The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 12
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 forecastle, 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 towards the bridge, felt that this quietness was not without its touch of the ominous. Yet he quickly 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 knitting his brows as he decided on the name and 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 approaching 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 slippered 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 entered his very cabin. Yet McKinnon knew, before he so much as looked up at the intruder, that it was Ganley who had come in answer to his call. And he had to restrain a smile at the thought of how identical were the tactics adopted 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.
"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 impassively 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, laying down his phones.
The Columbinelike giant in pajamas nodded his head.
"I've got news, big news," McKinnon confessed. "Yet it's not exactly about Ganley."
He could see the other man's eye-flash of impatience, but still the attitude of wary unconcern 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 being closely and keenly watched. This prompted him to toy with the situation for another moment or two, for he had his own watching to do.
"Do you know anything about this Locombian 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 tropical revolutions; the same fireworks, the same brass bands, the same bad ammunition and gold braid and bombast, and the same eternal countryful of starving peons!"
McKinuon, watching him covertly and closely, was a little disappointed at his enemy's apathy. 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 minute 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 inquired the other, with a languid uplift of his shaggy, iron-grey eyebrows. The two men looked directly at each other for a silent moment or two. McKinnon had a twofold end in view, and his line of advance was not an easy one.
"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 fruiter. 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 detect 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 emotion that may have been awakened in him remained shrouded and subterranean. Whatever he might be, concluded McKinnon, he was at least a consummate actor.
"Well?" the stolid and guarded figure demanded; and that was his only comment. McKinnon bent over as though to consult the message-sheet.
"They report that De Brigard has pounded his way through the Locombian lines and occupied Itzula."
The other man sat down, with a scarcely audible sigh, in the broken deck-chair beside him. There was an appreciable space of silence, unbroken except for the breathing of the two motionless 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 initiated 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 intercepted his enemy at the door.
"I want you to see this dispatch," he said, catching at the other's arm and talking against 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, following the other out on the deck.
"I've got a map of that country down in my cabin," answered the huge figure in the Chinese 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 moment. 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 something had cropped up to arouse his suspicions.
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 exploding 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 listening to the interminable muffled throb of the far-off engines, for not thinking in time, for not holding 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 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 Boynton had caught the warning signal, she had already 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, remembering he was unarmed, thinking of the revolver that still lay in his trunk.
But something in the quietness of the midnight 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.