LITMIR.BIZ

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pine table-edge, waited in silence. The other man was also silent. The pulse and throb of the engines crept into the white-walled cabin.

      "Well," said McKinnon with a significant glance toward his large and authoritative silver watch. The stranger's eye, following him, passed on to the key-lever and then on again to the helix wires.

      ​"You may recall that you sent a couple of messages out for me this afternoon," he finally began.

      McKinnon recalled the fact of the two despatches.

      "Maybe you happen to remember the wording of those two particular messages?"

      McKinnon, with wrinkled brow, turned to his "send-hook." He found the two sheets, and straightened them out on his knee. Then he looked up to say: "We never hold these things in our head, you know. We can't, any more than a wire can."

      He let his gaze run over the sheets of paper before him. The other man sat watching him as he read. For just a moment, as he made note of what seemed the operator's half-forbearing, half-cynical indifference, a shadow of disappointment flitted across his face, typifying, apparently, some passing regret for a reconnaissance at last recognised as unnecessary. But he pulled himself together at once, as though determined to face the problem immediately before him.

      "Would you mind reading that first despatch out to me?" he asked with the placid authority of a prestidigitateur sure of his trick.

      McKinnon rattled through the message at a breath: "Varrel, sixty Wall Street, New York. ​Our man on board Laminian, bound Puerto Locombia. Wire Washington. Will have him held by authorities to await instructions. Duffy

      The operator put the message on the table and calmly weighted it with his carborundum box. The other man suddenly realised, as he made note of McKinnon's attitude of unmoved neutrality, how automatic the human mind can become; how, when once immersed in the method of doing a thing, it can lose all sense of the thing itself. The man of the key had seen nothing but a string of words to be "sent." It was only too apparent that their meaning had escaped him.

      "I suppose I've got to explain that," said the stranger, fondling one of his thick, short cigars in his thick, short fingers. "You'll notice that this message went to 60 Wall Street. You may or may not know that that's the Information Bureau of the Consolidated Fruit Concern. And if you've knocked about the Banana Belt long enough you've found out that those people just about own those little yam-eating republics down there.

      McKinnon nodded as a sign that he understood.

      "They've got a good many millions of money locked up in that export business o' theirs. And ​when you're doing business in a republic that's built on bullets you've got to watch where you're walking. It means that you've got to keep your ear to the ground; see that your governments are stable, I mean; and your marionettes in their nice little red and gold uniforms running smooth and true. That's why they retain a big man like Varrel for their information bureau—just to know who's poking a finger into the political pie down there, and to be ready for trouble when it blows up."

      It was all obvious enough to the listening operator.

      "Well, I'm here acting for Varrel and the Consolidated Fruit people. The Locombian charge d'affaires at Washington tipped our office off some five weeks ago about trouble ahead in Guariqui."

      "Where's Guariqui?" quietly asked McKinnon.

      "Guariqui's their capital—the capital of Locombia. Since we've heard that, of course, we've been co-operating with the department at Washington, keeping an eye on any Locombian likely to be interested in the Guariqui mix-up."

      McKinnon confessed that he had known of detectives engaged in the sole pursuit of shadowing Latin-American exiles.

      ​"And it's right here under this deck"—Duffy tapped the floor with his heel as he spoke—"it's right here on this ship o' yours that we've got Ganley—the one and only Ganley!"

      ​

      CHAPTER V THE WEB OF INTRIGUE

       Table of Contents

      The stranger peered across the cabin at the unperturbed operator.

      "Who's Ganley?" asked McKinnon.

      The man in the steamer-chair let his astonishment explode in a ceiling-ward belch of smoke.

      "Ganley! Why, Ganley's the biggest gun-runner doing business in the Caribbean!"

      "Gun-runner?"

      "Yes, the slickest revolution-maker that ever shipped carbines and smokeless into a Latin-American republic!"

      "He's new to me," McKinnon protested.

      "He's the man who's always smelling out a country that's looking for a liberator. And he gets a rake-off from the patriots and a rake-off from the Birmingham gun people, and another rake-off from the nitro-makers. Why, he's the man who's been engineering this Locombian uprising for the last seven months! But now ​we've got him good, and got him where we want him."

      "Then what's he doing on a steamer like this? Couldn't he see he was going to be cornered?"

      The disposition of the operator was not altogether an inflammable one.

      "That's just the point, my friend. He couldn't get out of Charleston or Mobile or New Orleans. We had those ports watched. So he slipped quietly up to New York, engaged a passage on Saturday's Hamburg-American steamer for Colon, and then slipped over to the Laminian in a closed cab when he thought we weren't keeping tab on him. But, pshaw! you know all this already, don't you?"

      "Not all of it," replied McKinnon.

      "But you saw that yellow-skinned man who was helped aboard? The sick-looking fellow with the Spanish servant, who was almost carried up from that cab on the wharf?"

      McKinnon confessed to some vague remembrance of the incident.

      "That man is Ganley!" said the other. "And he's under this deck, down there in cabin fourteen, and you'll find that he's going to stay there until we slip into the roadstead at Puerto Locombia."

      ​A meditative silence filled the little white-walled cabin.

      "But what have I got to do with all this?" McKinnon at last demanded. His face seemed to carry the complaint that he had always found dissension on shipboard hard to endure; it was never easy to get away from disturbances in a world so small, or to put hate behind one in a life so circumscribed. Yet he smiled a little, in spite of himself. A ship, he had somewhere heard, must be either a heaven or a hell. The next fortnight, he felt, would find little of the celestial about the Laminian.

      "That's just what I'm coming around to," the intruder was saying to him. "This Ganley, remember, has got his 'fences' and confederates and small-fry helpers. He works the thing thorough when he does it. And as likely as not, between here and Puerto Locombia, he's going to get messages sent in to him, or he's going to send out some despatches on his own hook—so as to keep in touch with his people."

      The stranger came to a stop and sat regarding the younger man as though he looked for some word of encouragement or comprehension from him.

      "The thing I've got to guard against most," the stranger who called himself Duffy continued, "is the department at Washington. If ​they sent something in, and it got out all over the ship, it would be likely to spoil everything."

      "But it won't get out all over the ship," the operator corrected.

      "You'll promise me that?" asked the other with a look of relief.

      "Of course I'll promise you that—it's part of my business."

      "But there's the other side of the question," the stranger discreetly continued. "Ganley is almost sure to be sending or receiving

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