CHAPTER 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, seeming, 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 interlocutor.
"Mean it's your first run?" inquired the huge and genial spirit of the doorway. This question, like his first, remained unanswered. So he repeated it in a tone of mild and attained humility.
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