LITMIR.BIZ

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how are you going to clear me—I mean how are you going to make them see I haven't been acting against the ship, if it ever comes to a showdown!" asked the operator, not so much with timidity, but more as though he took a morbid joy in toying with the dangers of the situation.

      "There'll be nothing to clear, and nothing to show," the other retorted. "All you've got to do is to have a bad ear when a certain message or two happens along. But I'll go further than that just to put your mind at rest. To-morrow, when I pay over the balance, I'll put it down on paper, with my name to it, that I guarantee to protect you. We can both sign a note showing we're acting straight and where we stand. Then you'll have me tied down in black and white. That seems square enough, doesn't it!"

      "Oh, it's square enough. But suppose this man Ganley comes to me with a message to send out. I've got to show it to you, and if you don't approve of it I've got to act the lie that the message has been sent and keep lying to him every time he asks me about it."

      "You're not paid to be a 'fence' for a gun-runner, are you?"

      The older man laughed a little. Then he rose heavily to his feet. His head almost touched the cabin ceiling. "There's not much danger ​he'll ever ask about it. And when you know the man and his business you'll never let things like that worry you."

      "That doesn't excuse me—his being a gun-runner."

      "Well, if you felt that way, of course, you could send the message. Only you might send it as I mentioned—with the risk of falling short, I mean; some time when the engine-room doesn't happen to be giving you quite enough power."

      The operator weighed and pondered the question. The man beside him was anarchistic enough in his ideals of conduct. He recognised no authority beyond the dictates of expediency. He went back to primal and feral conditions—went back to them with the disquieting directness of a savage.

      "I'd have to call until I got my station," temporised the operator, "and the other fellow's O.K. after he'd got my call. Then he'd signal 'Go ahead,' to show he was ready to receive, and if I failed to reach him he'd keep 'coming back' for me to repeat. Then, too, what I was trying to send might be picked up by any stray operator behind the skyline. On the other hand, if I let the message die, after getting my 'go-ahead' signal, the thing would be reported ​and looked into. And that would mean trouble with the company when I got back."

      "Then when you get your 'go-ahead' signal why couldn't you just lay low and complain that your receiver or coherer, or something, was out of order—that you were cut off from receiving?"

      "I hate to lie about my machinery," retorted the operator with what seemed a blind and foolish pride in his tools.

      The older man's curl of lip showed a slowly mounting dislike for further argument. Then he lifted his wide shoulders with a movement of resignation.

      "Of course, I don't want you to lose either your job or your self-respect just because my official duty's been making me shadow a man."

      The wireless operator seemed groping about for an answer when the quietness of the ship was broken by a sudden sound. It was the Laminian's foghorn, hoarse and mournful through the darkness, tearing the quiet with its slowly repeated call. The two men stood side by side, listening, as the bass-noted complaint was repeated.

      "We're running into thick weather," said the operator, turning to take up his earphones. The two men, immured in their own ends and aims, had lost all thought of time and environment.

      ​A moment later heavy footsteps sounded on the deck and the captain appeared in the doorway. He stood in the narrow opening, red-nosed, gnome-like, with the white light glistening on his waterproofed figure.

      "Are you keeping an ear open for everything in there?" he demanded, with a scowl of disapproval at the man beside the steamer-chair.

      "I'm listening for anything," McKinnon answered, with the "set" over his head. The door shut again. McKinnon turned back to the littered pine table. The foghorn sounded and grew silent; the dynamo purred and buzzed as the starting-box lever crossed down on the contact-pins.

      The stranger beside the steamer-chair buttoned his coat. Then he crossed the cabin and turned back to peer at the operator, bent low over his table as he called and listened, and called again.

      "So I can count on you in this?" he asked in his quiet and reassuring guttural. His hand was already on the cabin door-knob.

      "To the finish," answered the other man pregnantly, replacing his earphones and holding them close to his head with his muffling handkerchiefs.

      ​

      CHAPTER VI THE SECOND VISITOR

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      McKinnon was oppressed by the thought that the hour was late and his body bone-tired. But he did not close communication with the Royal Mail operator who had "picked him up" through the fog until he had been duly warned of heavy weather southeast of Hatteras. Through the night came also the news that one of the Royal Mail passengers, an American consul from Aregua, had broken his thigh-bone against a bulkhead, and the Laminian was asked to relay the news to New York. This meant a call for ambulance and doctors to be at the landing-wharf, together with an order to have a hospital-room made ready.

      So the key was kept busy again while the beneficent resources of science were being marshalled so many miles away. The Laminian's operator had bidden his far-off fellow worker a sleepy "good-night," and was still stooping absently over his tuning-box—which had not ​adapted itself to the thick-weather work—when a knock sounded on his cabin door.

      "Come in!" he said, lifting off his earphones with a little sigh of mingled weariness and resignation. He suspected that his undisclosed caller was a junior officer, much given to garrulity. He began to dread the thought of being kept out of bed for another hour or two.

      The door opened slowly and the look of frank annoyance as slowly faded from the operator's face, for standing there, confronting him, blinking in the strong glare of his electrics, was a young woman.

      Her skirts, gathered up in one hand, and held high from the wet deck, showed in a sweeping cascade of white against the gloom behind them. On her head was a blue seagoing cap, swathed in a long, cream-coloured motor-veil. Behind her stood a stewardess, fat and untidy, carrying a cloak, with the outward and studious solicitude of a servile nature exalted by the consciousness of having been overtipped. She would have made an ideal figure, the operator felt, for the nurse of the Capulets.

      McKinnon put down his 'phone and rose from his seat, still peering at the figure nearer him, the woman in the doorway. He looked at her closely, perhaps too closely, for he had not imagined any such woman aboard the Laminian. ​He noticed that she was wearing a gown of dark-blue pilot-cloth, and that she was younger than he had at first supposed. One of her hands had been thrown out to the door-jamb to steady her against the roll and pitch of the deck. The clear oval of her face—and it seemed more the mature and thoughtful face of a woman than the timid and hesitating face of a girl—was shadowed and softened by a crowning mass of brown hair. Her teeth, as she ventured her sober yet oddly conciliating smile, impressed him as being very white and regular, vaguely hinting at a bodily strength which the softness of her eyes, at a first glance, seemed to contradict. Yet these deep-lashed eyes were alert and alive with the fires of intelligence, and set wide apart under the low and thoughtful brow. They carried an inalienable sense of wisdom in their almost austere steadiness of outlook, McKinnon felt, as the woman still stood in the doorway, puckering her face a little at the strong light. Yet what most impressed him was the sense of ebullient vigour, of intrepid and Aprilian vitality, which brooded about her. She was by no means Amazonian in stature—she was even smaller than he had at first suspected—but she gave him the impression of being youthfully and buoyantly full-blooded.

      Then she stepped boldly in across the high ​door-sill and held

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