LITMIR.BIZ

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be surprised if you've been handling something for him already."

      The operator reached out for his message-hooks. The movement was merely perfunctory, for the hooks were all but empty.

      "What name would he be travelling under?" McKinnon looked up to ask.

      "He's booked as John Siebert, cabin fourteen," was the answer.

      The man in the steamer-chair looked relieved, but only for a moment, when he learned that nothing had come or gone.

      "Of course I may be wrong about his trying to keep in touch with those people of his. And it may happen the department won't even try to have him held. Perhaps they won't do anything until we get him ashore at Puerto Locombia. But we've got to get him there—it's our ​last chance. We've worked too hard on this thing not to see it put through to a finish."

      "And?" asked McKinnon, waiting.

      "All I want you to do is to keep tab on anything that comes in for this man Ganley, or about him and his tin-horn warfare down there—and on anything that's to go out, until we land."

      "Are you acting officially?" McKinnon demanded, with a studied effort towards impersonality. "I mean, are you acting for the department at Washington?"

      "I'm acting as the confidential agent of the Consolidated Fruit people, and the Consolidated Fruit people have been co-operating with the department for several weeks now."

      "And you simply want to know what these messages are?"

      "Yes, that's all; I mean that's all, unless they're of such a nature as to defeat the ends of justice. We don't want anything to get through that's going to help our man slip away from us."

      "You mean for me to hold back everything that looks suspicious until you O.K. it?"

      "And couldn't you do that if I made it worth while for you?" quietly inquired the stranger.

      "How do you mean worth while?"

      ​"Why, I'll pay you for your trouble. I'll——"

      But McKinnon's seemingly indignant start brought the older man to a stop.

      "You don't suppose I'm going to take money to hold up the company's business?" he demanded.

      The stranger raised a thick, red hand protestingiy. McKinnon noticed a scar in the centre of the wide palm. He inappositely wondered if it could be a bullet wound.

      "Hold on a minute!" he warned the other, appeasingly. "This isn't a matter o' messenger-boy tips. It's out and out business. You've got to remember they're big things involved in this, and big people, too."

      "Why do you want to mix me up in the mess, whether it's big or little?" complained the operator. The other man permitted the protest to go unanswered.

      "But can't you tell me what it's worth for you to co-operate with us in this?" he blandly insisted.

      "It would be worth my job!" McKinnon cried. The other man, eyeing him closely, could not rid himself of the impression that the operator was acting a part, that he was feigning reluctance for some potentially better bargain yet to be driven.

      ​"Well, what's your job worth?" was the older man's undisturbed query. In fact, there was an undertone of contempt in his guttural question.

      "Oh, it's not what the job's worth," protested McKinnon. "It's the putting outside business before the business I'm paid to do. It's the acting against regulations and getting the company officers down on me. It's the doing of something I'm not here to do."

      "But this is merely a matter between us two, man to man. The company doesn't have anything to do with this."

      "They own this junk," broke out the operator, with a wave of the hand that designated the apparatus about him. "And they about own me, too, as long as I'm on their pay-roll."

      "Of course they do," the other soothed tranquilly. "But you're here, and they're in New York, and you've got the running of this apparatus until we dock at Puerto Locombia."

      The operator sat looking at the other man in silence.

      "Why, you told me yourself, a few minutes ago, that your machinery doesn't always work right. And you say you haven't a tape, or anything that registers the messages as they come to you. Isn't that right?"

      The operator nodded.

      ​"Then why couldn't you accidentally miss a message? Or why couldn't you send it out without being sure that it was going to carry clear across to the next operator?"

      McKinnon still looked at the other man. There was something so placid and intimate about the tones of the stranger's voice that the very purport of his suggestion had seemed robbed of its enormity.

      "I wouldn't do a thing like that for five hundred dollars!" the operator at last declared.

      The stranger looked back at him without a move of his great body in the steamer-chair. McKinnon's glance of open contempt in nowise disturbed him.

      "I'll give you one thousand dollars if you do it!" he said. His voice was quiet and casual as he spoke, but again the operator swung about and peered at him. He opened his lips to reply, and then suddenly became silent. He shifted in his chair, as though to draw away from some tangible and precipitating temptation.

      "I'll give you one thousand dollars," repeated the stranger, "and I'll promise to stand between you and any trouble you're afraid of."

      "It's not what I'm afraid of," the other retorted.

      "Then what is it? You fail to catch a message or two, and no one's the wiser. What of ​that? Good heavens, man, you're not doing anything crooked! Nobody's cut a throat back there in New York! Nobody's trying to get away from your Centre Street people. You're not doing anything against the penal code."

      "Why didn't you go to the captain about this?" complained the operator. The tacit note of concession in that complaint did not escape his companion.

      "That low-brow!" he grunted in disgust.

      "Being a low-brow, as you call him, ought to make him all the easier to handle," suggested McKinnon, with his short and puzzling laugh. "And he's still the master of the ship."

      "The captain has no more to do with this than De Forest himself! And I imagine he'd rather be soaking in brandy pawnees than talking business to outsiders. This is something between us two. You're not cheating anybody. You're not hurting anybody. All you do is to help me win a big case, and get well paid for your trouble. And a twist of the wrist is what it costs you. For I'm assuming, of course, you can put that machinery of yours out of business for the time being without exactly showing how.

      "That's easy enough," said the operator, with a stare at his apparatus. "There are a dozen ways of throwing a complicated thing like ​that out of kilter. It's my getting out of kilter with the company that worries me."

      "The company doesn't count, my friend. They're outsiders in this. And you get your thousand dollars in cold cash, to work on that reed-disk of yours for half a year, if you want to."

      McKinnon laughed a little. Then he grew more thoughtful, and was about to speak, when the quick tread of feet sounded on the deck with out. He caught up the phone "set" hurriedly and bent over the pine table. The steps passed on, but the betrayal of disingenuousness remained a consoling and obvious fact to the man in the steamer-chair. It left him no longer in doubt.

      He reached down into his capacious trouser pocket and produced a roll of treasury notes, held together by a double rubber band. He peeled off three orange-tinted twenty-dollar bills and folded them neatly across the middle, lengthwise. Then, with equal deliberation, he thrust them into McKinnon's still hesitating fingers. The operator looked down at the money doubtfully and then up at the stranger.

      "That's just a trio of twenties to bind the bargain," the latter explained. "You've got to get something for me taking up your time like this."

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