The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
THE VERNAL INVASION
Ganley, togged out in a loose-fitting and many-wrinkled suit of white duck, was pacing the Laminian's bridge-deck, like a polar bear pacing its cage.
He watched the morning sun come up, bright and brazen, like a newly minted penny. He watched the aerials bridging the mastheads and waiting like a seine to net any wandering school of æolian notes. He watched the barefooted sailors sluice the steaming deck-boards. But most of all he watched the sky-line ahead, with many ruminative uplifts of his heavy iron-grey eyebrows.
It startled him a little to see McKinnon emerge from the deck below, fresh from his early bath in a rusty iron tub that had long since parted with its porcelain, whistling like a sand-boy as he climbed the brass-plated stairs.
He emerged from the stair-head in a suit of fresh linen, clean and cool-looking, as chirpy as a city sparrow at a fountain-rim. It even disturbed Ganley a little to behold him so causelessly and so mysteriously happy.
But what more seriously disturbed the guardedly watching man was the trivial discovery that McKinnon took a key from his pocket as he approached his station door, that he inserted it in the lock and turned it before he gained admittance to his narrow operating quarters. It obviously meant that, for some reason or other, the wireless-room was thereafter to be kept under lock and key.
McKinnon himself knew there were more reasons than one for that early morning mood of his. It was not the mere thought that he could now claim a definite and dependable ally which brought his lightheartedness back to him. It was more the consciousness of that new camaraderie which must exist between him and Alicia Boynton, the promise of close and subtle companionship with a young and lovely woman whose interests were to be his interests. It was the realisation that at last duty and desire had been made one.
He found something wordlessly consoling in the fact that as the long tropical morning wore away he could look up from his tuner and phones and rest his eye on the white-clad figure of the girl, not a stone's throw away from him. It was understood that they were not to meet openly. But he knew, as he looked out at her from time to time, and saw her lying idly back under the patched awnings of the bridge-deck, apparently engrossed in a book, that she was quietly coöperating with him in keeping a watch of their common enemy.
The first-fruits of this quiet espionage was the disturbing sight of Ganley making his way to Captain Yandel's stateroom.
What took place there it was impossible to tell. All that Alicia could be sure of was that he remained for half an hour with the ship's master. For the past few days, she suspected, this thick-necked and bullock-minded officer had been more than ever under the influence of liquor. Alcohol, apparently, only served to crown his sullen taciturnity with an animal-like ferociousness when interfered with or even accosted. That silent and friendless man, she knew, was not one to be easily won over. He had neither the brains nor the ambition to disrupt the even tenor of his oxlike days by affiliations with anything so disquieting as a revolution-maker. He was not open to a gun-runner's negocio, or he would surely have played his hand earlier in the game.
Yet there was something terrifying to her in the mere fact that Ganley could remain closeted with that autocratic functionary for so long, whether the time was being spent in bribe-passing or in imbibing aguardiente flavoured with Jamaica rum and dried mint-leaves.
Her fear fell away from her, however, when she saw Ganley come out of the stateroom door again. His face was dark and troubled, and to the guardedly watching woman, his tread seemed heavy and spiritless.
She explained the episode to McKinnon, an hour later, when he casually strolled below and slipped unobserved into her cabin, as they had arranged.
"I don't think even Ganley could placate a beast like Yandel," explained the operator. "It would be like trying to wheedle yourself into the good graces of a grizzly. And he's been drinking—drinking abominably. It would be worse than trying to pet a boa-constrictor. He knows how to navigate a ship, and that is all."
"But if Ganley should put the whole case before him, and make the bribe a sufficiently big one? Suppose he waits until the last, and then simply buys him over?"
McKinnon shook his head.
"He's not the buyable kind, or he would have been bought before. And then he's against everything—he simply lives by fight and friction and opposition."
"But think of his power!"
"I don't think we need to, when we remember he's nothing but a whisky-tippling and saturnine misanthrope."
"Still, couldn't he be bought over, if the bribe were made big enough? As big as Ganley could afford to make it?"
"I don't pretend to knowledge as to what a man will do when he's tempted enough," answered McKinnon, as he fixed his absent and studious eyes on the troubled woman. "But something instinctively tells me Captain Yandel is not going to be our danger-point." He was silent for a moment or two, for her question had sent his ever-active mind off on a new tangent.
"I must be the one to temporise with him and keep him guessing until it's too late!"
"But it would only make things worse, in the end."
"Could they be any worse?"
"Perhaps not, but can you expect Ganley to trust you now?"
"I don't think he quite understands, yet. And I'll go to him and give him back his revolver. It's no use to me—and I've noticed he carries a second gun."
"But you, yourself?" interposed his companion. McKinnon touched his pocket.
"I've had to carry this, now and then, even before this trouble. But we can't lose anything by keeping in touch with him. And there's always the chance of my wireless picking up something."
"Suppose Captain Yandel has spoken to him of the scene in your room?" asked the girl, apparently disturbed by some new thought.
"Which scene?"
"When you told him I was your—your wife," she explained, with heightened colour.
"I'm sorry I had to stoop to a trick like that," said the other, with unexpected humility.
"It will make it so much harder, later," she ventured.
"I'm sorry," was all he could say. Her face suddenly coloured with a deeper flush at the thought that he had misinterpreted her.
"By later I mean all that we may have to go through before we are off this ship."
"Then escape from this ship is to be counted the end of everything?" he asked.
"No, no;" she murmured, "the beginning."
"Could it be the beginning I am hoping for?"
She drew back from him and looked about her, as though she had suddenly reawakened to their immediate surroundings.
"Neither of us has the right to hope, until we are free."
"But we will be free—we are free!"
"Not until we have escaped from Ganley and all he stands for."
"Ganley, then, is our first bridge," he cried, with sudden energy.
"Yes—our first bridge!"
"Then before we cross that bridge I'm going to test a girder or two!"