CHAPTER IV
THE 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 Forest helix, was the operator s narrow berth. Toward 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
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