CHAPTER XVII
THE PROFFERED CROWN
The Laminian's wireless-operator sat in his room, three hours later, with his door hooked back against the wall-plates and his window-curtains gently flapping. From its unpainted shelf droned and hummed his dry-battery electric fan. A seaman passed by under the awning, carrying in his hand a cluster of deck-lamps. From the open ventilator-heads came the discordant sound of steel shovels grating on steel, the occasional slam of a furnace door, the throb and pulse of the unvarying engines. Otherwise it was very quiet; sea and sky met in a world of unbroken peace which the passing of so incongruous a thing of steel and steam disturbed for only a moment, agitated foolishly, yet for only a heart-throb or two.
Then high above the quiet deck sounded out an even more incongruous noise, the nervous, tense staccato of the wireless "spark." It seemed like some underworld god of speed striking out titanic chords; it was like some ghostly fingers playing on a harp of haste. McKinnon sat between his four flashing white walls and sent his Hertzian waves arrowing out over the lonely acres of the Caribbean, hurling his coil's mysterious and imponderable force against the engulfing isolation of the sea. Then came a space of silence and again the blue-coloured sprite danced and jigged at the mast head.
As McKinnon had secretly hoped, that sustained rattle and roar of his "spark" brought to his open door the huge and white-clad figure that had been meditatively pacing the bridge-deck.
"Could you take a message for me, if you're in touch with anything?" asked Ganley from the doorway.
The operator put down his earphones and motioned for the other man to enter.
"I thought I had something then," he explained, "but it's only static breaking through!"
"What's static?"
"Lightning-flashes, somewhere beyond the skyline. I can hear 'em go like a roll of drums that bend up to what we call a cough or sneeze."
"Perhaps you're not in good running order," ventured Ganley, eying the apparatus as a street cat might eye a canary behind its cage-bars.
"It's working as smooth as oil," answered McKinnon, adjusting his receiver again and listening for a minute or two. "But we're too far away from things. We're drifting too far away from a white man's world."
Ganley sat down with his slow and ponderous deliberateness. McKinnon found it hard to say just what he wanted to say, for the weight of their last encounter was still heavy on his spirit.
The other man seemed to understand the source of his embarrassment. He sat back, at last, and diffidently remarked: "You had something to say to me?"
McKinnon reached a long thin arm over to the back of his operating-table.
"Yes, I'd forgotten to give you back this gun of yours," he said, as he held the revolver out to its owner.
Ganley took it, diffidently, turned it over in his fingers, puckered his heavy lips, and casually dropped the gun into his side pocket. Then he looked up at the other man.
"That was pretty ugly talk you got about me the other night," he began, sliding low in his chair until his attitude was nothing more than a nonchalant lounge. "I suppose you swallowed it whole—everything that attractive young woman said?"
It cost McKinnon an effort to hold himself in, but the only line of procedure in warfare such as this, he had learned, was the indirect one.
"I don't believe everything I hear," was his answer, as he assumed an equally indifferent position.
"I guess most stories 've got their two sides," remarked Ganley, largely.
"This woman, though, claims you're nothing more than a gun-runner," the younger man carelessly reminded him.
"Well, I am," suddenly declared Ganley, with his little deep-set eyes squarely on the other man's. "Can't there be two sides to gun-running?"
"The law side and the outlaw side, I suppose," suggested McKinnon.
Ganley stared at him, a little heavily, a little impatiently, as the beetling iron-grey eyebrows worked ruminatively up and down.
"Look here, son, I want you to understand this situation! These bodega-hugging, labour-loathing fire-eaters down here have got to have their theatricals. And you've got to have some body set the stage and supply the coloured lights for 'em. And if one man doesn't tote in the fireworks, another damned soon will."
"And toting in the fireworks is your business?"
"That's my business! I keep supplying them with the nicest little pin-wheels that money can buy. They've got to have em, no matter where they come from. So I'm keeping their show going, and I'm making them pay for it good and plenty."
"You only supply the fireworks?"
"Not always; but ain't even that enough? It's revolutions and revolution-talk that run their cafés—for you'll notice these little distractions always start in the cities, where there's plenty of vino bianco and spare time. There's not a republic down there that's able to eat right, if it hasn't got a boundary dispute to take up its spare time, or a junta-fed patriot to keep handing out rebel proclamations. They live on em. And I keep their vaudeville going for 'em."
"But hasn't this particular calling its particular dangers?" McKinnon casually inquired.
"That's part of the game! There are even men down there who'd go so far as to call me a lawbreaker. If that's what I am, I'd like to know what you'd call those Yankee concession-hunters and wire-pullers and bribe-givers who burrow around for underground contracts and then run squealing to Washington like a stuck pig every time a peon slaps a banana-car with a machete! No, sir, that's my market, and I'm going to hold it. I'm going to climb onto that Guariqui gang's pay-car and hang the completo sign over its dashboard!"
"But isn't this man De Brigard getting there ahead of you?" ventured McKinnon, watching for the effect of that softly exploratory probe.
"I guess I'll be in time for a little of the fun," answered Ganley, guardedly. The other was compelled to acknowledge there was something primordially massive about this uncouth Caribbean king-maker. There was something titanic and persuasive about this self-confessed filibuster of petty republics. His very audacity was a ponderable asset. The sheer force of the man could still appeal to some substratum of romance in the other's none too emotional state of mind.
Some trace of this feeling must have shown itself in McKinnon's half-smiling glance, for a new confidence crept into the tones of the man so closely watching him.
"I've been in my tight holes," he placidly declared, folding his arms over his great chest. "And I've got out of 'em, every time, just as I'm going to get out of this one!"
"But where's the hole, this time?" mildly inquired the operator.
"Not bein' dead sure I've got you on my side," said his candid enemy.
"But you have got me!" protested the other.
"Then why haven't you been sayin' so?"
"I can't say so, openly! I've got to watch myself and go slow," equivocated McKinnon.
"But what's the use o' falling between two stools? Why not swing in with the right side, nip and tuck, while you've still got the chance?"
Ganley was on his feet by this time, standing over him.
"See here, you're no piker. You're quick, and you're clever.
"You're not afraid of a big thing, just because it is big. I've got my wires laid, and I'm going to knock that Locombian government off its feet, if it costs me half a million to do it. I'm goin to blow it higher'n Gilroy's kite. They've got chromium-mines down there worth more'n a million. I'm going to clean out that Guariqui gang and I'm going to do it good when I do it. That's my country down there," and he waved a great apelike arm toward the south-west, "and a week from now'll see it made into a white man's land."
McKinnon peered up at him, wondering if by any chance the man had indeed persuaded him self of the justness of his cause.
"I tell you you've got to swing in with us," Ganley was blandly declaring. "You haven't any show. This work is going to be done quick and done quiet."
"But how about leaks?"
"There's not going to be any leaks. I've got my plan for that."
"What plan?"
Ganley laughed his short and mirthless laugh.
"A little plan to keep things quiet. The one and only thing we don't want is interference. It's our fight, and once we win it there'll be no trouble. We're a nation then, damn it, the New Liberal Party. We're a government of our own, and we can go back and patch up outside quarrels when we see fit."
"But what will you do with the Laminian? How about our captain, for instance?" McKinnon asked.
"I'll give him more than aguardiente to worry over!" declared the gun-runner, with a snort of contempt for that saturnine ship's master. "Oh, I've got this thing figured out as close as a sum in arithmetic. Some night this week our men are to surround their little two-by-four capital. Tuesday morning, by day-break, if our guns and stuff are all landed, they'll begin to cannonade. By Tuesday after noon we'll be advancing on the Palace itself. By Wednesday night we'll have Duran and his gang shelled out or our own men shoved in. By sun-up on Thursday we'll have Duran deposed and the new government declared, an hour after those Palace gates come down, with our own men in office. There's no use my beating round the bush with you any longer. It's all got to come. And I don't want you workin' against us. I know you're game enough; and I like your style. I don't want to see you cuttin' your own throat. And if you see us through for the next two or three days I'll do the right thing by you."
"How the right thing?"
"I'll deed you over a third interest in the Parroto chromium mines, and make you Minister of Telegraphs for the new republic, with a salary of six thousand dollars in gold!"
Some momentary spirit of romance, of vast issues and strange dangers, of hazards and risks in far-off corners of the earth, seemed to hover about the hot and stuffy little cabin.
"I mean it," went on Ganley, as placid and persuasive as before. "I'll tie myself down to it. And that hill-town of Guariqui is going to be a mighty livable little city when we do it over!"
"It's not Guariqui I'm afraid of," was McKinnon's evasive answer. He was thinking, not so much how some spirit of youth and adventure less sophisticated than his own might be stunned and intoxicated by such prospects as these, but just how he was going to discover Ganley's undivulged plan for keeping Puerto Locombia clear of all outsiders.
"Then what are you afraid of?" demanded Ganley.
"It's so big," complained the other. "So big for me, I mean!"
Ganley laughed, a little scornfully.
"Then take a day or two off and get used to it. Sleep on it, and let me know how you feel about it to-morrow or next day. Is that satisfactory?"
"Anything you say," McKinnon answered.
The other man rose heavily to his feet, crossed slowly to the door, and turned back to stare absently about the crowded little room.
"You'll be with us all right," he said, without emotion.
But instead of going below, after bidding the operator good-night in his suave and deep-throated guttural, he slowly and meditatively paced the bridge-deck, idly blinking up at the stars above the mastheads and out over the rail at the dark sea on either side of them.