CHAPTER XVIII
THE COAST OF MISCHANCE
It was two days later that the Laminian swung in toward the coast of Locombia. Her rust-stained bow, under the lash of the sweeping trade-wind, lifted and dipped again in a sapphire-coloured sea streaked with yellow wind-rows of drift-weed. The hot sun blistered the painted woodwork; the air was like a back-draft from an opened furnace.
The wind freshened, as the day wore away, whipping spray along the bleached decks and humming through the tight-strung aerials at the masthead. It brought with it occasional driving showers that pelted on the sodden canvas and steaming woodwork.
McKinnon, in his cabin, laboured in vain over his tuning box and responder. He had held Ganley off for another few hours, hoping against hope that something might still be picked up. The gun-runner had not accepted this enforced delay with a good grace; there could be little more hope for quibbles or equivocations in that quarter.
McKinnon, stooping to overlook his dynamo, felt that he had at last reached the end of his rope. The Princeton was still beyond his call.
When he stood up again he mopped his face with a handkerchief, and irritably summoned a steward and for the second time sent down to the engine-room asking how he was expected to operate his coils on less than a hundred volts.
Then he once more adjusted his helmet-receiver and sat back and sighed, letting the hot current from his electric fan play on his face. But the tropical air seemed devitalised, bereft of its oxygen. He was dimly conscious of the passage of time, of the muffled and monotonous drone of the fan, of the casual ship-noises far below deck. But nothing came to stir his responder into life. There was not a ship or station to be picked up. The day had deepened into evening, and nothing had come to help him solve his problem.
Already, on the ship's bridge, the navigating officer in soiled duck had picked up the Toajiras Light. Behind that light lay the flat and miasmal Locombian coast. And somewhere, still farther to the southwest, armies were being arrayed against each other. Somewhere, across the deepening night, men were ambushing and shooting. Peons dragged out of peaceful valleys, "volunteers" commandeered at the point of the bayonet, unattached citizens forcibly seized in cafés and the open streets, were being set at one another's throats, because it suited the plans of a placid-eyed and lethargic conspirator who wrung power and money out of the optimism of a deluded and childlike people.
McKinnon, as he sat in his hot and stifling station, wondered if his mission had failed. He asked himself if he had not been outmaneuvered, from the first.
The weight of this seeming failure grew heavier and heavier on his spirit. He felt as though every dead body in that Locombian war fare was pressing down on him, as though the blood from every gunshot wound was submerging him in a river of self-hate.
He turned back to his apparatus, sullenly, wearily, desperately. But call and tune and call again as he might, he could get nothing. He wondered if, by any chance, Duran and his government were already a thing of the past; if the Laminian and all she carried had come too late; if Guariqui had already fallen. Then he mopped his face again, and told himself that the heat had got on his nerves. Any one, when tired and half-cooked, he muttered, would feel dispirited.
He pulled himself together, with an effort, and coerced his attention on the instruments before him. The thing was not over, he doggedly maintained; he still had his fighting-chance.
His watch above the responder was interrupted by a peremptory rattle of his cabin door. He was, at Alicia's suggestion, keeping his wireless station under lock and key, though it had long since slipped his mind that he had locked himself in. He opened his door, guardedly, and was both relieved and disconcerted to see the figure of Captain Yandel swaying there.
"What're you picking up?" demanded the captain, thickly. His face was an almost apoplectic red, and a heavy odour of brandy drifted into the close little cabin. Yet the squat, wide-shouldered figure stood erect and steady enough on the ludicrously short and wide-planted legs. McKinnon wondered how many years he would last, in such a climate. Then he marvelled at the thought of how slowly men were able to kill themselves; the sheer pertinacity of life amazed him, as he peered up at the hulk before him, and in some way knew that it would drag on and on through its sottish years, that the overheated blood and the hardening arteries and the long-abused body would clamour for their own, would fight for life and movement, to the bitter end.
"I haven't picked up anything," answered the thoughtful-eyed man at the operating-table. "And I've been hugging this coherer for four hours."
"Can't you get that dam'ed Puerto Locombia operator?"
"I can keep calling."
"Well, keep at him till he answers. I want to know what they're doin' with that tin-horn republic o' theirs. And as soon as you get anything let me know."
He turned away, looked up at the night, swayed a little, slowly regained his equilibrium, and wandered forward to the darkness of the bridge.
McKinnon's hand went out obediently to the switch, his dynamo purred and hummed, and he caught up the lever-handle of his key. The great blue spark exploded from the coils and leaped and hissed from knob to knob across the spark-gap. "Pt-Ba," "Pt-Ba," he called, perfunctorily.
He looked up to see the restless captain back at his door again, stupidly watching his spark. The operator knew he was calling a dead station, but he played out his part.
"I might do something, if they'd give me a little more power from that engine-room," he said, by way of excuse.
"Then you'll get your power," declared the autocrat of his little world. "You'll get power enough, if that's all that's wrong," he repeated, as he made his way once more toward the bridge.
McKinnon switched off and waited until Captain Yandel's order had time to be acted on. Then he tested his spark again. The eruption, as the contact-points of his despatching-key came together, seemed to stab and tear a sudden hole in the silence. It roared and cannonaded out through the little cabin, until the night echoed with it; it spit and hissed from the mast heads, aggressively, incisively, as he continued to move the contact-lever up and down, slow and strong, and sent his call arrowing out through the darkness: "Pt-Ba," "Pt-Ba." But interpolated between each call for "Puerto Locombia" was an equally impatient and anxious Morse prayer for "Cruiser Princeton—Cruiser Princeton."
"That's almost enough to wake the dead," he mentally assured himself as he adjusted his "set," switched off, and pressed the phones close in to his ears.
Through these phones, as he listened, came a sound as feeble and minute as the tick of that insect known as a death-watch. His first thought was that it could be nothing more than a mere "echo-signal," from too high intensity. His second thought convinced him that this was out of the question; too long a time had elapsed between his own send and those coherent dots and dashes creeping into his startled ear. It was an outside message, a call being intercepted by his antennæ. Yet the signal that he was reading was the same as his own "Pt-Ba," "Pt-Ba."
McKinnon's hand once more darted out to his switch, and his face was alert and changing with his changing thought as he caught up his key-lever. And again the blue spark exploded across the spark-gap, and the cabin walls threw back the lightning-like flash and pulse of the illumination. Already he had forgotten the heat, the depressing sense of frustration, the brooding consciousness of impending defeat that had weighed upon him. Switching off, he sat with inclined head, intently, raptly listening.
He was startled to feel a huge and ape-like hand suddenly take hold of his arm.
"What're you getting?" demanded the owner of the arm.
It was Ganley standing there close beside him. His dark face, wet with perspiration, shone in the strong side-light as though it had been oiled. His peering eyes showed in two thin crescents of white, out of the heavy shadow made by the projecting eye-bones.
"Nothing," was McKinnon's sharp retort. "I'm only trying to get something."
He shook the detaining hand from his arm, and gave all his attention to his call. But the intruder was not to be so easily overridden.
"Are you with us?" he demanded, pregnantly, as the preoccupied operator again caught up the phone-set.
"Yes—yes, I'm with you," cried the man, stooping over the responder. "But I'm trying to operate!"
"What in hell does this operating count if you're with us?" persisted the placid-toned Ganley, determined, apparently, on a policy of obstruction.
"It's this call that's going to save both our scalps," was the abstracted yet hurried retort.
"How save my scalp?" demanded Ganley, with a detaining hand on the other's fore-arm.
The stooping McKinnon straightened up and wheeled on him, every nerve ready to snap like an overstrained bowstring.
"I've got to catch this call! Don't talk—keep away from me!"
Ganley looked at him heavily. He did not speak. But a third voice thundered abruptly and unexpectedly through the hot cabin. It was Captain Yandel's, belligerent, stentorian, bull-like.
"Come out o' that station!"
The man addressed did not move.
"Come out o' there and stop interferin' with my men!"
Ganley turned his head slowly about and gazed at the ship's master. But otherwise he showed no sign of having heard.
"Are you comin' out o' there?" demanded that apoplectic-faced officer, in a roar of inebriate and affronted authority. There was no evading his blind and unreasoning anger. Ganley shrugged a massive shoulder.
"Since you ask me so politely, I s'pose so," he conceded, with his mirthless laugh. Then he placidly turned about and stepped to the doorway, and from the doorway to the open deck.
"Now you get below-decks where you belong!"
The gaze of the two men met and locked; it was like the clash and lock of elk-antlers.
In that interlocked gaze lay animal-like challenge and counter-challenge, threat and counter-threat, malignant fortitude and an even more malignant defiance.
Ganley, with a lip-curl of contempt, thrust his hands slowly down in his pockets, and then turned on his heel and went below.
"What're you gettin'?" Captain Yandel demanded of the man chapleted with the shining band of steel ending in two small black knobs.
"They don't answer!" cried McKinnon, with a gasp of exasperation.
"Don't answer?" demanded the captain.
"No, I've lost them!" was the bitter cry of the man bent over his coherer.
The ship's master's blasphemy was both prolonged and voluble.
"And you ain't goin to get 'em?"
"I've lost them," was the repeated and almost hopeless answer. The morose-eyed officer peered at the operator's drawn and sweat-stained face.
"You're makin' a devil of a nice mess o' this business, between you!" he declared, with another oath of disgust.
The wireless-operator only stared at his instruments, silently, challengingly, combatively.