The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX
THE INTERCEPTED CALL
It was two hours later that a great wide-shouldered figure in white duck passed quietly along the empty bridge-deck. This ghost-like figure cautiously tried the door of the wireless room, but found it securely locked. Then it crept about to the half-open shutter and stood there, minute after minute, in an attitude of listening. Beyond the unbroken drone of the electric fan there was nothing to be heard from within. And the cabin itself was in utter darkness.
The man at the window waited for still an other space of time, peering back and forth along the deck to make sure that his movements were unobserved. Then he raised a cautious arm and slid the barred shutter farther along its groove.
The damp wood rasped and stuttered a little, for all his caution, as he pushed it, and he drew quickly back from the window. For he had heard the sound of a sudden half-articulate sigh, followed by the stir of a body moving impatiently on a mattress, and then the quick pad of bare feet crossing the cabin floor.
It was McKinnon, startled out of his sleep of utter weariness by the momentary sound of the moving shutter.
He turned on the single-globed, green-shaded electric that swung low over his operating-table. He stood there in his crumpled madras pajamas, looking dazedly and a little sleepily about the narrow room.
Then, automatically, from sheer force of habit, he adjusted his "set" over his head, swung a sleepy hand out to his tuner-levers, pressed the phones close over his ears, and listened.
He grew tired of standing there, half-leaning against the sharp table-edge, as he listened, for the responder had given no sign of life. So he dropped into the chair before his instrument, and sat there, yawning sleepily, with ludicrously wandering eyes, his elbows spread wide and resting on the edge of the unpainted pine board.
The man at the shuttered window could see his face, half in the strong light of the shaded electric globe. He could see the bony hand move back and forth to the tuner and shift and reshift the buttons in the slotted box-top columned 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 listener drew closer, for a sudden little sound, half-grunt, half-cry, had broken from McKinnon'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 coming 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 recognise the nature of the "send" as one would recognise the accent of a Westerner in Boston or a Londoner in Dublin. It was the unmistakable yet undefinable inflection and cadence of a navy man. It was an American battleship of some sort, calling Puerto Locombia.
McKinnon was on his feet again, tingling with excitement. He threw down his switch-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 listened. 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 diminished 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.
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?
And still again came the silence, and still again the call, indignant, peremptory, to the appreciatively trained ear as eloquent of impatience in its microphonic dots and dashes as the human voice itself could be.
Automatically, McKinnon wrote out the despatches, 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 concluded, 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 slinging 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 unyielding bulk, swinging to one side with a preoccupied 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, 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," suggested 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 disagreeably, 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 future, seeking for his next move and his reasons for it.
"It's for you!" was the quiet yet sinister answer.
"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 situation allowed of no further equivocation.
"Read it, of course—if you want to!"
Ganley pounced on it, like a cat on a cornered 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 message?" Ganley suggested with a pregnant movement of his right hand.
"Why?" asked McKinnon. He was still trying to think, to gain time.
"You know why," retorted the gun-runner.
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 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 malignant and admonitory stare into the cabin.
From the depths of his soul McKinnon resented that smile.
"You own this ship?" he asked, with a quietness that might have disturbed a less intrepid spirit. From that hour forward, he was beginning 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-looking 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 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 uttered it—"step in and try to stop my steamroller?"
"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.