CHAPTER XXIV
THE CALL FOR HELP
Things did not go McKinnon's way as easily as he had expected, or had so bravely pretended to expect. The first gray tinge of morning, deepening slowly to pearl, showed along the eastern sky-line before he had completed his task.
He sat back with a sigh of relief; he sat back like a god who had wearied of creation, looking on his work and seeing that it was good. The gray and pearl along the sky-line had by this time turned to pale rose, and slender pencils of light were showing through the chinks in his cabin shutter.
Alicia Boynton was still asleep on his narrow berth. So narrow was her resting-place, and so quiet her breathing, that it seemed to him as though she were lying in a coffin. She had dropped off into that sleep of utter weariness against her will. She had resolved to be with him and near him every moment of his labour, but the intriguing claims of the body had dethroned her volition.
And now, as he gazed down at her flower-like and tranquil face, he dreaded to waken her. He felt touched, as he watched the quiet throb of the pulse in her blue-veined temple where the dark and heavily massed brown hair had fallen back, with a sense of mystery before the ancient miracle of sleep. He wondered where her escaped spirit had gone to; it seemed nothing more than the quiescent shell of her, the empty husk of her, that he stood and watched.
A wayward sense of loneliness, of desertion, crept over him, and he turned about, not ungratefully, to listen to the familiar swish of deck-hose and thump of holy-stone as the early awakened deck-crew washed down the decks. It was commonplace enough, that swish of sea-water and thump of mumbling workers. But at the moment there was something wordlessly companionable in it to the listening McKinnon. It reminded him that the every-day trivialities, the orderly actualities that sustain the machinery of life, must always go on, no matter how close may brood the spirit of outer tragedy. It reminded him, too, that it was morning, and that the hour of his ultimate trial had arrived.
He swung his door open, and looked out along the deck. He beheld a windless sea, and a blood-red tropical sun mounting up above its rim, where dull orange paled into dark azure. On his face he could feel the sea air, still fresh and balmy. There seemed something Edenic in its limpidity, something unearthly in its over-exquisite and unvoluptuous softness. It seemed to etherealise life, to beautify even the tainted and sordid hulk of wood and steel and steam that forged ever forward across its universal curve of azure peace. The sea itself, as he stood there watching it, assumed strange and quickly altering tints. Along some slight wind-riffle it became claret-coloured and turquoise and violet. The lace-work edge of some wandering current left it royal with floating purple, shot through, in spots, with flashing ruby-red that held all the fire of a thousand cinnamon-garnets. In other places some miracle of refracted light made the softly undulatory surface a bosom of breathing quicksilver. Then a point's shift in the sun's altitude merged and darkened the silver into the pale blue of forget-me-nots, deepening it still again into dully lustrous maroon and lapis-lazuli, streaking it with lilac and apple-green, leaving it as varied and mystic as the breast-plate of an Hebraic high-priest.
McKinnon took a deep breath of that soft and balmy air, and felt that life was still beautiful. He felt that there were still great hopes to be thankful for, great hazards to be gladly faced, great ends to be attained.
Then his thoughts came down to more material things, as he looked about and beheld a dirty-jacketed and heavy-eyed steward carrying a pewter coffee-pot and a tray of fruit and toast and eggs along the deck to the captain's stateroom, but who veered about to the wireless-room door, at a sign from McKinnon.
"Couldn't you leave that with me?" asked the operator.
"It's the captain's," said the steward, moving impassively on.
"Wait!" said McKinnon, taking a bill from his pocket. "Your captain's not even awake yet. And you could have a second trayful up to him in ten minutes."
The heavy-eyed steward willingly enough surrendered his burden when McKinnon thrust the bank-note into his hand, and went shuffling below-stairs again, to replace the coffee-pot and replenish the tray.
McKinnon closed and locked his cabin door, before he set down the breakfast thus caught on the wing. When he looked up he saw Alicia Boynton regarding him with wide-open and vaguely wondering eyes. He felt glad that he had escaped the brutality of waking her to the troubled world that still encompassed them.
"What is it?" she asked.
"It's your breakfast," he said, with studied cheeriness. "You're going to eat it while I start to send."
Then you can send?" she asked. Her world of reality seemed slow in coming back to her.
"I've got to go to the engine-room first," he explained, "to see about my power."
"What must I do?" she asked.
"Lock this door when I go out, and don't open it; don't open it for Captain Yandel himself, until you hear me knock three times."
She had made her hurried toilet by the time he was back, but the coffee and eggs remained untouched. McKinnon, at the still open door, could see that the brief tropical morning had already merged into open day. He could see, too, that they had drawn closer in to the Locombian coast. Along the southwest lay a broken blue line of mountains, remote and lonely-looking. They seemed to him, under their high-arching sky of abysmal blue, like some forlorn and ragged rampart of a world's end. Still nearer stretched the alluvial plains and the low, flat line of swamp-land, broken here and there by clumps of palms, along the higher spots where the ground-swell of the emerald-tinted shallows broke in blinding white on the coral beaches.
Between the toppling peaks of the Cordilleras and the littoral mangrove swamps hung a crawling and miasmal fog, curling and feeling its way inward, like a snake trying to escape the heel of the hot sun. McKinnon's flesh tingled and crept a little as he looked on it, for it disquieted and overawed him, that land of crawling mists and blazing light and flaming heat. The thought of its overcrowded and self-strangling vegetation, of its ceaseless and sinister and over-exuberant life, depressed him. He was glad enough to shut and lock his door on it all.
"You haven't eaten?" he said, as his eye fell on the untouched breakfast.
"I don't think I could," she protested.
"But you must!" he declared; and she found, to her wonder, that his note of authority held something vaguely appealing and consoling to her.
"I couldn't until I knew you were sending again!"
He thought over that statement, for the situation had its difficulties.
"Not a word, not a dot, goes out until we've had our breakfast," was his ultimatum. He knew that she needed nourishment. He also knew that it would be unwise to bank too strongly on his untested apparatus. And he knew that defeat, if defeat it was, would be a crushing one. So he ate, though it was more to encourage her than to appease his own hunger. And when their frugal meal was finished, he looked at his watch with speculative and half-closed eyes. Then he gave a deep sigh and turned to his operating-table.
"Time's up!" was all he said.
The girl, sitting on the berth-edge, saw his hand go up to the switch-board; she saw the lever come down on the contact-pins, one by one, and heard the hum and drone of the wakened dynamo. She saw his rubber-muffled fingers catch up the piece of heavy insulated copper wire which had been attached to the dismantled binding-post, and the flash of blue flame that exploded from knob to knob across the spark-gap as he completed his circuit by touching his wire-end to the contact-point of his improvised key. She saw his intently inclined head as he sat listening with his phones pressed close over his ears, and the strong-sinewed yet still oddly boyish-looking face beaded with minute drops of perspiration.
His preoccupied left hand went out to his tuner, and still he sat there, over his reconstructed responder, waiting. The only sound in the cabin was the continuous whir of the electric fan on its unpainted pine shelf. The minutes dragged slowly away. The silence became nerve-torturing, piling up like a wave that refuses to break and fall.
"It's useless!" cried the girl.
McKinnon silenced her with a peremptory movement of the hand.
"Wait!" he commanded.
He leaned forward, slowly, until his breast-bone pressed against the edge of the table. Then came a moment or two of unbroken quietness.
"I've got them!" he whispered.
But still again the silence was unbroken as the man with the glimmering steel band across his head sat crooked up like a schoolboy over a slate, listening. His hand went out to the lever-heads in the numeral-lined slots of his tuning-box, as he paused to tune up to the wave-pitch of some as yet undecipherable message. His half-closed eyes opened and widened, and he was suddenly springing for the switch-handle of his starting-box again.
"I've got them," he cried exultantly, as he turned to his key. "I've got two of them!"
"Two of them?"
"Yes; they're both talking at once. I've got to make one hold back, if I can reach him. If not, I've got to tune him out!"
His voice was cut off by the familiar spit and flash of the huge blue spark, and a thin ozonic odour filled the closed room, strangely like the smell of summer air after a thunder-storm. The rapt and wistful eyes of the woman watched him as he worked, touched into wonder before the inscrutable, humbled into momentary amazement by the unfathomable mystery of Hertzian waves.
"Thank God!" he cried, "it's Guariqui!"
"Guariqui!" echoed the woman.
He silenced her sharply, for he had his ear at his phone again, and was once more working nervously over his tuning-box.
"We've lost them," he murmured dejectedly.
"Are you sure?" she whispered, out of the silence that followed.
"We've lost them both!" he almost groaned. The whir of the fan and the breathing of the two listeners was the only sound in the cabin. The quietness again seemed like an up-piling breaker that refused to fall and retreat. The woman stirred uneasily.
"Wait!" cried McKinnon, with suddenly inclined head. His face, now seamed with runnels of sweat, was drawn and the jaw muscles were set and knotted. He jerked a nervous hand to ward the droning fan, peevishly, as though its presence were a personal affront to him.
"Shut off that fan," he commanded.
The woman rose without a word and shut it off. There was a malicious little spit of the rebellious current, a spark of blue under the japanned standard, and the revolving brass wheel-wings came to a stop. Nothing but the sound of breathing filled the cabin.
"There!" McKinnon s voice erupted like one of his own coil-sparks through the silence. "Now I've got them!"
He jumped for his key, talking over his shoulder as he did so.
"It's the Guariqui operator," he explained, as he worked. "He's sending very weak; I can hardly get him. He says his power's giving out, and De Brigard's men are targeting at his aerials with carbines.
Then he flung himself into his chair, and caught up his form pad for transcription, with his receiver once more over his head. He wrote slowly, with intent eyes and wrinkled brow, word after word, sometimes going back and scratching out a phrase, sometimes puzzled by a lost dot or dash in the stuttering Morse, sometimes quickly "breaking" and asking the operator to repeat. His breath came shorter and quicker as he listened and wrote. Then he called frenziedly, and listened, and called again.
"They're dead!" he exclaimed, in disgust.
"Dead?" cried the woman, in white-lipped alarm.
"I mean I can't get them! Their wires must be gone!"
His use of the word "dead" still terrified the woman at his side. He had no time to explain. He simply thrust his inscribed pad sheets into her hand as he turned to his key again, for time now was precious, terribly precious.
She read:
Duran's men all here. Shut up in city waiting cartridge shipment. Light skirmishes last two days. Ulloa held De Brigard back all yesterday, but had to fall back on city at night. Short of ammunition.… We are shut in. De Brigard's forces surrounded city at daybreak. Courier reports rebels bringing machine guns up through hills, from Sanibella. We must have help before guns join bombardment. Carbines are picking at my aerials from Paraiso Hill, to the east. Can you get Chilean battleship two days off Puerto Locombia or British ship out of Kingston? Must have help. Relay call to anything in reach.… Duran's authority.… Or if Chilean or British marines can be landed in time advise them to push in by way of Boracao. American Consul Klauser shut up there holding wireless with Kilvert, United Fruit operator, but report bad sending.… Is only disaffected town outside capital.… Entrain there.… Must hurry.…
Her hungry eyes rushed back and forth along the second sheet which McKinnon had thrust into her hand:
Can get Princeton.… Some one from God's country.… Must hurry. Yes, president and cabinet safe. Seven hundred crowded in Palace yards and water shut off. Tell Princeton not to wait to land guns. Remember Boracao switch bridge is mined.… Bullet against switch-board.… Get me south of Boston again—hurry—use—power dying—hurry.
That was the end of the message.
"But the Princeton!" gasped the woman. "If you can't get the Princeton!"
"Wait—wait—I'm getting her," answered the man, bent low over his responder, as though the sense it appealed to were vision and not sight. "They've been waiting for me to relay. They've been"
He left the speech unended, for he was busy sending his spark cannonading across its gap.
He kept up that cannonading until it seemed to the watching woman that it was never going to end. Then he switched off and listened again, and again cannonaded his answer.
Then he dropped wearily into his chair, wiped he was not alone. He looked up at the woman with a strangely transfiguring smile on his sweat-stained face.
"It's over," he said, with the simplicity of utter weariness.
"You've got them—the Princeton?" she asked.
"I've got them!"
She put out her two Hands to him. It was meant as an impersonal gesture of gratitude, and he knew it as he took them in his. But there seemed something revivifying and electrical in the sweat from his face, and remembered that mere contact with them, something that brought the hope and joy of life back to his tired body. He laughed aloud.
"I gave them what they were aching for! They were lying there steaming and baking and fretting for the very one word I sent on to them."
"Then they'll come!"
"Come! Yes, they'll come! They've been lying there whimpering to get up at De Brigard, just like a rat-terrier whimpering to get at a kitten."
He was silent for a moment, as his mind pictured the sudden change, so many miles away, that was flashing and thrilling through all the great gray hulk of that wakened battle-ship, of the signal-bells clanging, the orders being given, the furnaces being stoked, the decks being cleared.
"And before to-morrow night they will be anchored at Puerto Locombia."
"Before to-morrow night?" she repeated, with sinking heart.
"She has to steam all the way from Torreblanca—she can't cover the distance in less than thirty hours under any circumstances.
"But we will be at Puerto Locombia to-day, before nightfall!"
"I know it," he said, with all the joy and confidence trailing out of his voice.
"Then Ganley will have one whole day to act. The Sanibella guns will be pushed up to Guariqui. Ulloa s men will be without ammunition."
"They can hold out!" he answered her.
"But they may not," she cried. "It may all be over and done before we can help them. And we will be here at the mercy of Ganley!"
She failed to impart any shred of her terror to the listening operator.
"Yes," he said, with abstracted and studious eyes, "that is the one thing that worries me."
"But Ganley can do anything, once we're at Puerto Locombia. This ship and everything it carries will be under his thumb!"
"Yes, that is still our problem—we've still got that bridge to cross," he confessed. "Yet I think we can cross it, when the time comes."
"But how?" she demanded.
"By not having this ship remain at Puerto Locombia, once Ganley's put ashore," was his answer.
"Then in what way could we still help Guariqui—in time?" was her forlorn and helpless query.
"We've got to make a way!" he told her, with his grim yet reassuring smile.