CHAPTER XXIII
THE RECAPTURED KEY
McKinnon turned from the quiet and horror-stricken figure of Alicia, huddled back on his berth-end, and contemplated what was left of his broken and dismantled apparatus. He felt like a child in an open boat, without oars, approaching an inevitable Niagara.
Then he turned back to the girl. There was no message of consolation he could bring to her. It came slowly home to him how hopeless the entire future stretched before them. A great hatred for the ship on which he stood grew up in him. His spirit revolted against the horrors it had housed, against the ordeals through which it had thrust a tender and innocent life, against the enigmatic perils with which it was still to threaten that life and his own.
Then he grew calmer-thoughted. He began to grope and probe about for explanations that would sustain her. But the task was a fruitless one. There was nothing to say. Instinctively, as he stooped over her, he touched her hand and murmured: "I'm sorry." He was a man of action always before one of emotion. But he had to swallow hard, to clear the lump from his throat as he spoke.
He stroked the passive hand that lay on his pillow, with the rough timidity with which a seaman might stroke a tired and captured land bird. Then he drew back his berth-curtain and lifted his electric fan from its shelf, placing it on the operating-table so that the current of air from its whirring wings might blow in to where she rested. Then he locked and bolted and doubly secured his cabin door.
"Is it hopeless?" she asked at last, without turning her face to him. She struggled to ask it casually, but the bitter listlessness of her voice translated every tone and word of that question into the notes of utter tragedy.
"No, it's not hopeless," he said, combatively, aggressively, for her sake alone. "This is a De Forest station. We have the international rights common to all wireless operation. We can stand on those rights. We can hold this room until help of some sort arrives."
It was foolish, he knew, even as he uttered it. They could be driven out, or starved out, or baked out, in a single day. Yet as he kept up the pleasant fiction, he was infinitely glad of her presence there. He needed her, not because she could buoy him up to meet implacable adversities, but to compel him to sustain himself for her sake.
"We can attach a power-wire to that cabin door-handle, so that no one dare touch it. We can run a wire to"
His voice trailed off and went out, like a burnt fuse. The change that had come over him was so sudden that the woman turned and sat up.
"Wait!" he called, in a voice so high-pitched it sounded what was almost a treble note. "Wait!"
He stood rooted to the spot for a moment, petrified by the new thought that had come to him.
"It's not hopeless!" he cried exultantly.
"What is it?" asked the other, confronting him.
"It can be done! The models! My telephony models! They carry what is practically a responder!"
The woman watched him, wide-eyed, for he was down on the floor, on his knees, before the box of models, lifting out strange and delicate bits of machinery—machinery for which she had always felt a certain fear and aloofness, since the quiet evening he had spoken to her of high-frequency oscillations and auctions and ionising gases.
"I tell you I can make it work!" he exulted.
"Work?" she echoed.
"It'll take time, it'll take scheming, but I can do it! I can have the whole thing rigged up by daylight. By morning I can be sending and receiving again!"
He was on his feet by this time, trying to explain it to her.
"My key's gone, you see; but that doesn't make it hopeless. I can adjust a piece of heavy copper wire to my rear binding-post here. Then I can take the other end of that wire and touch it at the contact-point here where my key used to strike. I can spell out the Morse that way, word by word. We'll be able to talk! We'll be able to send out our message!"
"Is this true?" she asked, her wide and shadowy eyes searching his face.
"Yes, it's true!"
"Quite true?"
"Every word of it, or I don't know wireless!"
"That means we can call the Princeton."
"We'll be still closer by morning. I'll be ready and waiting by the time their operator is at his key. And by noon we ought to pick up Guariqui, if we passed the Toajiras Light over three hours ago—no, before that, any time after sunrise!"
"If they are still sending!" said the woman.
"They must be sending," cried McKinnon, as he bent over his mysterious instruments. "They must be, or the Princeton would never have been calling them the way she was."
"Then I must help you in some way!"
"No, you must rest. This is work I have to do alone. You are worn out; you must have rest. You must sleep if you can."
"And you?" she asked.
"Oh, I'll be working this out. There'll be no sleeping in this place, you know, once I start to send!"
"But I meant that you need rest," she explained.
He could even laugh now, although his laughter was both brief and preoccupied.
"Rest!" he cried. "I'm good for two days without a drop of it, once I've got things going the way I'm trying to make them go."
She watched the white electric light of the drop-globe pour down on his bent and constantly shifting head. She could see the little black stain of dried blood on his temple. She could also see the sweat running down the side of his face, between his cheek-bone and his ear. For some inexplicable reason, she gave a throaty and inarticulate little gasp of gratitude.
"What is it?" he asked, looking up quickly.
"Nothing!" she answered, turning away her head so that he would not see a foolish tear or two in her eyes.
"I said things would go our way—and they will!" he declared, ruminatively. "Once we get this message out, we'll have three hundred American bluejackets up in Guariqui inside of two days!"
"And Ganley?" she asked.
"Oh, Ganley will be about again, and very much alive by that time!"
"But what will he do—what could he do, if we reach Puerto Locombia before the Princeton?"
He sat back, deep in troubled thought.
"That is the one thing I don't know, I can't tell. He's hinted at some trump card he's got up his sleeve—but he's given no inkling of what it is."
"Then we can only wait?"
"Yes, we can only wait!"
Then the tightened jaw-tendons relaxed into his quick and conciliating smile. "But why should we waste thought on things like that!" he cried, with his forced yet valiant laugh. "We're going to have a banana-train filled with machine guns climbing up through those hills and every rebel in Locombia under cover inside of three days!"
Alicia Boynton did not answer him as he stooped and studied and worked. But she sat there, with her hands clasped loosely together, gratefully and softly watching the aureole of light that the swinging electric made about the wireless-operator's head.