about at the wall, foolishly,
for support, like a child learning to walk; he
dragged himself up to a sitting posture. But
before he could struggle to his feet, Captain
Yandel and an officer from the bridge were in
the cabin. He saw them tearing and dragging
at Ganley’s great limbs. He saw the white and
panting and disheveled group once more up-
right, each shaking and facing the other. Then
for the first time he saw his dismantled ap-
paratus.
“What's this shooting on my ship?” roared
the captain.
“That cat tried to kill me!” cried Ganley,
breathing short and quick. The woman strug-
gled to speak, but the captain gave her no at-
tention. His eye for the first time had fallen
on McKinnon leaning against the cabin wall,


THE UNEXPECTED BLOW 245
with a little trickle of blood running down over
one swollen cheek-bone.
“What’s this mean?” he demanded of his
operator. McKinnon’s senses had come back to
him by this time. But a hopelessness that was
almost worse than death itself crept through
him.
“He’s killed our wireless! Our wireless!
Can’t you see he’s killed it!”
The captain's mental state was such that
ideas filtered into the narrow seat of his con-
sciousness but slowly.
“But how? And why?”
“The responder!” gasped McKinnon.
**But What Of it?”
“Look at that responder!” cried the opera-
tor. “It’s smashed. And the key’s ruined !
He’s cut the heart out of our apparatus!”
“But I want to know the meaning of this bar-
room brawling aboard my ship !” still thun-
dered its master.
McKinnon pointed landward savagely, to-
ward the mangrove swamps and mountains of
Locombia.
“He’s been trying to stop my sending. He
said he’d kill me if I sent.”
“That’s a lie,” retorted Ganley. “He’s
working with this woman to juggle messages


246 THE UNEXPECTED BLOW
for Duran! They're making a tool of you and
your ship !”
“That shows who's making a tool of you!”
cried McKinnon, pointing with his lean and
shaking finger to the shattered responder. The
ship captain’s face was blotched and purplish
and horrible to look at by this time.
“And he's killed our wireless?”
“Look at it,” answered McKinnon.
For the second time Captain Yandel looked.
The indignity, the enormity of the thing threw
him into a slowly growing ecstasy of sublimated
rage.
“And who fired that shot?” he demanded,
with an almost voluptuous delight in the antic-
ipation of further fuel for a still more tower-
ing fire.
“I did,” said the white-faced woman.
“So you did,” purred the captain, slowly re-
leasing the torrent. “And you’re a nice pair,
the two of you, makin’ a pot-house of my ship !
You half-breed filibusters! You garlic-eating
outlaws! You murderin’, slave-drivin’ tinhorn
conspirators!”
“Stop!” cried McKinnon.
“Get out o’ here, you flimflam beach-
combers!” roared on the unheeding officer.
“Get out o' my sight! Get down to your
cabins and stay there until you’re put ashore


THE UNEXPECTED BLOW 247
at Puerto Locombia, or by the living God, if
you so much as show a nose outside your doors,
I’ll clap the whole lot o' you into irons and carry
you back to New York harbour!”
It meant nothing to the weak and bewildered
girl, after what she had gone through, but it
wounded some inner and ever guarded part of
her to see that McKinnon made no effort to in-
tervene, that he had not stepped in and spoken
for her.
It was not until his steadying glance met hers
that she began to realise he was holding some-
thing in reserve, that he had his reasons, that
he was plotting out some new line of procedure,
and with this discovery came a renewed memory
of the hopelessness of their position, of the
dangers confronting them, of the last avenue of
delivery that had been cut off from them. The
blasphemy and truculence of a ship captain
meant nothing to her; the satyr-like exultation
of Ganley meant nothing. She knew that she
had been fighting for life, or something almost
as worthy as life. And she knew that the fight
had by no means approached its end.


CHAPTER XXII
THE PRIMORDIAL HOUB
IT was nothing but an eye-glance that passed
between Alicia and McKinnon. Yet in that
fraction of a second intimacies flashed between
them, a message was delivered and received,
the encouragement of one lonely soul offering
its help to another was cryptically given and
taken. It showed her, too, that judgment and
intelligence were once more on their throne
with her ally, that he was no longer beating
and threshmg his way about on the primordial
sloughs of mere assault and defence. He was a
thinking being once more, with his own secret
ends and his own secret means to them. And
she was sick of the primordial; every woman's
fibre in her body was offended and felt degraded
by that caveman’s hand-to-hand fight through
which she had passed.
The shaking-limbed captain had swung about
on McKinnon.
“Have you picked up anything about fightin'
248


THE PRIMORDIAL HOUR 249
in there?” he demanded, with his guttural run-
ning obligato of mariner’s oaths. “Or have
you been too taken up with your own fightin’?”
“I’ve picked up nothing,” was McKinnon’s
3InSWer.
“Then why can’t you get Guariquit”
The ship’s master was still slow in grasping
the situation.
“I tell you we’re cut off from everything!
My responder’s gone!”
“Can’t you fix it?”
“No!”
“You Can’t?”
“Not unless there’s a De Forest responder
brought aboard from Puerto Locombia.”
“Can’t you shift without it?”
“No more than you can live without a heart.”
The captain turned on the strangely placid-
eyed and listening Ganley. The latter’s indif-
ference seemed to sting him into a renewed
ecstasy of anger.
“You’ll cool your heels in the Puerto Locom-
bia quartel for this,” he declared, with another
of his explosive oaths. “I’ll damned soon hand
you over where you belong!”
His threat had no ponderable effect on his
placid-eyed listener. The gun-runner’s heavy
face, with its houndlike, pendulous jaws, and
the drooping-lidded, deep-set eyes, with their


250 THE PRIMORDIAL HOUR
misleading look of pathos, seemed to show noth-
ing but a patient forbearance.
“I want you to get that couple where they
belong,” he calmly and slowly replied. “I want
that woman put where she won’t be taking pot-
shots at every passenger she doesn’t like!”
The waiting and wide-eyed group at the door
had increased by this time, until their bodies,
pressing close, shut all air from the crowded
cabin. The captain shouldered them back sav-
agely. That his authority should be overrid-
den, in his own ship, on his own deck, was more
than he could endure.
“Get out o’ here!” he cried, in his arbitrary
and inconsequential rage. “Get out o’ this
cabin, or I'll throw you out!”
The ship’s mate, a wiry Costa Rican with the
hungry and predaceous face of a pirate, made
an effort to forestall his superior officer’s in-
tention. He dropped the leather-covered bridge-
telescope which in his haste he had carried with
him, and caught the rebellious passenger by the
right arm, as though to drag him forth.
But one sweep of that huge right arm sent
the mate stumbling and falling over the ruins
of the steamer-chair.
Captain Yandel beheld that offence, and it
left him no longer a reasoning being. His last
instinctive sense of order and right had been


THE PRIMORDIAL HOUR 251
outraged. He caught up the leather-covered
bridge-telescope. He swung it circlingly back,
above his head, as a blacksmith swings a sledge.
He would have brought that poised cylinder of
glass and steel blindly down on the other man’s
skull, had the ship’s mate not caught the end of
the telescope and stopped the murderous blow.
“You coward l’” said Ganley, without moving.
The two ship’s officers still stood there, automat-
ically and blindly and grotesquely contending
for the cylinder of leather-covered steel.
“Not that way,” cried the mate. “Don’t kill
him l’’
“Yes, I’ll kill him!” raged the captain. “I’ll
kill him any way he wants!”
“Then fight it out on deck—fight it out like
men l’’
“Fight it out !” echoed a half-caste deck-
hand, shrilly, carried away by his feelings, as
the crowd surged out into the open spaces of the
star-lit deck.
“Yes, fight it out, by God!” bellowed the in-
furiated and unreasoning ship’s captain, peel-
ing off his coat and waving back the circle of
onlookers. “Fight it out, like men!”
Heilig, the chief-engineer, pushed through
the protesting crowd.
“Captain,” he said in his slow and gloomy


252 THE PRIMORDIAL HOUR
monotone, “what call’ve yuh got to go prize-
fightin’ on your own ship?”
“Shut up!” howled back his superior officer.
“Get back!”
“Why're yuh fightin’ with a he-rhinoceros
like him?” persisted the other.
“Get back! Gi’ me room l’’
The gloomy misanthrope of the engine-room
did not move. He stood regarding the circle
with calm and scoffing eyes.
“It ain’t fittin’,” he slowly objected. “And
it ain’t right!”
“Right? I know my rights!” yelped back
Captain Yandel, waving the interloper aside.
He rolled up his sleeves, with shaking hands,
disclosing strangely fashioned tattooed figures
on his thick and hirsute forearms.
McKinnon closed the door, that the woman in
the cabin might not see. There was the sound
of a boatswain’s whistle, a murmur of voices,
a quick shuffling of feet. A space was cleared
on the deck, promptly, solemnly, as though for
the despatch of some casual and duly appointed
ship’s business. Then the circle re-formed,
watching and silent, waiting with set faces, for
what was to come. And McKinnon saw that it
was indeed to come, that there was no escap-
ing it. -
For one moment only did Ganley hesitate.


THE PRIMORDIAL HOUR 253
Just once did the deepset and malicious little
eyes shift in one sidelong glance of hesitancy.
McKinnon, from his cabin door, could see that
look. He could see the change of colour that
crept slowly up through the gun-runner’s flaccid
face. It did not blanch, but it merged from a
brick-dust tint to the dead-brown hue of un-
tanned leather. It became cadaverous, and
horrible to look at. Even then he must have
seen and known that it was all madness, that it
was more than useless, that it solved no prob-
lems and settled no issues. But he had no
choice left to him.
McKinnon’s first thought, as he watched, was
that Ganley would never fight fair. Then he be-
held the close-packed circle of rough and
waiting faces, of bare-armed and hard-eyed
watchers—for even the stokers’ hole had
vomited forth its soot-streaked, naked-shoul-
dered children of wonder—and he knew that the
gun-runner could gain nothing by trickery. The
ferine and active brain housed in the great sun-
browned skull would be of no use to him in this.
The adroit and vulpine intelligence beyond its
screening frontal bone could now flash out no
path of deliverance. He was confronted by
passions that were adamitic in their primitive-
ness, by forces that belonged to the world of
claws and tusks and talons,


254 THE PRIMORDIAL HOUR
Then the two men fought.
It seemed grotesque, at first, to the wearied
and indifferently watching McKinnon. It made
him think of a combat between two butchers,
two gross butchers clad in white. There was
something ludicrous in the two heavy and lurch-
ing and staggering bodies, lunging at each
other, like Pleistocene beasts from the twilight
of time, like primordial monsters in the bitter
and brutal combat of bitter and brutal ages.
The sweat oozed out on their skins. It dia-
monded their faces. Then the beads of mois-
ture ran together, and gathered into slow run-
nels that smarted in their eyes and moistened
their necks and dripped on their clothing, mot-
tled more and more with splashes of red.
Then it became brutish. It became blind and
ponderous, like a bull-fight. It impressed
McKinnon as something wordlessly pathetic, it
was so useless and unreasoning, so futile and
foolish, in the face of all the vaster problems
that confronted that lonely steamship and the
lives she carried. It did not horrify him, for
by this time he was beyond horror, as a
swimmer is beyond thought of a passing rain-
shower.
Then it became sickening. The impact of
bone and flesh on flesh and bone seemed demean-
ing and dehumanising to the dazed and shrink-


THE PRIMOR DIAL HOUR 255
ing onlooker. The hot night air, which left
breathing a burden to even the untaxed lungs,
made the gasping of the two combatants audible
and vocal, made it pitiful, like the gasps of the
drowning, made it short and guttural, like the
tongue-choked chest heaves of an anaesthetised
patient. The fighters became two vaguely heav-
ing and gasping white hulks blotched with
blood. There seemed something more than
sinister in their dogged persistence. It became
Satanic. It grew into an affront to manhood,
an insult to the quiet stars that looked down on
it. It became a living nightmare, in which two
coiled and striking and threshing Hates
emerged from a slime that was antediluvian.
McKinnon turned away, sick and faint. For
he had seen one of the red-blotched hulks fall
back and lie full length on the deck. He had
seen the Laminian’s captain lean over that pros-
trate figure, weakly, swaying forward and then
backward, where he would surely have fallen,
had one of his sailors not caught him under the
armpits and held him up. It was over.
McKinnon heard the guttering yelp of
triumph, the unreasoning and vapid snarl of
Success, of the ship’s master who had re-estab-
lished his disputed mastership.


CHAPTER XXIII
THE RECAPTURED KEY
McKINNoN turned from the quiet and horror-
stricken figure of Alicia, huddled back on his
berth-end, and contemplated what was left of
his broken and dismantled apparatus. He felt
like a child in an open boat, without oars, ap-
proaching an inevitable Niagara.
Then he turned back to the girl. There was
no message of consolation he could bring to her.
It came slowly home to him how hopeless the
entire future stretched before them. A great
hatred for the ship on which he stood grew up
in him. His spirit Yevolted against the horrors
it had housed, against the ordeals through
which it had thrust a tender and innocent life,
against the enigmatic perils with which it was
still to threaten that life and his own.
Then he grew calmer-thoughted. He began to
grope and probe about for explanations that
would sustain her. But the task was a fruitless
one. There was nothing to say. Instinctively,
256


THE RECAPTURED KEY 257
as he stooped over her, he touched her hand and
murmured: “I’m sorry.” He was a man of
action always before one of emotion. But he
had to swallow hard, to clear the lump from his
throat as he spoke.
He stroked the passive hand that lay on his
pillow, with the rough timidity with which a
seaman might stroke a tired and captured land
bird. Then he drew back his berth-curtain and
lifted his electric fan from its shelf, placing it
on the operating-table so that the current of
air from its whirring wings might blow in to
where she rested. Then he locked and bolted
and doubly secured his cabin door.
“Is it hopeless?” she asked at last, without
turning her face to him. She struggled to ask
it casually, but the bitter listlessness of her
voice translated every tone and word of that
question into the notes of utter tragedy.
“No, it’s not hopeless,” he said, combatively,
aggressively, for her sake alone. “This is a
De Forest station. We have the international
rights common to all wireless operation. We
can stand on those rights. We can hold this
room until help of some sort arrives.”
It was foolish, he knew, even as he uttered
it. They could be driven out, or starved out,
or baked out, in a single day. Yet as he kept
up the pleasant fiction, he was infinitely glad


258 THE RECAPTURED KEY
of her presence there. He needed her, not be-
cause she could buoy him up to meet implacable
adversities, but to compel him to sustain him-
self for her sake.
“We can attach a power-wire to that cabin
door-handle, so that no one dare touch it. We
can run a wire to—”
His voice trailed off and went out, like a
burnt fuse. The change that had come over
him was so sudden that the woman turned and
sat up.
“Wait!” he called, in a voice so high-pitched
it sounded what was almost a treble note.
“Wait!”
He stood rooted to the spot for a moment,
petrified by the new thought that had come to
him.
“It’s not hopeless!” he cried exultantly.
“What is it?” asked the other, confronting
him.
“It can be done! The models! My telephony
models! They carry what is practically a re-
sponder!”
The woman watched him, wide-eyed, for he
was down on the floor, on his knees, before the
box of models, lifting out strange and delicate
bits of machinery—machinery for which she
had always felt a certain fear and aloofness,
since the quiet evening he had spoken to her


THE RECAPTURED KEY 259
of high-frequency oscillations and audions and
ionising gases.
“I tell you I can make it work!” he exulted.
‘‘Work?” She echoed.
“It’ll take time, it’ll take scheming, but I can
do it! I can have the whole thing rigged up
by daylight. By morning I can be sending and
receiving again!”
He was on his feet by this time, trying to
explain it to her.
“My key’s gone, you see; but that doesn’t
make it hopeless. I can adjust a piece of heavy
copper wire to my rear binding-post here.
Then I can take the other end of that wire and
touch it at the contact-point here where my key
used to strike. I can spell out the Morse that
way, word by word. We’ll be able to talk!
We’ll be able to send out our message!”
“Is this true?” she asked, her wide and
shadowy eyes searching his face.
“Yes, it’s true!”
“Quite true?”
“Every word of it, or I don’t know wire-
less l’’
“That means we can call the Princeton.”
“We’ll be still closer by morning. I’ll be
ready and waiting by the time their operator is
at his key. And by noon we ought to pick up
Guariqui, if we passed the Toajiras Light over


260 THE RECAPTURED KEY
three hours ago—no, before that, any time after
Sunrise!”
“If they are still sending!” said the woman.
“They must be sending,” cried McKinnon,
as he bent over his mysterious instruments.
“They must be, or the Princeton would never
have been calling them the way she was.”
“Then I must help you in some way!”
“No, you must rest. This is work I have to
do alone. You are worn out; you must have
rest. You must sleep if you can.”
“And you?” she asked.
“Oh, I’ll be working this out. There’ll be
no sleeping in this place, you know, once I start
to send l’’
“But I meant that you need rest,” she ex-
plained.
He could even laugh now, although his
laughter was both brief and preoccupied.
“Rest!” he cried. “I’m good for two days
without a drop of it, once I’ve got things going
the way I'm trying to make them go.”
She watched the white electric light of the
drop-globe pour down on his bent and con-
stantly shifting head. She could see the little
black stain of dried blood on his temple. She
could also see the sweat running down the side
of his face, between his cheek-bone and his ear.
For some inexplicable reason, she gave a


262 THE RECAPTURED KEY
and every rebel in Locombia under cover inside
of three days!”
Alicia Boynton did not answer him as he
stooped and studied and worked. But she sat
there, with her hands clasped loosely together,
gratefully and softly watching the aureole of
light that the swinging electric made about the
wireless-operator’s head.


CHAPTER XXIV
THE CALL FOR EELP
THINGs did not go McKinnon’s way as easily
as he had expected, or had so bravely pretended
to expect. The first gray tinge of morning,
deepening slowly to pearl, showed along the
eastern sky-line before he had completed his
task.
He sat back with a sigh of relief; he sat back
like a god who had wearied of creation, looking
on his work and seeing that it was good. The
gray and pearl along the sky-line had by this
time turned to pale rose, and slender pencils
of light were showing through the chinks in his
cabin shutter.
Alicia Boynton was still asleep on his nar-
row berth. So narrow was her resting-place,
and so quiet her breathing, that it seemed to
him as though she were lying in a coffin. She
had dropped off into that sleep of utter weari-
ness against her will. She had resolved to be
with him and near him every moment of his
263


264 THE CALL FOR HELP
labour, but the intriguing claims of the body
had dethroned her volition.
And now, as he gazed down at her flower-
like and tranquil face, he dreaded to waken her.
He felt touched, as he watched the quiet throb
of the pulse in her blue-veined temple where
the dark and heavily massed brown hair had
fallen back, with a sense of mystery before the
ancient miracle of sleep. He wondered where
her escaped spirit had gone to; it seemed noth-
ing more than the quiescent shell of her, the
empty husk of her, that he stood and watched.
A wayward sense of loneliness, of desertion,
crept over him, and he turned about, not un-
gratefully, to listen to the familiar swish of
deck-hose and thump of holy-stone as the early
awakened deck-crew washed down the decks. It
was commonplace enough, that swish of sea-
water and thump of mumbling workers. But
at the moment there was something wordlessly
companionable in it to the listening McKinnon.
It reminded him that the every-day trivialities,
the orderly actualities that sustain the ma-
chinery of life, must always go on, no matter
how close may brood the spirit of outer tragedy.
It reminded him, too, that it was morning, and
that the hour of his ultimate trial had arrived.
. He swung his door open, and looked out along
the deck. He beheld a windless sea, and a


THE CALL FOR HELP 265
blood-red tropical sun mounting up above its
rim, where dull orange paled into dark azure.
On his face he could feel the sea air, still fresh
and balmy. There seemed something Edenic
in its limpidity, something unearthly in its over-
exquisite and unvoluptuous softness. It seemed
to etherealise life, to beautify even the tainted
and sordid hulk of wood and steel and steam
that forged ever forward across its universal
curve of azure peace. The sea itself, as he stood
there watching it, assumed strange and quickly
altering tints. Along some slight wind-riffle it
became claret-coloured and turquoise and violet.
The lace-work edge of some wandering current
left it royal with floating purple, shot through,
in spots, with flashing ruby-red that held all the
fire of a thousand cinnamon-garnets. In other
places some miracle of refracted light made the
softly undulatory surface a bosom of breath-
ing quicksilver. Then a point’s shift in the
sun’s altitude merged and darkened the silver
into the pale blue of forget-me-nots, deepening
it still again into dully lustrous maroon and
lapis-lazuli, streaking it with lilac and apple-
green, leaving it as varied and mystic as the
breast-plate of an Hebraic high-priest.
McKinnon took a deep breath of that soft and
balmy air, and felt that life was still beautiful.
He felt that there were still great hopes to be


206 TIIE CALL FOR HELP
thankful for, great hazards to be gladly faced,
great ends to be attained.
Then his thoughts came down to more ma-
terial things, as he looked about and beheld a
dirty-jacketed and heavy-eyed steward carry-
ing a pewter coffee-pot and a tray of fruit and
toast and eggs along the deck to the captain’s
stateroom, but who veered about to the wireless-
room door, at a sign from McKinnon.
“Couldn’t you leave that with me?” asked
the operator.
“It’s the captain's,” said the steward, mov-
ing impassively on.
“Wait!” said McKinnon, taking a bill from
his pocket. “Your captain’s not even awake
yet. And you could have a second trayful up
to him in ten minutes.”
The heavy-eyed steward willingly enough
surrendered his burden when McKinnon thrust
the bank-note into his hand, and went shuffling
below-stairs again, to replace the coffee-pot and
replenish the tray.
McKinnon closed and locked his cabin door,
before he set down the breakfast thus caught
on the wing. When he looked up he saw Alicia
Boynton regarding him with wide-open and
vaguely wondering eyes. He felt glad that he
had escaped the brutality of waking her to the
troubled world that still encompassed them.


THE CALL FOR HELP 267
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s your breakfast,” he said, with studied
cheeriness. “You’re going to eat it while I
start to send.”
“Then you can send?” she asked. Her world
of reality seemed slow in coming back to her.
“I’ve got to go to the engine-room first,”
he explained, “to see about my power.”
“What must I do?” she asked.
“Lock this door when I go out, and don’t
open it; don’t open it for Captain Yandel him-
self, until you hear me knock three times.”
She had made her hurried toilet by the time
he was back, but the coffee and eggs remained
untouched. McKinnon, at the still open door,
could see that the brief tropical morning had
already merged into open day. He could see,
too, that they had drawn closer in to the Locom-
bian coast. Along the southwest lay a broken
blue line of mountains, remote and lonely-look-
ing. They seemed to him, under their high-
arching sky of abysmal blue, like some forlorn
and ragged rampart of a world’s end. Still
nearer stretched the alluvial plains and the low,
flat line of swamp-land, broken here and there
by clumps of palms, along the higher spots
where the ground-swell of the emerald-tinted
shallows broke in blinding white on the coral
beaches.


THE CALL FOR HELP 269
crushing one. So he ate, though it was more
to encourage her than to appease his own
hunger. And when their frugal meal was
finished, he looked at his watch with specula-
tive and half-closed eyes. Then he gave a deep
sigh and turned to his operating-table.
“Time’s up!” was all he said.
The girl, sitting on the berth-edge, saw his
hand go up to the switch-board; she saw the
lever come down on the contact-pins, one by
one, and heard the hum and drone of the
wakened dynamo. She saw his rubber-muffled
fingers catch up the piece of heavy insulated
copper wire which had been attached to the dis-
mantled binding-post, and the flash of blue
flame that exploded from knob to knob across
the spark-gap as he completed his circuit by
touching his wire-end to the contact-point of his
improvised key. She saw his intently inclined
head as he sat listening with his phones pressed
close over his ears, and the strong-sinewed yet
still oddly boyish-looking face beaded with
minute drops of perspiration.
His preoccupied left hand went out to his
tuner, and still he sat there, over his recon-
structed responder, waiting. The only sound in
the cabin was the continuous whir of the elec-
tric fan on its unpainted pine shelf. The
minutes dragged slowly away. The silence be-


270 THE CALL FOR HELP
came nerve-torturing, piling up like a wave that
refuses to break and fall.
“It’s useless!” cried the girl.
McKinnon silenced her with a peremptory
movement of the hand.
“Wait!” he commanded.
He leaned forward, slowly, until his breast-
bone pressed against the edge of the table.
Then came a moment or two of unbroken quiet-
neSS.
“I’ve got them!” he whispered.
But still again the silence was unbroken as
the man with the glimmering steel band across
his head sat crooked up like a schoolboy over a
slate, listening. His hand went out to the lever-
heads in the numeral-lined slots of his tuning-
box, as he paused to tune up to the wave-pitch
of some as yet undecipherable message. His
half-closed eyes opened and widened, and he
was suddenly springing for the switch-handle
of his starting-box again.
“I’ve got them,” he cried exultantly, as he
turned to his key. “I’ve got two of them!”
‘‘TWO Of them?”
“Yes; they’re both talking at once. I’ve got
to make one hold back, if I can reach him. If
not, I’ve got to tune him out!”
His voice was cut off by the familiar spit and
flash of the huge blue spark, and a thin ozonic


THE CALL FOR HELP 271
odour filled the closed room, strangely like the
smell of summer air after a thunder-storm. The
rapt and wistful eyes of the woman watched
him as he worked, touched into wonder before
the inscrutable, humbled into momentary amaze-
ment by the unfathomable mystery of Hertzian
WaVeS.
“Thank God!” he cried, “it’s Guariqui!”
“Guariqui!” echoed the woman.
He silenced her sharply, for he had his ear at
his phone again, and was once more working
nervously over his tuning-box.
“We’ve lost them,” he murmured dejectedly.
“Are you sure?” she whispered, out of the
silence that followed.
“We’ve lost them both !” he almost groaned.
The whir of the fan and the breathing of the
two listeners was the only sound in the cabin.
The quietness again seemed like an up-piling
breaker that refused to fall and retreat. The
woman stirred uneasily.
“Wait!” cried McKinnon, with suddenly in-
clined head. His face, now seamed with runnels
of Sweat, was drawn and the jaw muscles were
set and knotted. He jerked a nervous hand to-
ward the droning fan, peevishly, as though its
presence were a personal affront to him.
“Shut off that fan,” he commanded.
The woman rose without a word and shut it


272 THE CALL FOR HELP
off. There was a malicious little spit of the re-
bellious current, a spark of blue under the ja-
panned standard, and the revolving brass wheel-
wings came to a stop. Nothing but the sound
of breathing filled the cabin.
“There!” McKinnon’s voice erupted like one
of his own coil-sparks through the silence.
“Now I’ve got them!”
He jumped for his key, talking over his shoul-
der as he did so.
“It’s the Guariqui operator,” he explained,
as he worked. “He’s sending very weak; I can
hardly get him. He says his power’s giving out,
and De Brigard’s men are targeting at his
aerials with carbines.
Then he flung himself into his chair, and
caught up his form pad for transcription, with
his receiver once more over his head. He wrote
slowly, with intent eyes and wrinkled brow,
Word after word, sometimes going back and
Scratching out a phrase, sometimes puzzled by
a lost dot or dash in the stuttering Morse, some-
times quickly “breaking” and asking the opera-
tor to repeat. His breath came shorter and
quicker as he listened and wrote. Then he called
frenziedly, and listened, and called again.
“They’re dead!” he exclaimed, in disgust.
“Dead?” cried the woman, in white-lipped
alarm.


THE CALL FOR HELP 273
“I mean I can’t get them! Their wires must
be gone!”
His use of the word “dead” still terrified the
woman at his side. He had no time to explain.
He simply thrust his inscribed pad sheets into
her hand as he turned to his key again, for time
now was precious, terribly precious.
She read:
Duran's men all here. Shut up in city waiting cartridge
shipment. Light skirmishes last two days. Ulloa held
De Brigard back all yesterday, but had to fall back on
city at night. Short of ammunition. . . . We are shut
in. De Brigard’s forces surrounded city at daybreak.
Courier reports rebels bringing machine guns up through
hills, from Sanibella. We must have help before guns join
bombardment. Carbines are picking at my aerials from
Paraiso Hill, to the east. Can you get Chilean battle-
ship two days off Puerto Locombia or British ship out of
Kingston? Must have help. Relay call to anything in
reach. . . . Duran's authority. . . . Or if Chilean or
British marines can be landed in time advise them to push
in by way of Boracao. American Consul Klauser shut up
there holding wireless with Kilvert, United Fruit operator,
but report bad sending. . . . Is only disaffected town
outside capital. . . . Entrain there. . . . Must
hurry. . . .
Her hungry eyes rushed back and forth along
the second sheet which McKinnon had thrust
into her hand:
Can get Princeton. . . . Some one from God's coun-
try. . . . Must hurry. Yes, president and cabinet safe.
Seven hundred crowded in Palace yards and water shut off.
Tell Princeton not to wait to land guns. Remember Boracao
switch bridge is mined. . . . Bullet against SWitch-


274 THE CALL FOR HELP
board. . . . Get me south of Boston again—hurry-use
-power dying-hurry.
That was the end of the message.
“But the Princeton?” gasped the woman. “If
you can’t get the Princeton/”
“Wait—wait—I’m getting her,” answered
the man, bent low over his responder, as though
the sense it appealed to were vision and not
sight. “They’ve been waiting for me to relay.
They’ve been—”
He left the speech unended, for he was busy
sending his spark cannonading across its gap.
He kept up that cannonading until it seemed
to the watching woman that it was never going
to end. Then he switched off and listened again,
and again cannonaded his answer.
Then he dropped wearily into his chair, wiped
he was not alone. He looked up at the woman
with a strangely transfiguring smile on his
sweat-stained face.
“It's over,” he said, with the simplicity of
utter weariness.
“You’ve got them—the Princeton?” she
asked.
“I’ve got them!”
She put out her two hands to him. It was
meant as an impersonal gesture of gratitude,
and he knew it as he took them in his. But there
seemed something revivifying and electrical in


THE CALL FOR HELP 275
the sweat from his face, and remembered that
mere contact with them, something that brought
the hope and joy of life back to his tired body.
He laughèd aloud.
“I gave them what they were aching for!
They were lying there steaming and baking and
fretting for the very one word I sent on to
them.”
“Then they’ll come?”
“Come! Yes, they’ll come! They’ve been
lying there whimpering to get up at De Brigard,
just like a rat-terrier whimpering to get at a
kitten.”
He was silent for a moment, as his mind pic-
tured the sudden change, so many miles away,
that was flashing and thrilling through all the
great gray hulk of that wakened battle-ship, of
the signal-bells clanging, the orders being given,
the furnaces being stoked, the decks being
cleared.
“And before to-morrow night they will be
anchored at Puerto Locombia.”
“Before to-morrow night?” she repeated,
with sinking heart.
“She has to steam all the way from Torre-
blanca—she can’t cover the distance in less than
thirty hours under any circumstances.”
“But we will be at Puerto Locombia to-day,
before nightfall!”


276 THE CALL FOR HELP
“I know it,” he said, with all the joy and
confidence trailing out of his voice.
“Then Ganley will have one whole day to
act. The Sanibella guns will be pushed up to
Guariqui. Ulloa's men will be without ammu-
nition.”
“They can hold out!” he answered her.
“But they may not,” she cried. “It may all
be over and done before we can help them. And
we will be here at the mercy of Ganley !”
She failed to impart any shred of her terror
to the listening operator.
“Yes,” he said, with abstracted and studious
eyes, “that is the one thing that worries me.”
“But Ganley can do anything, once we’re at
Puerto Locombia. This ship and everything it
carries will be under his thumb l’’
“Yes, that is still our problem—we’ve still
got that bridge to cross,” he confessed. “Yet
I think we can cross it, when the time comes.”
“But how?” she demanded.
“By not having this ship remain at Puerto
Locombia, once Ganley’s put ashore,” was his
anSWer.
“Then in what way could we still help
Guariqui-in time?” was her forlorn and help-
less query.
“We’ve got to make a way!” he told her,
With his grim yet reassuring smile.


CHAPTER XXV
THE TRUMP CARD
IT was eight hours later that the Laminian
made her way under half-speed into the road-
stead at Puerto Locombia.
She drifted guardedly in over shoals of trans-
lucent verdancy, with her screw churning the
lettuce-green waters into coiling and copperas-
tinted eddies.
A long iron pier ran out into this green-
watered roadstead, its trestles spanned by the
single track of a narrow-gauge railway. On
either side of the concrete breakwater that
lipped the sea-edge of the town itself stretched
away two curves of white sand with their in-
termittently whitening surf. Then came scat-
tering clumps of lonely palms, then a lower
mist-hung coast of ooze and mangrove and
steaming lagoon.
Behind the concreted crescent of shore-line,
to which the roadstead pier seemed like an ar-
row set in a drawn bow, stood irregular lines
277


278 THE TRUMP CARD
of thatched huts, of mud and bamboo wattle,
crowding on narrow streets that sloped to the
centre and held sidewalks no wider than a wall-
top. Still nearer ranged the more substantial
part of the town, the bald, sun-scorched build-
ings of corrugated iron and tin, the one-story,
open-front shops, with red tile roofs, the unin-
viting rectangular bodegas and the austere
and gloomy government buildings. Over the
latter drooped strange flags of yellow and red
and blue.
On the higher ground to the right ran rusty
streets lined with pink and yellow-tinted house
walls of stucco, with heavy Spanish shutters
and terra-cotta roof-tiles. Along the fringe of
lower ground to the extreme left stood irregular
rows of wattled huts, raised the height of a man
from the “sand-jiggers” and the miasmal tun-
dra under them, looking like lines of patient
herons as they balanced on their rotting palm-
wood stilts.
Beyond the town, leading into the slowly ris-
ing ground of the southwest, wound a road of
shell and limestone, leaving a crooked scar of
white against the blackness of the lowlands
through which it crept. Close in by the concrete
breakwater lay the ribs and spars of a wrecked
schooner, mysteriously adding to the atmos-
phere of gloom and neglect. On a side-track


THE TRUMP CARD 279
curving from the pier-end stood a dismantled
train of cars, so small that they looked like a
child’s toys. Near-by lay a derailed locomotive,
brown with rust, strangely pathetic in its atti-
tude of resigned helplessness. Thirty paces
from this stood the tottering remains of a corru-
gated-iron warehouse, its fallen roof and twisted
wall-plates showing plainly enough that it had
been blown up by either Ulloa or the insurgents.
Farther out along the broken pier rolled and
creaked a soft-coal-burning tug. About her
single deck, under her overlarge and drooping
ensign of red and yellow and blue, lounged and
waited a number of figures in red-striped uni-
forms. Obsolete brass cannon shimmered at her
bow and stern, and a carbine-rack showed out
just aft of her wheel-house.
It was while this strangely accoutred tug
cast off and came puffing and wheeling about to
meet the newcomer into the roadstead that Mc-
Kinnon and Alicia Boynton stood at the rail,
gazing landward. Nothing seemed left for them
now but to watch and wait. Everything that lay
in their power had been done; all they could do
now was to study the cards as Fate threw them
on the board.
“That’s one of De Brigard’s gunboats!” said
the watching and anxious-eyed girl.
“So those are the tools that Ganley works


280 THE TRUMP CARD
with !” said the operator, looking with open
scorn at the strange tug, the strange ensign, the
still stranger figures in uniform. He tried to
hide his anxiety and depression under a light-
ness of tone that seemed as incongruous, even
to his own ears, as the tricoloured ensign flap-
ping over the soft-coal-burning craft before
them.
“Those are the tools that can cut deep, when
they have to,” was the woman’s answer, as she
Once more looked landward.
“They’re burning Parroto!” cried some one
from a lower deck, in plaintive wonder. “That's
Parroto going up in smoke there!”
McKinnon, under the rocking awning that
could not altogether shut out the hot sun of the
late afternoon, leaned farther over the rail and
peered inland.
Far to the south and west stretched the flat
and gloomy swamps, steaming under the sun's
*ys, mephitic and menacing. Still farther
*Way, tier by tier, rose the hills, with a condor
Wheeling above them here and there.
They lifted, in gentle waves softened with the
#" of orange and banana and cocoanut-palm,
of bamboo and breadfruit, until they crowded
£p to the huddled blue line of the moun-
£idges, to the very peaks of the Cordilleras,
* forbidding, and seemingly impenetrable.


THE TRUMP CARD 281
From one of the nearer tiers of hills black
columns of smoke twined and curled and bil-
lowed up into the air. It was the town of Par-
roto, still in flames.
But no sound or sign of movement came from
shore. A mysterious and drug-like sleep seemed
to envelop both town and swamp and hills. Yet
McKinnon, watching with set and thoughtful
face, knew that somewhere in the dust-laden
streets between the stucco walls señoritas were
peering from jalousies, and naked children were
playing and lean curs were prowling. In the
yellow church facing the Prado priests were
moving about. In the shadowy bodegas flies
were buzzing and glasses were clinking, and
swarthy and undersized patriots were rolling
cigarettes and enlarging on the true paths that
led to liberty. In each tesselated patio shad-
owed by rustling palm-fronds, were women and
old men, and beside the mud oven of each wat-
tled hut meals were being made ready and eaten.
It took him back to the past, painfully, to the
past that he would much rather have forgotten.
“Does it look like home?” he asked the girl
at his side, a little absently, a little bitterly.
She was silent for another minute or two, as
her eyes turned through the broken line of the
Cordilleras to where Guariqui lay, to where still


282 THE TRUMP CARD
waited the life for which she had fought and
risked so much.
“It will never seem home to me again,” she
answered.
“But it was your home once!”
“Yes, I used to think it was almost beautiful.
The movement and colour and mystery of it!
The fiestas, and the music, the glitter and pomp
of its little court life that so satisfied my foolish
vanity, the riding and the freedom, the passion
and warmth of everything! You may not believe
me, or understand me when I say it, but I can
remember when it used to make me almost
drunk, especially at night!”
He felt vaguely envious of those earlier and
happier days; he felt that he had been cheated
out of something. But her eyes, through all
their mournfulness, glowed like a tropical sea
touched with moonlight, as she smiled up at
him; and he forgot the feeling.
“It was beautiful to me—then,” she con-
fessed. “But the beauty was there, I think, be-
cause I put it there.”
To the eyes of the tired and anxious man at
her side it seemed anything but beautiful. It
seemed a land of unbroken silence, of sullen
mystery, of primordial shadow and gloom, from
the white lip of the beach that sucked so fever-
ishly at the pale copper-green of the sea-water


THE TRUMP CARD 283
to the misty line of its farthest mountain-tops.
And he wondered if it was to be allowed him
ever to reach those mountains, and what would
await him there. He wondered, with such odds
against him, if the hour for activity would bring
with it an honest fighting-chance.
He turned his anxious eyes to the tug Swing-
ing authoritatively in under the Laminian’s
quarter. He knew only too well, from the gas-
conading attitudes of its uniformed officials,
from the sheer effrontery with which they
swung in and overhauled the bigger steamship,
that he was at last beholding the local instru-
ments of the new “Liberal” dictatorship. And
he knew that with their advent the curtain was
about to rise on a new act of the tangled drama.
He racked his brain to understand what Gan-
ley’s move would be. He knew that all day long
the gun-runner had kept to his cabin. A stew-
ard had reported that his head was bad and
causing him much pain. He had eaten nothing;
he had kept his berth, cursing the Laminian and
the heat of her coffinlike cabins and, above all,
her sottish and pigheaded captain.
Yet McKinnon knew it would take more than
a sore head to keep Ganley from acting when
the moment for action arrived. The one thing
that puzzled the operator was what form that
first move of Ganley's was to take.


THE TRUMP CARD 285
trousers, a yellow-faced white jacket and a gold-
braided cap, came aboard. He carried a sword,
held at his side by a red sash, and was followed
by an alert-eyed, narrow-shouldered, yellow-
faced youth in blue denim striped with red.
The officer with the sword brought his heels
together and saluted Captain Yandel. That
worthy seaman, descending from his bridge, de-
manded to know, in English, why he was so
damned slow about getting pratique, and what
all the damned fuss was about.
Before any reply was proffered to these im-
patient queries, Ganley himself appeared from
below deck. A crooked smile rested on his
bruised and swollen face, a smile that seemed
more sinister than the light in his baleful and
blood-shot little eyes.
“Come in off the deck!” he commanded, with
the calmness of unquestioned authority.
That was all that McKinnon heard, for the
talk was resumed in the captain’s stateroom,
with thunderous volleys of broken Spanish on
the one side, with calm and dictatorial insolence
on the other. It was to this talk that Alicia,
as she leaned over the ship’s rail, listened so at-
tentively.
“What is it?” asked McKinnon, noticing her
wide and terrified eyes.
“We are in quarantine,” she answered.


286 THE TRUMP CARD
“In quarantine?”
“Yes.”
“Do they say why?”
“The comandante has ordered us to be held
here. They are sending a detachment of sol-
diers to watch the ship. We are to be kept here,
prisoners.”
“But there’s no fever !”
“No; of course not! It's the old trick! They
daren’t outrage our flag openly—we are an
American ship ! They daren’t insult our colours
by open capture. But they draw what they call
a dead line, and they shoot down everyone who
crosses it!”
“So that’s how they intend to hold us!”
“Yes—I heard Ganley say, in Spanish, that
he'd keep up here until he finished his game. He
told Captain Yandel that he was going to tie
him up here until his anchor-flukes were bar-
nacled.”
“But what’s their excuse for this?” he asked,
with absent and preoccupied eyes, for his busy
brain was already reconnoitring into the
menacing future.
“He claims that it’s yellow fever—that we’ve
entered the affected zone.”
“So that was his trump card, after all!” said
the meditative McKinnon.
“It’s the card that makes us lose,” was the


THE TRUMP CARD | 287
girl's hopeless rejoinder. “We must stay here
prisoners, as much prisoners as though we were
cooped up in a quartel, for a whole day and a
whole night! We are here, worse than helpless,
until the Princeton comes!”
She came to a stop, and shuddered a little.
“Oh, believe me,” she told him, in her tense
and low-toned voice, “believe me, I am not a
coward! . . . . . . But anything, any-
thing, can happen on this ship to-night!”
The intentness with which he was studying
her face brought her wondering eyes up to his.
“I’m afraid you’ve got to be very brave,” he
said, as gently as he could.
“Yes . . . . . I know,” she said, a
little brokenly.
“But braver in a different way,” he amended.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you and I are going to break this
quarantine to-night!”
She looked from him to the smoke-columns
that hung over Parroto, and then back at the
carbine-rack and the brass guns of the coman-
dante’s smoke-belching ship-of-war.
“We can’t,” she said, with a little gasp of
despair. “We would have no chance. There is
no place to go to—and they will have orders to
shoot. It would be giving them the chance they
are waiting for. We can’t go!”


288 THE TRUMP CARD
“We’ve got to !” McKinnon said, doggedly.
“But where could we go? Where could we
find safety?” she demanded, as her hopeless and
unhappy eyes swept the inhospitable country
that confronted them. In all that country, she
Knew, there was not a hamlet or town, not a
valley or jungle, that could offer them safety.
There was not a square mile of it, outside the
beleaguered walls of Guariqui itself, that would
offer them harbour.
“We’re going to Guariqui to-night—you and
I!” said McKinnon, meeting her wondering
gaze with his clear and steadfast eyes.


CHAPTER XXVI
THE DEAD-LINE
ALICIA stood on guard at the door of the wire-
less room, waiting for McKinnon’s return. More
and more, in those last strange hours of uncer-
tainty, she dreaded being alone. There seemed
something ominous and bodeful in the very
quietness of the midnight ship, as she rocked
and grated against the pier in the long and sul-
len ground-swell of the roadstead. The screw
no longer throbbed, the engines no longer pulsed
and churned. The quietness seemed deathlike.
It was broken only by the steps of De Brigard’s
sentries, as they sleepily paced the long deck,
one to port and one to starboard. Yet even
these two figures, with their shouldered car-
bines, seemed ghostlike, presaging vague evils.
The heat, too, was oppressive, for not a breath
of air seemed to stir in the quiet ship. But in-
comparably more oppressive was the silence so
rhythmically broken by the spectral tread of the
pacing sentries. Then the infinitely minute
289 ..


290 THE DEAD-LINE
sound of another movement crept in to her
straining ears. She took up the heavy revolver
as McKinnon had warned her to do, and
crouched back into the remotest corner of the
cabin, listening and waiting.
The girl’s heart stood still as McKinnon him-
self quietly swung back the cabin door, dodged
inside, and as quickly closed and locked the door
behind him. He stood there with his back to
her, listening, without so much as a glance in her
direction. He heard the pacing steps pass and
die away, and pass still again. Then he mur-
mured a grateful “Thank Heaven!” took a deep
breath, and turned slowly about to the waiting
girl. His gaze was impersonal and abstracted;
he scarcely seemed conscious of her presence as
he stood there, deep in troubled thought.
“Well?” she whispered at last, struggling to
keep some tremour of dread from her voice.
“I was right,” he said, with the look of per-
plexity still in his studious eyes. “Eighty-eight
boxes of fluxing-slag have been passed out from
the hold and piled along the pier. They’ve been
standing there covered with a tarpaulin.”
“Is any one there?” she asked.
“Five of De Brigard’s men—four men and an
officer. The four men are moving those boxes
now. They are lifting them in through the east
door of the weigh-scales shed. The south door


THE DEAD-LINE 291
has been kept shut; and the United Fruit Con-
cern's track-motor has been kept there waiting.
They have divided the eighty-eight boxes into
two lots. They intend to take out only one-half
of the shipment to-night. I counted the boxes
from under the life-boat. Forty-three were left;
that means they are taking off forty-five.”
“That means almost three hundred thousand
rounds of ammunition!” she exclaimed, with a
little hopeless gesture of the hands.
“The Remington rifles, of course, they can’t
touch. The forty-five boxes, I imagine, have com-
pletely loaded the body of their car, filled it
up!”
“But what are we to do?”
He looked at her, and laughed a little, reck-
lessly.
“They have to run those boxes of slag out
through Puerto Locombia to De Brigard’s head-
quarters to-night. They have to get them out
there quietly, very quietly. The track, doubt-
less, has been cleared for them. It has to be
cleared for them, for even an eighty-horse-
power motor can’t side-track an ore-train or
switch a string of banana-cars. And there is no
longer any telegraph between this port and the
inland points they have to pass.”
“No, there is no telegraph,” she said, still
at Sea.


THE DEAD-LINE 293
He stood once more studying her with his im-
personal and abstracted eyes.
“Could you run a motor, a track-motor like
this?” he asked, with a side-jerk of his head
toward the pier.
“I have run one, often,” was her quiet
answer. “There is no steering-wheel. It is
simply a starting and speed-lever and the brakes
—though we always took a boy, to blow, to keep
the tracks clear!”
“The boy will not be needed, to-night,” was
his grim rejoinder, as he once more studied his
watch. She drew back from him, slowly, step by
step, aghast.
“You are not going to try to take that motor
from them?” she asked.
“We’ve got to take that motor. It’s our only
way out. And with your help I can do it.”
“But these sentries! And there are five men!
And forty-eight miles of country held by De
Brigard!”
“Listen,” he said, so simply, so matter-of-
fact in the facing of the problem, that his very
quietness brought her stampeding thoughts
back to her. “There are just two danger-zones.
The first is in the weigh-scales shed, where
those five men will be. The second will be in
De Brigard’s lines.”


294 THE DEAD-LINE
“Yes,” she said, doing her best to meet his
mood of calm-eyed practicality.
“The officer will be the only man armed, of
those five. I’ll attend to him. Before the other
four can get to their carbines we’ll be off-
you’ll be off, I mean, for remember, whatever
happens, you are to get to that starting-lever
and get away with the car. I’ll be holding the
men off until we’re clear.”
“‘Clear Of What?”
“Clear of that shed—and of the wharf.
Then, once out of the town, we’ve got a clear
run until we strike De Brigard’s outposts. It
will be simply a matter of rushing them—and
trusting to luck.”
“It’s hopeless,” she sobbed.
“To stay six more hours on this steamer is
more hopeless!”
“Even if we did get through,” she tried to
explain, “we couldn’t get into Guariqui. They
would fire on a car breaking into their lines—
they would killus both, before they could under-
Stand!”
He shook his head dissentingly.
“We’ll have to warn them in some way
• that is only one of the smaller
problems!”
He caught up his coat, and dropped a revolver


THE DEAD-LINE 295
into each side pocket, and after them the loose
cartridges, in handfuls.
Then, after another moment’s thought, he
crossed the cabin again, and leaned over the
open trunk. -
“I’ve got a pocketful of milk tablets here,”
he explained, “and a pound or two of German
army chocolate.”
He swung about and looked at her, with his
almost boyish smile.
“And I’m terribly sorry, but it isn’t sweet-
ened!” he said. Although there was no answer-
ing smile on her face, he thought he saw a fleet-
ing look of gratitude in her eyes, as though she
was struggling to thank him for even his foolish
and futile efforts at lightheartedness. And
while she still gravely looked up at him he
slipped his huge wicker-covered brandy-flask
into his hip pocket, and once more consulted his
watch.
“Our time is up!” he said, with every sem-
blance of levity suddenly fading from his face.
It tortured him to see such resigned hopeless-
ness in her quiet eyes, but he knew it was peril-
ous to surrender to his feelings.
“I know it’s hard,” was all he said, “but it
has to be done.”
“I understand,” she said.
He turned, with his hand on the light-switch.


296 THE DEAD-LINE
“Is there anything you feel you ought to take
along with you?”
“Nothing,” she whispered.
“Then are you ready?”
“Quite ready,” was her answer.
She heard the snap of the light-switch. She
heard him quietly turn the key in the cabin door.
She knew, as she stood with her hand on his
sleeve, that he was listening and waiting for
the sentry’s steps. He waited until they passed
and died away toward the bow of the ship.
Then he noiselessly opened the door and drew
her out after him into the blackness of the
balmy, musky-odoured midnight air.


CHAPTER XXVII
THE FLIGHT
THEY crept across the deck, hand in hand,
to where the shadowy outlines of one of the
life-boats blocked their path. They slipped in
under the bow of this life-boat, groping their
way to the davit, where the ship’s rail ended.
Before them was a drop of six feet, from the
ship's deck to the string-piece of the pier,
against which the rusty side-plates were creak-
ing and groaning.
McKinnon made a sudden motion for the girl
to wait, for dark figures were moving about on
the pier below. She could make out the gloomy
mass of the weigh-scales shed, its oxid-red paint
leaving it black by night. She could see that
the west door of the shed was open, and that
a figure stood just inside this door, holding a
lantern. She knew it was the officer, for she
could see the light glimmer on the sword-scab-
bard that moved back and forth with every
movement of his body. She could see, too, that
297 -


298 THE FLIGHT
he was contentedly smoking a cigarette. She
could even smell the tobacco smoke, mingled
with the heavy odour of a decaying shipment of
bananas that rotted farther out along the pier-
edge.
She could hear low voices, now and then,
speaking cautiously in Spanish, as two bare-
footed soldiers padded past the swinging lan-
tern, in through the door. They carried a heavy
box that reminded her of a baby’s coffin; and
as they came out again two others passed them
on their way in.
Then she felt McKinnon touch her arm, warn-
ingly, and heard his quick whisper for her to be
ready. She could also hear the slow tread of
the sentry’s feet behind her, to the north of
the shielding life-boat.
“Now’s our chance,” McKinnon was saying
in her ear. He dropped silently over the deck-
edge. She could just make out the white patch
of his face as he stood there waiting to lift her
down.
She knew no emotion, beyond a vague and
persistent anxiety, as she felt his arms clasp her
surrendering body. The moment’s intimate
contact brought her neither joy nor repugnance.
She only knew that McKinnon was leading her
by the hand to the far end of the shed that faced
the west. Then he took away his hand, and


300 THE FLIGHT
hear the sigh of one of the men, the pad of bare
feet, and the nonchalant “Forty-three, forty-
four” of the counting officer.
It was then that McKinnon lifted her bodily
into the driving-seat, whispering to her to sit
low, even catching at her outstretched hand
and conveying it to the starting-lever.
“Start as the door opens,” she heard him
whisper, and she knew that he had crept for-
ward again, and that she was alone in the car.
She tried to school herself to calmness, to coerce
her attention on which was the starting-lever
and which the speed-lever, to force into life the
hope that all might still turn out well. Once
free of that door, she felt, she could breathe
again.
She waited, straining through the dim light,
wondering what kept McKinnon so long.
Then the quietness was broken by the sud-
den sound of metal rasping on metal, of a fall-
ing piece of wood that echoed cavernously
through the high-roofed shed.
“Who is there?” cried the startled officer, in
Spanish, as he swung about with his lantern.
He whipped out a revolver from his belt as he
repeated the challenge. The door had not
opened; they were shut in, trapped.
The officer sprang forward, holding the lan-
tern out at his side as he ran. The girl's heart


302 THE FLIGHT
lever back, threw the speed out full, and
crouched low in the bottom of the car front.
She knew that somebody was clubbing at the
seat above her with a musket-end. She could
hear the guns of the Laminian’s sentries giving
the alarm. Then she closed her eyes, and
crouched lower, for she knew the car was under
way.
It had some fifteen or sixteen feet of head-
way before it struck the huge pine door that
barred the tracks. There was a sudden rend-
ing and splintering of pine, a crunching of
wood, and the car had gone through the door
like a hound through a paper hoop.
McKinnon swung up beside her as the door
went down. He was astride her body almost,
fighting and panting, for a swarthy-faced Lo-
combian was on the car-step, making frenzied
thrusts at her with his carbine-end. Another
was on the cartridge-boxes, and he shot once,
scorching the operator’s face with his powder-
flash as it passed him. He had no time for a
second shot, for McKinnon’s hand went up and
his revolver barked. The carbine fell forward
into the seat between them. The Locombian
himself rolled sideways, to the left, with a howl
of pain. He staggered to his feet, swayed there
a second, and then toppled backward over the
boxes, and fell from the car.


THE FLIGHT 305
and was rolling and pushing him out from the
back of the racing car.
He remained so long there at the rear of the
car, gasping and fighting for breath again, that
the waiting girl was in doubt as to who had been
the victor. Then he called to her, and she
understood.
She lowered the revolver, slowly, as he
clambered weakly back over the boxes, and
dropped in the seat beside her.
“Are you hurt?” he gasped.
“No!” she said. But the sound was more
like a sob. The siren of the Laminian was now
screaming and bellowing out through the vel-
vety black quietness of the midnight waterfront.
The sentries on the ship were still shooting
after them, foolishly, and adding to the inter-
mittent uproar. But the car, by this time, had
covered more than half of the mile-long pier.
A land-breeze, balmy and many-odoured, blew
in their faces. On either side of them, through
the darkness, pulsed the ghostly white lacework
of the beach-surf.
“Thank God, we’re free!” said McKinnon
devoutly.



CHAPTER XXVIII
THE COUNTER-FORCES
McKINNON's cry of thankfulness was cut
short by an exclamation from the girl at his
side as the car rocked and swayed along the un-
even pier-track.
“Look!” she gasped. “They are closing the
gates ahead of us! They are shutting us in 1”
McKinnon peered through the darkness. He
could see a number of moving lights; they
shifted about through the gloom, small and rest-
less, like fire-flies. He could also make out the
shadowy lines of a building or two. Where
the track ran between these buildings, at the
end of the pier, a white-painted wooden gate
had been swung and locked across the rails to
stop the car. He could see the light from the
restlessly moving lanterns refracted from its
painted slats, from the swords of the officers
and the rifles of the waiting soldiers.
He knew what it meant, but it was too late
for half-measures. With the quickness of
306


THE COUNTER-FORCES 307
thought he jerked down two of the heavy cart-
ridge-boxes, to the left side of the driving-seat,
as a barricade against a chance bullet. He felt
sure it would be only a chance bullet; his con-
tempt for both the arms and the marksman-
ship of the Latin-American was of long stand-
ing. He hauled and twisted and rolled two
boxes as quickly down on the right-hand end
of the driving-seat, calling to the girl at his
side to crouch down between his knees as he
reached out and took the speed-lever in his own
hand. -
Alicia had instinctively slowed down the car,
for the moving lights were now not more than
two hundred feet before them. McKinnon, with
his foot held ready on the brakes, threw the
motor out to full speed. He no longer felt
afraid of the flimsy wooden gate. What he
feared was a tie across the track or a switch
thrown open to derail him. And any moment,
he felt, as the heavy car gathered speed and
once more hurled itself forward, they would
start shooting at him with their pot-metal
rifles.
He crouched lower and lower between his
barricade of boxes as the car swung in toward
the shadowy pier-end, so that his stooping body
forced the girl to the very floor of the driving-
seat. He saw a red tongue or two of flame dart


308 THE COUNTER-FORCES
out of the blackness ahead of him, and he knew
that the firing had begun. He could hear the
whine of the bullets as they passed overhead;
he could hear the lead ping and pound against
the car-sides. He had little fear for the boxes
of ammunition surrounding him; the cartridges
were covered enough by the powdered fluxing-
slag to be cushioned against concussion. Once,
indeed, a bullet splintered against the wood of
the very box against which he leaned. He held
his breath and waited, racking and swinging
onward toward the moving lights.
But still the firing kept up. The white-
painted gate before him seemed a mirage,
which receded as he advanced. It seemed that
he would never get to it. And he knew what a
bullet might do at any moment. He carried no
lights, and he felt certain that as yet the men
attacking him had nothing against which to cen-
tralise their fire. But as he came closer, he
knew that this advantage would be lost. Then
it suddenly occurred to him that a show of re-
sistance would be a possible help to him. He
had no time to feel for one of the carbines that
still lay somewhere about the bottom of the car.
But his groping fingers found the revolver on
the car-seat cushion behind them.
Before his arm could go up, however, he knew
that it was too late. The fire was pouring in


THE COUNTER-FORCES 309
on them broadside; he could hear the whistle
of the bullets and the splintering of the car-hood
sides. He had ridden down the lights and the
waiting men.
The stabbing and jetting and drifting powder
smoke obscured the gate so that they were upon
it before he knew it. There was a second rend-
ing and snapping of wood, a vision of flying
white pickets, a cry from the soldiers on either
side of him. But the car had passed its second
barrier, carrying away one end of the frame-
work across its battered lamps.
McKinnon took a deep breath and waited with
his foot still on the brake, oppressed by the ter-
ror of a sudden derailment. But the great car
kept to the tracks and went thundering in be-
tween the shadowy buildings that mercifully
shut them off from the grilling rifle-fire of De
Brigard’s men. He knew, by the passing of
the thunderous echo, that they were in the open
again, circling up through the scattering lines
of mud huts. The sound of a shot or two still
came to his ears. He could feel the girl move;
she was trying to rise to the seat. But he held
her there between his knees as the car con-
tinued to plunge and sway along the crooked
tracks. Now and then the howling of dogs came
to his ears, breaking through the continuous
monotone of the wind’s rush past his face,


310 THE COUNTER-FORCES
straining and peering into the darkness ahead.
Far out in the roadstead the Laminian’s siren
was still bellowing and roaring. An answering
steam-whistle, somewhere in the east, took up
the stentorian complaint; lights began to ap-
pear in the houses of the wakened town.
Alicia, still pinned down by his knees, was
struggling and calling to him. He knew that
she was safe, that she was still unharmed, and
that was all he cared to know.
“Hurry!” she called to him.
“Yes,” he answered, leaning closer to catch
her words.
“We circle about the town,” she was calling
into his ear. “We have to come out by Point
Asuncion, next to the new hospital. There will
be guards there. They can cross from the pier-
end almost as soon as we can circle around!”
“It’s out to the last notch,” McKinnon ex-
plained, and she had to steady herself in the
reeling car by suddenly catching at his arm.
“They'll try to stop us there!” she called
out to him once more.
“They can’t!” he called back recklessly, al-
most drunkenly, for the speed of their escape
seemed to have gone to his head. “They
can’t 1”
He suddenly forced her down to her former
position, between his sheltering knees, for his


312 THE COUNTER-FORCES
|- - - -
-
He ducked low as he heard the sound, and
brought his carbine into play. Throwing the
old-fashioned magazine-lever down and back,
he took quick but careful aim at the moving
lanterns, light by light. It was not until his
magazine was empty that he dropped the
weapon and caught up his revolver. His shots
were going wild, he knew, but he did not stop.
He saw the moving lights come to a halt, al-
most beside the track-edge. He saw one of them
go down and scatter, and the oil break into
flames. He saw the remaining lights waver,
draw back, and disperse. And the girder fell
as the men wavered and retreated. But it did
not fall on the rails.
He swept past where it lay beside the burn-
ing oil, six good feet from the track. He heard
the hasty volley they tried to pour in on him,
broadside, as he went. But they had nothing
more than a racing shadow for a target, and
the car had thundered past before they could
make a second move. He felt the girl clasping
his knee; whether from fright or weakness or
gratitude at their deliverance he could not tell.
Nor did he care to ask as he helped her up into
the seat.
They were clear of the town now, and in the
open country. A long level stretch of swamp-
land, musky-smelling, miasmal, blanketed with


THE COUNTER-FORCES 313
a feverous night-mist, stretched before them.
McKinnon knew that no courier could overtake
them. He remembered that no wires ran from
Puerto Locombia inland, that the coast was cut
off from the hinterland, that they were com-
paratively safe until they had climbed the
Height of Land and Guariqui itself came in
sight. Then there would be the Liberal army’s
lines to run, De Brigard’s sentinels to pass.
Then, if all went well, their journey would be
at an end. Getting into Guariqui would mean
one last risk and one last fight; but in the mean-
time they were safe.
He lessened the mad speed of the car a little,
wondering, for the first time, if they carried
enough gasoline to see them to their journey’s
end. The more he thought over that problem
of gasoline supply the more it disturbed him.
With his tank once empty they would be
stranded in a hostile country, in which there
would be no hiding, from which there could be
no escape. The mere terrifying thought of such
a contingency caused him to throw out the
speed-lever a notch or two. He noticed, as they
plunged on and on through the quietness of the
night, that his hands were cut and scratched,
that his face was caked with dried blood, that
his body was sore and stiff. But deep with-
in him was a persistent and unquenchable glow


314 THE COUNTER-FORCES
of exhilaration, something more than mere
speed-drunkenness and mere thankfulness for
delivery from past dangers.
It was the world-old and primordial joy in
accomplishment, the intoxication of conquest
implanted in him by a thousand fighting ances-
tors. And he felt at his side the tired and over-
taxed body of the woman for whom he was bat-
tling; and as she swayed there with the sway-
ing of the car, letting her weight fall against
his shoulder and then recede from it, this feel-
ing that might have been nothing more than
pagan exultation was touched and transformed
into something higher. The air beat against
their faces, side by side; nocturnal moths flat-
tened against their clothing and were held there
by the wind.
McKinnon could see that they were beginning
to climb, now that the swamp-land had been left
behind, and that leaves and palm-fronds were
rustling on either side of them. The air seemed
to grow clearer, the darkness less abysmal.
He could see that they were at last on the edge
of the banana-belt, still climbing and pounding
and swaying upward. Their path was now a
lonely aisle through the forest of rustling
greenery that crowded up to the very track-
edge; sometimes a leaf swept the car-roof. At
times they could hear the ripple of water in the


THE COUNTER-FORCES 315
irrigation ditches. Once a light swung across
the track, a mile ahead. It brought the lever
out to full speed again, and a carbine ready,
and the two figures in the car lower down be-
hind their barricade. A voice shouted to them,
petulantly, out of the darkness as they swept
past, but that was all.
They were grinding and screeching on a
curve again, before McKinnon could lessen the
speed. As they swept around the sharp quar-
ter-circle, the car descended on what must have
been a grazing burro or a steer. The heavy
framework shuddered with the force of the im-
pact; there was an animal-like sound, half-
groan, half-grunt, as the obstructing black mass
was thrown aside. McKinnon felt a spurt of
blood flung up in his face, and the next mo-
ment held his breath, for he knew they had sped
out on a cobweb of steel that bridged the
cañonlike bed of a river. But still they kept on,
up and up, until the gradient began to tell on
the motor and the air grew perceptibly cooler.
Forest trees were about them now, and they
could hear the startled call of birds and the cry
of monkeys. Once a jaguar called out through
the night, and once, as they swept past a sleep-
ing village of little white huts, they saw the
glow of coals in an open mud oven.
But still the flying wheels carried them up


316 THE COUNTER-FORCES
and up until they could see behind them the
vague glimmer of the Caribbean, and the star-
light grew so clear that McKinnon could make
out the woman’s locked hands in her lap at
his side. He felt her shiver with the cold, and
forced her to drink a little of the liquor from
his brandy-flask. Then he groped about, look-
ing for a covering, for he knew that as the alti-
titude grew greater the cold would increase.
Under the seat-cushions he found an oilskin
coat, and helped her into it. The coat was much
too large for her, but he doubled it over, in
front, and held it in with a cushion-strap about
her waist.
He noticed, for the first time, that they were
both hatless. And as he began to feel the pene-
trating chill creep into his own bones, he swal-
lowed a mouthful of brandy and buttoned his
coat close up to his throat. But they were still
racing on, up and up toward the Cordilleras.
And he thanked what gods he thought were
watching over him that the gasoline had held
out, and that the car had kept to its tracks.
A cluster of three or four lights showed
ahead, on their left, and brought a little cry
from the girl.
“That’s Paraiso!” she called out to him.
“The road divides here. We must take the
track to the right.”


THE DISPUTED TRAIL 319
riedly about the track in the darkness. The
first was that the switch was locked. The closed
padlock resisted his fiercest tugs and wrenches.
He had to compel himself to calmness and de-
mand of his jaded intelligence some more
adequate means of attack.
He returned to the car, after a moment of
thought, and groped about until he found one
of the army-rifles lying between the cartridge-
boxes. Then he felt his way back to the switch,
and worked his gun-end carefully in through
the lock-chain. It did not take him long, using
his carbine-barrel as a crowbar, to pry and
twist the lever free.
His second discovery was a more alarming
one. Standing on the Guariqui track, block-
ing his way, was a flat-car. This car was piled
high with roughly hewn sticks of logwood. To
push any such dead weight as this ahead of them
to Guariqui was out of the question. He knew
it would have to be hauled back and side-
tracked on the rails to the left. Whether or
not it was beyond the strength of his motor
only an actual test could tell.
He found a chain binding the logwood-pile
together, and after a few minutes of hard work
this chain was securely attached to his car-axle
and hooked over the coupling-pin of the flat-
Cal'.


320 . THE DISPUTED TRAIL
But try as he might, the obstacle was not to
be removed. The loaded car refused to stir.
One of its wheels, pocketed in a half-inch de-
pression caused by a flattened rail-end, held it
anchored to the spot. His motor, sulking and
back-firing under the unnatural strain, was not
strong enough for the task. And he was sorely
afraid of injuring his engine and finding him-
self broken down and helpless on the very out-
skirts of De Brigard’s lines. He saw that there
was nothing to do but unload the flat-car where
it stood.
Alicia would have helped him at that slow
and dreary labour, but he pointed out to her the
necessity of standing on guard while he worked.
The rough-hewn sticks of logwood seemed
heavy beyond belief. Some of them, which he
could not lift, he had to work slowly outward
and let fall from the side of the car. He also
had to make sure that every log and stick fell
clear of the track.
His muscles ached, his fingers seemed with-
out joints, his strength was gone. Twice he had
to resort to heavy drafts from his brandy-flask.
But he worked on, doggedly, sullenly, argu-
ing with himself that he ought to be grateful
that he was gaining his end without being dis-
covered, picturing what such labour would be
under the fire of a dozen half-breed sharp-


THE DISPUTED TRAIL 323
this relentless enemy of light, was on his heels,
turned him back to his work, frenziedly, until
his heart pounded like a trip-hammer under his
aching breast-bone, and his breath, in that rare-
fied atmosphere, came with short, painful gasps.
He had to resort to his brandy-flask before
he could reach the car again. There he rested
for a precious minute or two, explaining to
Alicia that he would pry against the empty flat-
car’s wheel with a logwood stick, while she
hauled and tugged at its lower end with the re-
versed motor.
It was perilous work, calling for the utmost
caution lest one fault of judgment undo all his
labour. It was a moment when everything hung
in the balance, when one grain of ill-luck would
send the beam swinging up against them. But
an inarticulate little cry burst from him as he
saw the black mass slowly yield, and then move,
inch by languid inch. He heard the grind of
the rusty wheel-flanges against the switch-
points, and knew that he had won.
Then the operation was repeated, when once
the switch had been cleared and the lever
thrown over, and again the stubborn flat-car
was pried and pushed into motion. When it
came to a standstill, it was left resting well
off to the left of the switch, with the road to
Guariqui once more open.


THE LAST DITCH 325
away, and they came into a more broken
country, winding and twisting between bald and
rocky hills, past coffee-farms from which early
awakened dogs barked out at them. But the
ragged hooded car raced and pounded forward,
taking the sharp curves with a scream of pro-
test, striking with malignant heels at every
passing switch-point. Then the light grew
stronger; they could see a more orderly and
level country studded with rancho and hacienda,
and a crooked, sun-baked road, white with dust,
and broken walls, and clumps of stunted trees.
Then the girl gave a cry and caught at his
aInn.
“Guariqui!” she said, pointing toward the
northwest. He had no time to look, for at the
same moment his own eyes had caught sight of
something which filled him with an even more
compelling emotion.
Before the rocky hill-crests toward which
they were sweeping, he caught sight of a row
of smoke columns and the serried white
Splashes of tent walls against the yellow-gray
of the parched fields. He leaped to his feet as
he saw it. He surrendered the lever recklessly,
and turned and struggled with one of the car-
tridge-boxes on the row behind them. He pulled
... and tugged and worked it quickly forward, to
heighten the barricade on the right-hand side


326 THE LAST DITCH
of the car, for he knew they were charging down
on De Brigard’s camp. He realised that their
climacteric moment was at hand, that the time
for their last dash across the enemy's lines had
COrne.
Already he could see the pacing sentries as
they met and countermarched between the scat-
tered splashes of white. He could see the cor-
raled horses and mules of De Brigard’s cav-
alry feeding together. As the car raced on, he
could even make out groups of men in ragged
uniform, barefooted, squatting about the camp-
fires.
Some of them he could see stooping quietly
over black pots; one group was splashing and
washing at a long wooden water-trough. There
seemed something tranquil in the scene, some-
thing strangely unlike the way of war in the
slowly rising smoke columns, in the slowly mov-
ing barefooted men, in the ranchos of palm and
tree-boughs, in the water-trough and the tran-
quilly feeding horses and mules.
Then the scene changed, with the quickness
of a stage-picture. The cue for that change
came with a challenge from a sentry and then
a single rifle-shot from a second sentry on guard
further along the track-edge. The camp
changed with that shot.
It seemed to McKinnon like the sudden


328 THE LAST DITCH
perhaps, from immoderate drafts of brandy on
a wofully empty stomach.
He saw them, as in a dream, but he scarcely
gave them a thought. All he knew was that the
woman huddled down at his side was still safe,
and his car was still under way. Beyond that,
he knew, nothing counted. Death had snapped
at his heels too often and too closely that night;
he was supremely contemptuous of their fire-
cracker powder and their pot-metal guns. He
wanted to get to Guariqui and have something
to eat, and then sleep for twenty good hours.
And the racing of the car made him dizzy.
And every bone in his body ached. And he
wondered how long he would have to keep
shooting.
Then he sat back, with a sigh, and rested his
arms. He noticed that his gun-barrel was hot
to the touch. He noticed, too, that the noise of
the shooting was not so disquietingly loud in
his ears. It began to dawn on his dazed mind
that they had faced the worst of the fight. He
began to understand that they had forced their
way through De Brigard’s lines, that they were
swinging up to the outskirts of the capital, that
they were to reach Guariqui, after all.
Then he remembered pounding out over a nar-
row iron bridge, under which flashed and rip-
pled a little stream as blue as a robin's egg.


THE LAST DITCH 329
It made him think, for a moment, how thirsty
he was, how much he would give for a hatful
of that rippling blue water. Then all thought
of the stream passed from his indifferent mind,
for before him he could see walls, white walls
and blue walls and pink walls, and above them
huddled red roofs, and the dark green of tree-
tops, and a yellow cathedral-tower, and still
farther away a coppered roof-dome glimmering
like a ball of fire in the slanting sunlight. Then
he heard a bugle call, and call again, sweet as
silver, like a voice out of a dream.
That mellow and trailing note was punc-
tuated by the sudden blow-like sounds of rifle-
shots, from somewhere amid the soft white and
blue and pink of the very walls ahead of him.
He saw the track-ballast about him leap and
erupt into ominous little clouds of flying dust.
Ulloa's outposts were shooting at him, from
Guariqui. They were under fire, from their own
people.
“Quick!” he called to the girl. “Show a
flag !”
“How?” she asked, not understanding.
“Tie it to a carbine-end! Quick!”
“Tie what?” she called in his ear.
“A flag—a white flag—anything white!”
He knew, the next moment, that she was tear-
ing a linen underskirt from her own limbs. He


CHAPTER XXXI
THE LAST HOPE
McKINNON's fall seemed to shock him into
new life. The very abruptness of his disaster
brought with it a renewed appreciation of
danger. His mind became alert again, with the
peevish alertness of febrility, as though, like
the long-taxed body, it were capable of coming
into a sort of second-wind.
He realised what had happened, for he was
thinking clearly and quickly now. He could see
the whole thing, and see it only too well. De
Brigard’s men had had the forethought to break
the one line of communication between Guariqui
and the coast. This end had been achieved
easily enough, by the mere uprooting of a few
lengths of track. He had ridden into that open
trap, without thought. He had demanded too
much of Destiny. Luck had at last gone against
him, as it must in the end go against every man
who insists on taking his chances. -
They were alone there, he and the girl he
$89


THE LAST HOPE 333
-----------------
was trying to save, under the hot morning sun
of an open and unprotected country. They
were stranded on a slope of yellow ballast-sand,
face to face with a guerilla army that would re-
fuse them quarter, under the walls of a be-
leaguered city that would decline to admit them.
Yes, he had asked too much of Fate. There
was nothing left to him, now, but to fight it out,
fight it out to a finish.
The next clearly defined thought that came to
him was that he was burning with thirst. Be-
fore everything else, he felt, he must have water.
And there remained only one hope of water.
That was the little stream two hundred yards
behind them, the flashing little ribbon of blue
over which De Brigard’s men would be swarm-
ing at any moment.
There was no time to be lost. His first task
was to make his way to that stream and back—
to fight his way there and back, if need be. He
could not hold out, he knew, without water.
He dodged and peered and groped about the
overturned car, in feverish search for anything
that would hold water. That hurried search
seemed a hopeless one, until his eyes fell on a
battered gasoline-can of galvanised tin, stowed
away under the seat-frame. He got the screw-
top off its cover, in some way, and let its con-
tants bubble out on the yellow sand as he swung


THE LAST HOPE 335
he was wounded. But the next moment she be-
held him bring his rifle into action, and then run
forward, and repeat the movement, and again
run forward. Then he ducked lower, and rose
again, and suddenly dropped down into the bed
of the creek, completely out of sight.
He remained there for what seemed an inter-
minable length of time to her. The vicious
Snapping and popping of the distant guns crept
ominously closer, second by second. They
would be on him, she felt, before he could es-
cape. They would cut him off before he could
even climb from the creek-bed.
Then, in the clear light, she saw his head
emerge. She caught sight of him worming cau-
tiously back, dodging and rounding into each
land-depression. The gun-shots began again,
until they became a rhythm of hollow sound,
like quick and impatient hammer-pounds on a
plank. She saw that he was wet to the knees,
and breathing hard, as he stumbled back to the
Car.
Then, as she saw the wet and dripping can,
all her being was centred on the thought of her
own thirst, of how her dry throat ached and
throbbed for water. She scarcely noticed that
the firing had ceased, that the line of skulking
and scattered figures had fallen mysteriously
away. She only knew that McKinnon had


THE LAST HOPE 337
“Our chance for what?” she asked, as she
worked.
“For holding out—for keeping them back—
for saving this ammunition for Guariqui!”
He was now taking the boxes as she filled
them, and piling them one above the other on
the outside of his roughly built wall, as an
armour-belt protection for his serried cartridge-
cases. He was afraid of what a bullet at close
range might do to those cartridges. And all
the while, slowly and methodically, the Guariqui
sharpshooter was picking at him, as he showed
himself outside the shadow of the car-wreck.
“We can hold them off, I tell you!” McKin-
non was exulting, as he left a narrow embrasure
in his three-foot battlement, by pushing two of
the boxes a few inches apart. “We’ve got a
fort here! We’re as safe as Guariqui is! They
can’t get in behind us, because Ulloa's men are
waiting there, and they know it! They’ve got
to come at us from the front! And we’re safe
behind this—it’s as safe as a stone wall! And
we’ve got ammunition—a ton of it, if we need
it!”
He was hauling at more of the boxes, build-
ing his side-walls now.
One of the Guariqui sharpshooter’s bullets
whined in over his head, within a foot of where


338 THE LAST HOPE
he worked. He swung about and shook his fist
at his unseen enemy, irritably, impotently.
“You fool!” he cried. “You fool!—wasting
powder on the people who're tryin’ to save
you!”
“We can’t save them!” said the woman, gray
with dust, weak with hunger, sick with fear.
But she worked on, mechanically, doggedly.
“We’ve got to !” exulted McKinnon, as he
took the last box of sand from her. “We’ve
got to hold out until the Princeton lands her
men and gets them up into the hills here ! It's
simply a matter of time! We can hold out here
as well as in Guariqui! We’re safe here! And
we’ve got water!”
“But no food!” she said.
“Wait!” he cried again. “The chocolate!
And the milk-tablets! It’s enough! And here's
brandy, see—half a cupful of brandy left!”
“But how long will that last?”
“It will last as long as we need it—until
nightfall, anyway!” he declared, as he crawled
back to the car and dragged the remaining rifle
out from under the fallen boxes.
“But if the Princeton’s men are not here by
night?” she asked.
He seemed to resent her note of hopelessness.
“They will be here by night! They’ve got to
be here! They should be at Puerto Locombia


THE LAST HOPE 339
by five this afternoon. They’ll commandeer a
Fruit Concern locomotive from the roundhouse
there, and be up here by sunset—before sun-
Set !”
She forced herself to believe him. She strug-
gled to catch at some shadow of his hopeful-
neSS.
“Then what more must I do, to help?” she
asked, very quietly. He was peering out over
the rolling and sun-steeped plain.
“Eat—we must eat before those devils start
back at us!” he said, as he caught up the can
of gasoline-tainted water and gulped at it, sav-
agely, for the sun by this time was cruelly hot
overhead. Then he dragged out his brandy-
flask, diluted its contents, and made the girl
drink from it.
“If that fool back there’d only stop wasting
powder!” he cried, as a bullet splattered
against a car-wheel behind them. “They won’t
understand who we are, back there, until they
see De Brigard’s men coming in closer and
closer, or trying to rush us. They won’t know
we’re friends until they see us holding that
guerilla mob off!”
“It can’t be long now,” said the girl, blink-
ing out across the sun-steeped plain, where, in
the distance, restless brown figures could be


340 THE LAST HOPE
seen once more moving and dispersing and con-
cealing themselves along the land-dips.
“Then we must eat, before they come,” he
answered, putting the broken and crumpled
pieces of army-chocolate out between them.
The milk-tablets he decided to save for a second
meal. Then he loaded the rifles, and laid them
out ready, and placed the three revolvers on a
box-top, with his pocketful of cartridges close
beside them.
And they sat there on the yellow sand of their
little rifle-pit, breakfasting on brandy-and-
water and unsweetened chocolate, while they
waited for the enemy to come up.


THE LAST STAND 343
“Why?” she asked.
“They’re helpless in there . . . . they’ve
no ammunition!”
She compelled herself to calmness again.
“But surely they’ll know . . . . surely
. . . . in time,” she murmured.
“Yes, they’ll know!” he answered, absently,
for his squinting eyes were on the undulating
sweep of open ground ahead of him. He could
see little barefooted men in ragged denim uni-
forms, creeping and running from hollow to
hollow, spreading out in an irregular line, like
the fan-edge of a breaking side-swell.
“They’re coming . . . . keep low!” he
said. And as he spoke he sighted and fired.
The response to that first fire of his was
prompt, almost instantaneous. It brought a
steady crescendo clatter of sound and a patter
and throb of bullets against the pit-front.
McKinnon swung the emptied rifle back into
the hands of the waiting girl and caught up its
mate, with one movement of his body. -
He was firing calmly and deliberately now,
watching for each upthrust shoulder and ad-
vancing head as it rose above the dip of the
creek-bottom.
Then the heads began to show thicker-and
faster, and it left him no time for deliberation.
He pumped the lever and fired until his arms


346 THE LAST STAND
a disturbing weakness descended upon him. So
he leaned against his embrasure and chewed
milk-tablets, and fired when he saw a moving
shadow to target into, or a threatening gun-
arm to aim at, and made the white-faced girl
eat her portion of the milk-tablets and drink
the last of the brandy-and-water.
And as he watched the afternoon grew older,
and the sun swung lower over Guariqui. But
still he fired and reloaded and wondered if the
Princeton had steamed into Puerto Locombia,
and silently and devoutly prayed for help.
Then all thought of prayer went from his
mind, for his squinting eyes had fallen on what
looked like a salt-barrel as it appeared over
the brink of the creek-bank, a ludicrous and un-
looked-for thing of staves and hoops.
McKinnon watched this barrel, in wonder, for
it seemed to shift about by itself. Then it be-
gan to roll slowly forward. It advanced
towards the rifle-pit, inch by inch, propelled by
no visible human hand. It moved ponderously
onward, foot by foot, as though it had been en-
dowed with some miraculous power of locomo-
tion.
Then it came to a stop, on a barren “hog-
back,” high above the ground that surrounded
it. But even before the betraying black finger of
a rifle-end appeared cautiously and slowly above


THE LAST STAND 347
one corner of it, McKinnon knew it was a blind,
a moving shelter. He knew it was a barrel filled
with sand, a roughly improvised ambuscade
being pushed forward by some intrepid sharp-
shooter from De Brigard’s camp.
The man in the rifle-pit watched that barrel,
uneasily, frowningly, firing maliciously at it,
from time to time, as it advanced and stopped
and delivered its whistling challenge of lead
and still again crawled onward. It seemed a
thing to fear and hate, like some venomous and
loathsome dinosaurian reptile armoured against
attack. Then the man watching it schooled him-
self to calmness, and fired more deliberately,
studying his sight and range and trajectory,
feeling his way about that incongruous and rep-
tilious enemy with a hissing antenna of lead.
When the rifle-end showed again McKinnon
fired, as calmly and judiciously as before, but
this time three inches to the right of the rifle-
end and the fraction of an inch lower.
He had the satisfaction of beholding a pair
of hands thrown up in the air, wide apart, and
of knowing that the rifle had fallen to the
ground. Beyond that there was no sign. But
the sand-barrel did not move again.
Then, as he watched with heavy eyes, he
caught sight of a figure on horseback, circling
out from what must have been the most south-


THE LAST STAND 349
cernedly, until the magazines were emptied and
the barrels were too hot to hold. But he could
no longer keep his ground clear. They were at
last clearing the creek-bank, clearing it in
swarms. They were finally overwhelming him,
in sheer force of numbers.
Powder-smoke enveloped him. Dust and
splinters flew about him. Runnels of sweat ran
down his lean and grimy face. But still he kept
firing, faster and faster, pouring his lead into
the advancing line in a frenzy of hopelessness.
Then one of the guns jammed, irretrievably.
He caught up the other, and emptied it, until
the overheated steel scorched his shaking hand.
But still the ragged and shouting line came on,
unchecked. He had nothing but the revolvers to
fall back on. So he snatched them and stood
up to it, breast-high above the sand-box rampart
in front of him. -
“Come on, you cowards!” he exulted, drunk-
enly, reelingly, as he faced and watched the
Spitting and snapping and ever-advancing line,
for he knew it was the end. Then the girl
dragged him down, while she reloaded, and
caught up the third revolver and stood at his
side, with her breast against a smoke-blackened
cartridge-box.
“It’s the end!” he said,


350 THE LAST STAND
“I know!” she answered, moving closer, so
that her body touched his.
But the line she looked out on was not the
same line that McKinnon had last seen. It had
shifted and wheeled, in an inexplicable side-
movement. It had crumpled and twisted up on
itself, like leaves caught and tossed in a wind-
eddy.
Then a cry burst from her throat, a cry of
sheer joy, and she caught at McKinnon’s arm.
“Look!” she said, with a sob.
For swinging about the track-curve were two
flat-cars. Mounted on these cars she could see
glimmering and burnished machine-guns. And
behind these guns stood cheering and shouting
bluejackets, stabbing the air with adder-like
tongues of flame as the spinning chambers were
discharged and the puffing locomotive pushed
them slowly upward along the narrow track.
They seemed little more than boys, those
quick-moving and bright-eyed jackies. They
were shouting with the foolish joy and pride of
youth at the thought of its first baptism of fire.
They seemed like an excursion of madmen to
McKinnon. He wondered what they meant,
where they came from. But he could not give
them much thought. He had other things to
think of—for a wounded Locombian, a little
brown-faced demon with a long-barrelled maga-


TEIE LAST STAND 851
zine-rifle, was crawling towards him on a
broken thigh, taking pot-shots as he came. And
McKinnon knew he had to hold that man off,
and it worried him to think that he had only a
revolver to do it with. But he fired and re-
loaded and fired, leaning out over his wall-top
and hurling half-delirious imprecations into the
smoke-hung air. He fought on, to the last, like
a man in a dream. All the world, to him, had
become a chaotic pit of contending spirits who
clamoured for his blood.
Then he was stirred and disturbed by the sud-
den scream of the girl at his side. Her voice
seemed to come from a great distance; it Smote
on his ear thinly, as though heard through a
wall.
“You’re wounded!” she cried, foolishly,
hysterically. He denied it, indifferently, and
wondered why he was no longer standing be-
side his cartridge-boxes. He saw her white and
smoke-streaked face bent over his arm and
heard her repeated cry of alarm as she tore
away a part of his ragged shirt-sleeve. He
could see her fingers, when she lifted them; they
were wet, and dark-red in colour. Then he
knew that she was tearing some part of her
dress, that she was binding and twisting a strip
of linen about his arm, somewhere below the
left shoulder.


352 THE LAST STAND
She twisted and tightened it cruelly; but he
was too tired to argue with her about it. He
felt it would be best to humour her; she had had
to endure so much for him. And it was rather
pleasant, he told himself, having her fussing
about him that way. But he wished she
wouldn’t cry and shake, and that he could ex-
plain to her how much he wanted to go to sleep.
Then he was roused by more shouts and cries,
and by a voice quite close to him, which said,
in wonder: “Good God, he’s a white man!”
Then came more men, and a sudden order for
someone to stand back.
McKinnon opened his eyes, wearily, and saw
a yellow-faced stranger with a pointed gray
beard. He wore a uniform like an officer’s, and
carried a sword from a red silk sash, a foolish
and womanish-looking sash. Then came other
men and other officers, and a thin and far-away
babbling of voices, till the yellow sand where
the car lay changed into a lake of swarming and
crowding human beings, into a sea of little
brown-faced jumping-jacks who shouted and
contorted and flung foolish little red-striped
army-caps up in the air, gibbering and arguing
and calling, all the while, in some outlandish
and incomprehensible tongue.
McKinnon neither knew nor cared what it
meant. He only wanted to get somewhere


THE LAST WORD 355
as a Crusader smoking a Pittsburg stogie, or a
monastery with mail-chutes, or a cathedral with
a cash-register. Then Aikens led him to the
battlemented edge of the flat roof and showed
him the arc-lights that swung in Avenida Sac-
ramento and Calle Florida, and the new power-
house toward Paraiso Hill, and the statuary
that gleamed through the green palms of the
Parque Nacional, and the Asilo Chapai and the
roof of the new Boynton Hospital, and the
columned front of the Theatro Locombio. Then
he drew himself up and protested that Guariqui
wasn’t such a one-horse town, after all.
McKinnon continued to look down at Guari-
qui, after Aikens had gone back to his work.
He could see the iron-fenced Palace gardens,
cool and shadowy and secluded-looking. In the
Plaza beyond he could see the splash of water
from a frond-hidden fountain, and the white
statue of some unknown hero who had died in
some unknown war for Locombian liberty. He
could see the yellow front of the cathedral and
the sun-steeped Prado white with dust. He
could see the American bluejackets, from the
Princeton, who were still picketing the streets,
and a bullock-cart that crawled noisily over the
cobblestones.
At the head of Avenida Sacramento he could
see another detachment of white-helmeted


358 THE LAST WORD
crowded and companionable cities of his own
kind. There seemed something barbaric to him
in the very music of the band that brayed and
shrilled from the streets below. In the men
who followed that band he could make out the
narrow shoulders and the protruding cheek-
bones of Carib-Indian blood. They seemed
more than outlanders to him; they were scarcely
white men. And he was tired of them and their
foolish little wars; he was homesick.
He heard a movement at his side, and he
looked up from the embrasure over which he
leaned to see Alicia Boynton standing almost
within reach of his hand. She seemed nearly
ghost-like, to his first startled glance, for she
was dressed in white linen, and the things
through which she had passed and many days
and nights of anxiety had left her face still
colourless. The strong sunlight, too, accentuated
the wistful little hollow that had crept into her
cheek. The touch of tragedy which this shadow
in some way gave to her face was contradicted,
though, by the deep and happy look in her eyes.
Yet as she stood there at McKinnon’s side
the strangeness and the loneliness of Guariqui
seemed almost to fade away. She humanised it
and brought it nearer to him. Then his eyes
fell on the figure of an officer in full uniform,
passing in through the Palace gates, with his


THE LAST WORD 359
scabbard in his gauntleted hand. He was as
gilded and as ornamental as a character from a
Broadway musical comedy. But he served to
bring a wayward surge of misery over the soul
of the American.
McKinnon sighed, openly and audibly. He
could recall, only too easily, the beginning of
that vague unhappiness. It had first come to
birth in the Hospital, when General Alcantara,
as Alicia had called him, accompanied her to
the bed in the little blue-walled ward. He was
a dapper and dashing officer, and in explaining
that he had once studied at West Point, Alicia
suggested that the two of them might have much
in common. But McKinnon had resented that
youthful officer’s presence at her side, from the
first. From the first, too, he had despised the
over-ready and white-toothed smile, the padded
and punctilious little figure, the fawn-like eyes
of Latin brown, as soft as a woman’s. He had
even more resented the panther-like grace of the
scrupulously uniformed little figure, and the
tropic-born cadences of the light-noted and care-
fully modulated voice as the two of them chat-
ted and laughed together. It made McKinnon
think of himself as awkward and ungainly,
as raw and raucous in his address to women.
He had maintained the pretence, to himself,
that it did not matter, that it never could or


360 TEIE LAST WORD
would matter. But he knew, at last, that this
was not true, that it mattered more than he
dared admit.
“You mustn't do this,” the girl was saying,
reprovingly, as she drew closer beside him, so
that her tinted parasol threw its shadow over
his head.
“But it’s so good to be out again,” he said.
“And they’re giving Ulloa's Irregulars an ova-
tion down there.”
“But you’re not strong yet,” she warned him,
looking up into his face with anxious eyes.
“Strong!” he laughed. “Why, I feel like a
shorthorn in from the range!”
“But that is a tropical sun you are stand-
ing in.”
“It isn’t the sun that makes me feel so bad,”
he confessed. “It’s being so far away from—
from home, from—oh, from everything!”
There was a minute or two of silence as they
stood gazing down over Guariqui.
“I know,” she said at last, comprehendingly.
He looked down at her, a little surprised at the
humility in her voice. She had seemed a little
aloof from him during the last few days; he
had not been able to guess at the source of that
aloofness. Guariqui and its official life, he felt,
had flung a bar between them. It seemed to
have drawn and shut her in as one of its own.


THE LAST WORD 361
He had grown almost afraid of her, since the
morning he had seen her from his window, sit-
ting up so slender and fragile in Duran’s flash-
ing official landau as it swept out through the
Palace gates surrounded by galloping and gor-
geous cuirassiers with brazen breastplates and
horsetail helmets. And the consciousness of
this alienation brought a touch of bitterness into
his voice as he went on.
“No; I don’t believe you do know. This is
the life you were born to. This is your home.
It means everything to you!”
“Not everything,” she corrected him, very
quietly. He could not see her face, for she was
gazing out over Paraiso Hill.
“But I know you would never be happy away
from it, from everything here that has been
making me feel so lost and miserable, any more
than I would be happy away from the things
that would make you feel lost and miserable.”
She glanced up with a little look of surprise.
“I’m not a Locombian,” she said, laughing a
little. w
It was his turn to laugh, though there was
little mirth in it.
“No; but you are the sister of Dr. Arturo
Boynton, Minister of War for the Republic of
Locombia, Member of the Federal—”


362 THE LAST WORD
She looked up at him again, and met his gaze
without hesitation.
“And you are the man who saved the Re-
public of Locombia from—well, you know what
from 1”
He threw up his hand with a gesture of pro-
test.
“I was thinking hanged little about the Re-
public of Locombia,” he retorted, with his
cheery and companionable laugh. “I wanted
to get you out of that Ganley mess.”
“Then you saved me,” she protested.
“When I happened as a primary considera-
tion to be fighting to save my own precious
neck!” he deprecated.
He noticed the silent reproof in her eyes, and
as he saw it a new courage began to grope up-
ward out of the darkness of his heart. He
thought, a little enviously, of the days when she
had been so close to him, when the arm of no in-
tervening convention had stretched out between
them. Then he thought of the blood and dust
and grime of his battle, of the blood and dust
and grime that lay over so many of his years.
And all his life suddenly seemed an empty and
aimless and wasted life to him. It seemed an
affront to her, even to tell her how unworthy
he was, yet the growing hunger and ache in his
heart forbade him to keep silent. He watched


THE LAST WORD 365
touched with sorrow only as all things that
fringe on the Infinite are so touched. It was
love, the deep love that lives only in deep souls.
They were alone under the high-arching
tropical sun. The condor wheeled back over
Paraiso Hill unnoticed; barefooted soldiers in
ragged denim marched by under the Palace un-
seen; Ulloa's mounted band brayed itself into
the distance unheard.


CHAPTER XXXIV
THE LAST DEBT
IT was Aikens, the wireless-operator, who
brought McKinnon and Alicia back to the world
of reality.
“I’ve got 'em!” he called excitedly, from his
little station door shadowed by its awning of
faded striped canvas. “I’ve picked something
up!”
He disappeared from sight, and McKinnon
could hear the crackle and spit of his “spark”
across the “spark-gap.”
Then the youth reappeared under the faded
striped awning. He held a much-worn Panama
hat in his hand, and he approached the older
man with some hesitation.
“Could you help me out for a few minutes?”
he asked, with a hand-wave towards his
“station.”
“What's wrong?”
“I’ve got to get somebody from the War
866


368 THE LAST DEBT
the tightly jacketed midshipmen in the Plaza
below him. Then came the hurrying dots and
dashes of the Boracao operator:
Detachment of Morazan’s Scouts captured American
named Ganley this morning at daybreak. Ganley held here
in quartel-condemned to death by fusilado after drumhead
court-martial by Morazan. He claims to be American citi-
zen and wants protection of his government. I cannot gét
Guariqui-station there dead for seven days past. Hurry
in relief on receipt of this or will be too late. If possible
land marines at San Antonio Inlet and push overland to
Boracao by way of Agira River Trail. I have done every-
thing in my power, but am helpless. You must hurry-is to
be shot at Sunset. ADOLPH. KLAUSER,
American Consul, Boracao.
McKinnon handed the written sheet to Alicia
without speaking.
She read it and handed it back to him. Her
hand was shaking a little.
“What can we do?” she asked, almost in a
whisper.
“There’s nothing we can do,” was McKin-
non's answer. “Our coils are still out of order.
They’re still too weak to send I’’
“But we can’t stand here and see the man
die—now—in that way!”
McKinnon suddenly held up a hand for
silence, for the Princeton was sending again:
Cannot land men before communicating with Guariquí.
Ask Suspension of execution of American named Ganley for
day or two until Guariqui conference.
LIEUTENANT VERDU,


THE LAST DEBT 369
Then came a break and another wait, while
from somewhere far off in the streets below
floated up the bray and throb of the military
band. Then a second Boracao message trickled
down through the Guariqui wires and stirred
the coherer into feeble life:
Can do nothing. Morazan claims acting for General
Ulloa under President Duran’s orders. But whole thing
terrible mistake. We must have help at once, or innocent
and law-abiding citizens will be murdered. Send men and
heliograph advance from San Antonio Hill.
KLAUSER.
Aiken's hurried return with two orderlies and
an officer in full uniform kept McKinnon from
intercepting the Princeton’s reply. The little
station had suddenly become close and stifling.
He felt weak and unstrung, and was glad to
gain the open air and find the quiet sunlight and
the slowly waving palms about him once more.
He was glad to know that the woman he loved
stood at his side, and that their future life was
to be a life far from such scenes.
They were still there, side by side above the
embrasure, when the hurrying Aikens, as he
darted below-stairs, thrust a sheet of carbon-
copy into their hands as he passed. McKinnon
held it up and read it aloud:
American named Ganley just shot down by quartel guards
as he broke jail here—body surrendered to me by alcalde-
am holding it awaiting instructions.
KLAUSER.





-
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of a Neglected Wife
B, Mass. HERBERT unner
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