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 clutching 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 comfortable 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 whatever, 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
