CHAPTER XX
THE LISTENING ALLY
McKinnon was aroused by a quick, light knock, repeated for the second time. He took up his revolver, slipped it into the loose side pocket of his bath-robe, and cautiously opened the door.
It was Alicia Boynton who stepped in as he did so, pushing him sharply back and closing the door even more sharply after her.
Then she stood confronting him, with her finger to her lips, as a sign for silence. McKinnon had long since learned that great moments seldom accord with their setting, that catastrophic seconds are often wanting in ceremonial. His first impulse had been to warn her hurriedly away. Yet it was not the danger that surrounded her, but more the thought of his attire and its simplicity that disturbed and shocked him. His embarrassment, even at that moment, was greater than that of the calm-eyed girl's.
"What is it?" asked the operator, nettled by the intent look on her listening face.
She made a second sign for silence. Then she took a deep breath of relief. For the first time he noticed that she was fully dressed, as though for land travel. Something about her conveyed to him the passing impression that she was as disconcertingly well-groomed as she was incongruously at ease. Her face, under the heavy upturned veil, still carried its inalienable touch of youth and vigour, for all the anxious shadow about the eyes, which scarcely betrayed the fact that she had been passing troubled and restless nights.
"I have heard every word," she explained, in her low and intimate tones.
"Then you know what a mess we've made of it!"
"I was leaning on the rail, under the bow of the life-boat," she went on, disregarding his exclamation. "I waited until Ganley passed behind the officers' quarters. He's walking up and down, smoking—and waiting."
"Did he see you come in here?" asked McKinnon, distressed at the thought that here was no hospitality and no harbour he could extend to her, feeling that this fight was his own, and his alone.
"No; he did not see me. It was so hot below—I had been sitting on deck for an hour."
"You must go below!"
"But this means so much—to-night. I should be here, with you!"
The calm impersonality of her declaration seemed to clear the air like a thunder-clap. McKinnon knew but one moment of wavering.
"I'd rather you went below," he found himself saying, at the very moment that he felt most grateful for her presence there.
"Why?" she asked.
"There is going to be trouble here," he warned her. "You must go!"
"I couldn't, now," she answered, very simply. "And we are wasting time in talk when every moment is precious. What did you pick up by wireless?"
"I had the Princeton, at Torreblanca."
"The Princeton! Then we are wasting time—we're getting farther and farther away from her every minute."
"No, that's impossible if she's actually at Torreblanca. We're drawing a little closer to her, if anything. The danger is that the wireless-operator will leave his instrument before I can call again. And I've got to have power from the engine-room."
"Then I'll watch your key while you go below," she promptly suggested.
He pondered the problem for a moment or two.
"No, that would only be exposing yourself and inviting danger," she amended. "You must give me the message. I must take it to the engine-room."
"I couldn't see you taking a risk like this," he protested, still puzzling over the problem.
"There's no risk, with me, because no one will suspect. And you must stay with your key."
He lifted his revolver from his bath-robe pocket, after another moment of thought.
"Then I want you to take this," he told her, holding it out for her. He noticed her puzzled glance up into his face, and then her quick and unequivocal movement of repudiation. They both knew, as they stood facing each other, that the ever-narrowing apex of the dilemma was crowding up to its final climacteric point.
"I could not use it," she said, shrinking away from the glimmering and intimidating little instrument of death. "I will not even need it."
"Then you must not be seen leaving this station."
"But what will you do—when the power comes?" she asked.
"I'm going to send," was his reply. "I'll fight it out with him. Ganley can't dictate to the high seas of the world."
Even in anarchy and outlawry, he felt, there had to be some final substratum of reason. And Ganley had fallen back on nothing but brute force.
"Why couldn't I go to the captain?" she pleaded.
"That's worse than useless. He's drunk. And we'll only get him against us, for he'd order us to keep out of the mess. He'd fight shy of entangling alliances. He'd forbid me to send, for he's got his ship to clear from that port."
"But the Princeton would be his protection, as well as ours."
"That's true—but the man's brain is too brandy-soaked to understand such a situation. We've got to act ourselves, and on our own hook."
He told her, briefly, the way to the engine-room. Then he switched off his light, unlocked his door, and glanced out to see that the way was clear.
Yet he waited at that open door with his revolver in his hand, every moment of the time until she had crossed to the stair-head, until she had passed quietly down the brass-plated steps, until he had made quite sure that she was below-stairs.
Then he locked himself in again, and made a mad and desperate dash into his clothes. Then he unlimbered his revolver, looked over its chambers, brought out his box of cartridges, and saw that every cartridge was in place. He had, by this time, more or less made up his mind as to his line of procedure.
He had his natural rights, and they were going to be respected. There would be no more free-and-easy invasion of his station, no more buccaneer's airy threats of force. He had been made a football of for too long: he had been mauled and bullied and browbeaten like a street-curb panhandler. He was an official, with official duties to perform. The full sense of his responsibility came home to him, as he took thought of the vast and ponderous machinery behind him, of the reserved and gigantic forces of which he was a mere out-runner. The time had come to act, and he was going to act. And at the first movement of aggression or interference from Ganley, he would shoot—and he had long since learned to pride himself on the fact that when he shot he seldom wasted powder.
As he waited for the engine-room's response to his dynamo he busied himself in barricading the cabin-window with a shelf-board wrenched from his closet, and in drawing out his trunk and standing it on end, to be shoved against the locked door as a further re-enforcement against attack from outside. The wall-plates themselves, he knew, could never be penetrated by a bullet. It was the wooden-shuttered window and the door alone that needed defense.
No touch of fear rested on McKinnon as he worked out his plan, point by point; it was more perplexity as to the outcome of the movement, touched with wonder as to whether of not any contingency had been overlooked. He was glad of action, of something against which to direct his stored-up nervous energy. He regretted, vaguely, that Alicia had in any way been dragged into this trial by fire, that she had in any way been identified with a combat so sordid and demeaning. Yet he felt, in some way, that this final combat was to subject her to the acid-test of a final integrity. It would be unalloyed purity of purpose, he argued, that would keep her at his side during such an ordeal. He almost gloried in the thought that such an unequivocal and authentic seal was to be put on a relationship that had once seemed little more than fortuitous.