CHAPTER XXI
THE UNEXPECTED BLOW
McKinnon, ill at ease, tested his coils and wondered if Alicia had indeed succeeded in reaching the engine-room. Then he wondered if she were once more safely back in her cabin. Then all thought passed away from him, for the light patter of hurried footsteps, followed by an oath and an answering cry of alarm, sounded from outside his door.
"You keep out o' here!"
It was Ganley's voice, short and brusk. The knob of the locked door twisted and moved. The new-comer, whoever it was, must have caught hold of this knob from the outside. It was equally plain, from the sound of the sudden gasp and the scuffle that followed, that Ganley had flung this intercepted visitor aside from the door. It was then, and only then, that the listening operator realised who that new-comer must be.
McKinnon switched out his light before he opened the door, for he wanted every chance.
The first message that flashed to his brain was that it was very dark outside. The second was that a great malletlike hand had descended unexpectedly on his own, out of this darkness, and had sent his revolver rattling across the boards of the cabin floor. His next was the knowledge of clinching and writhing and struggling with a desperately fighting and heaving hulk that for a moment bore him back over his door-sill.
Then came a brief and bitter battle for what seemed to be a short-barreled, heavy-butted revolver in one of the malletlike hands. The revolver fell away from them both in the hot and stifling blackness of the cabin, but still they clawed and panted and writhed from side to side.
"The lights!" cried the warning girl through the darkness.
Then came the sound of the door slammed shut, and the girl again crying to McKinnon to turn on the light. He dropped low and twisted sharply, tearing himself loose from the apelike arms.
"The light—turn on the light!" still cried the helpless girl, as though apprehensive of some danger he could not fathom.
McKinnon, still panting and shaking, sprang for his light-switch and snapped on the current. The blank darkness puffed into a sudden picture.
It showed in sparkling high-lights on the wireless apparatus. It revealed the huddled figure of Ganley crouching back against the sleeping-berth. It showed the white-faced and terrified woman close by the cabin door. But that was all; for in the next second the light went out again, and the cabin was once more blanketed in utter darkness.
But McKinnon, in that brief heart-throb of illumination, had caught and fixed in his mind's eye the position of his fallen revolver.
He was already on his hands and knees, on the floor, like a cat, crawling to the farther corner of his dynamo base.
The silence seemed something material, something smothering and choking the three watchers. No one knew from what quarter the bolt would strike. McKinnon's fingers padded feverishly yet silently about the floor, exploring the area in which his fallen revolver must lie. He thought he had it; but his fingers had closed only on his heavy, canvas-covered dumb-bell. He padded farther into the blackness, feeling along the dynamo base, wondering if it were blood or only sweat that was trickling down his face.
Then he gave a gasp of relief, and fell back, slowly drawing himself upright as he retreated. He had recovered the revolver. He was armed again; he was once more able to face the situation. All he wanted now was to get the woman out of the way, out of the cabin, if possible. It was not going to be the sort of thing she should face. It was too late for half-measures. He had been subjected to too much; he had gone through too much. There could be no possibilities of further compromise. He felt, dimly, that it would be horrible; and yet he felt that it had to be. It was the inevitable and final movement toward which all others had centred.
He backed toward the door until his groping hand came in contact with its knob. Then he caught at the girl's arm, and half-pushed, half-dragged her toward the threshold, with a whispered "Quick!"
He never knew whether she mistook him for Ganley. or whether she had determined to remain in the wireless room, even against his wishes. But she did not go; she only drew closer in to the wall as he swung the door open for her.
It was at that moment that Ganley must have caught some dim silhouette of his figure against the less opaque blackness of the open deck. For, as the door circled back on its hinges, Ganley swung out with the oak-framed steamer-chair which he had already caught up as a weapon of defence.
He swung it short and quick, with a forward and elliptical motion, as he leaned out toward the dimly discerned shadow. He heard it strike home; he heard the inarticulate little half-groan, half-sigh, as the stunned man crumpled down over the door-sill.
Ganley also heard the woman's cry of terror, but he had other things to think of, other fish to fry. He pawed frenziedly about the cabin wall until he found the switch, and turned on the light. He saw McKinnon still sprawled half over his door-sill; he saw the woman crouched shield-like over his body; he saw the broken steamer-chair lying on the cabin floor. He also saw the heavy iron dumb-bell, covered with rusted canvas, lying at his feet, not six inches from the dynamo base. The terrified woman, waiting for the unknown end, screamed again, and still again, as she saw him stoop and catch it up.
It was not until the great, ape-like arm of the gun-runner brought the dumb-bell crashing down on the operating table that she realised her mistake, that his actual intention flashed through her.
His fury now was not being directed toward McKinnon. It was the instrument that he was attacking. For the heavy iron had struck with a crashing blow on the delicately poised responder, with its fragile and mysterious coherer, crushing the flimsy mechanism of glass and wood and metal as a mallet might crush a bird's egg. She felt McKinnon's mumbling and struggling body under her; but she gave it no thought. She only saw and knew that this maddened brute was beating the very heart out of their wireless apparatus, that with every blow he was crushing her last hopes. She dragged and wrenched McKinnon's revolver from his outstretched hand. But before she could so much as raise it, Ganley's second blow had fallen. This time it fell on the "key" itself, tearing the heavy metal lever free from its binding-post. He had just caught it up and flung it malignantly through the open cabin door, whirling out into the sea, when she fired.
Her first shot went wild. Before she had time for a second, Ganley had wheeled about and sprung on her through the smoke-filled air. The huge forty-four Colt seemed too heavy for her, beyond her strength, for she had no second chance of using it, of poising and adjusting and aiming it, as she knew she should have.
But she caught at him and clung to him, blindly, panting and screaming, wondering why no one came. She clung and clawed at him like a cat, until, under the sheer fury of that attack, he had to take thought to defend himself.
He fell back a step or two, and the movement sent them both falling over the broken steamer-chair, grotesquely, foolishly. But not for a moment did the woman cease to fight and scream. The sound of it all seemed to sting the dazed McKinnon into a consciousness of what was going on. He pawed about at the wall, foolishly, for support, like a child learning to walk; he dragged himself up to a sitting posture. But before he could struggle to his feet, Captain Yandel and an officer from the bridge were in the cabin. He saw them tearing and dragging at Ganley's great limbs. He saw the white and panting and disheveled group once more up right, each shaking and facing the other. Then for the first time he saw his dismantled apparatus.
"What's this shooting on my ship?" roared the captain.
"That cat tried to kill me!" cried Ganley, breathing short and quick. The woman struggled to speak, but the captain gave her no attention. His eye for the first time had fallen on McKinnon leaning against the cabin wall, with a little trickle of blood running down over one swollen cheek-bone.
"What's this mean?" he demanded of his operator. McKinnon's senses had come back to him by this time. But a hopelessness that was almost worse than death itself crept through him.
"He's killed our wireless! Our wireless! Can't you see he's killed it!"
The captain's mental state was such that ideas filtered into the narrow seat of his consciousness but slowly.
"But how? And why?"
"The responder!" gasped McKinnon.
"But what of it!"
"Look at that responder!" cried the operator. "It's smashed. And the key's ruined! He's cut the heart out of our apparatus!"
"But I want to know the meaning of this bar-room brawling aboard my ship!" still thundered its master.
McKinnon pointed landward savagely, toward the mangrove swamps and mountains of Locombia.
"He's been trying to stop my sending. He said he'd kill me if I sent."
"That's a lie," retorted Ganley. "He's working with this woman to juggle messages for Duran! They're making a tool of you and your ship!"
"That shows who's making a tool of you!" cried McKinnon, pointing with his lean and shaking finger to the shattered responder. The ship captain's face was blotched and purplish and horrible to look at by this time.
"And he's killed our wireless?"
"Look at it," answered McKinnon.
For the second time Captain Yandel looked. The indignity, the enormity of the thing threw him into a slowly growing ecstasy of sublimated rage.
"And who fired that shot?" he demanded, with an almost voluptuous delight in the anticipation of further fuel for a still more towering fire.
"I did," said the white-faced woman.
"So you did," purred the captain, slowly releasing the torrent. "And you're a nice pair, the two of you, makin' a pot-house of my ship! You half-breed filibusters! You garlic-eating outlaws! You murderin', slave-drivin' tinhorn conspirators!"
"Stop!" cried McKinnon.
"Get out o' here, you flimflam beachcombers!" roared on the unheeding officer.
"Get out o' my sight! Get down to your cabins and stay there until you're put ashore at Puerto Locombia, or by the living God, if you so much as show a nose outside your doors, I'll clap the whole lot o' you into irons and carry you back to New York harbour!"
It meant nothing to the weak and bewildered girl, after what she had gone through, but it wounded some inner and ever guarded part of her to see that McKinnon made no effort to intervene, that he had not stepped in and spoken for her.
It was not until his steadying glance met hers that she began to realise he was holding something in reserve, that he had his reasons, that he was plotting out some new line of procedure, and with this discovery came a renewed memory of the hopelessness of their position, of the dangers confronting them, of the last avenue of delivery that had been cut off from them. The blasphemy and truculence of a ship captain meant nothing to her; the satyr-like exultation of Ganley meant nothing. She knew that she had been fighting for life, or something almost as worthy as life. And she knew that the fight had by no means approached its end.