CHAPTER XXVI
THE DEAD-LINE
Alicia stood on guard at the door of the wireless room, waiting for McKinnon's return. More and more, in those last strange hours of uncertainty, she dreaded being alone. There seemed something ominous and bodeful in the very quietness of the midnight ship, as she rocked and grated against the pier in the long and sullen ground-swell of the roadstead. The screw no longer throbbed, the engines no longer pulsed and churned. The quietness seemed deathlike. It was broken only by the steps of De Brigard's sentries, as they sleepily paced the long deck, one to port and one to starboard. Yet even these two figures, with their shouldered carbines, seemed ghostlike, presaging vague evils. The heat, too, was oppressive, for not a breath of air seemed to stir in the quiet ship. But in comparably more oppressive was the silence so rhythmically broken by the spectral tread of the pacing sentries. Then the infinitely minute sound of another movement crept in to her straining ears. She took up the heavy revolver as McKinnon had warned her to do, and crouched back into the remotest corner of the cabin, listening and waiting.
The girl's heart stood still as McKinnon himself quietly swung back the cabin door, dodged inside, and as quickly closed and locked the door behind him. He stood there with his back to her, listening, without so much as a glance in her direction. He heard the pacing steps pass and die away, and pass still again. Then he murmured a grateful "Thank Heaven!" took a deep breath, and turned slowly about to the waiting girl. His gaze was impersonal and abstracted; he scarcely seemed conscious of her presence as he stood there, deep in troubled thought.
"Well?" she whispered at last, struggling to keep some tremour of dread from her voice.
"I was right," he said, with the look of perplexity still in his studious eyes. "Eighty-eight boxes of fluxing-slag have been passed out from the hold and piled along the pier. They've been standing there covered with a tarpaulin."
"Is any one there?" she asked.
"Five of De Brigard's men—four men and an officer. The four men are moving these boxes now. They are lifting them in through the east door of the weigh-scales shed. The south door has been kept shut; and the United Fruit Concern's track-motor has been kept there waiting. They have divided the eighty-eight boxes into two lots. They intend to take out only one-half of the shipment to-night. I counted the boxes from under the life-boat. Forty—three were left; that means they are taking off forty-five.”
"That means almost three hundred thousand rounds of ammunition!" she exclaimed, with a little hopeless gesture of the hands.
"The Remington rifles, of course, they can't touch. The forty-five boxes, I imagine, have completely loaded the body of their car, filled it up!"
"But what are we to do?"
He looked at her, and laughed a little, recklessly.
"They have to run those boxes of slag out through Puerto Locombia to De Brigard's headquarters to-night. They have to get them out there quietly, very quietly. The track, doubtless, has been cleared for them. It has to be cleared for them, for even an eighty-horse-power motor can't side-track an ore-train or switch a string of banana-cars. And there is no longer any telegraph between this port and the inland points they have to pass.”
"No, there is no telegraph," she said, still at sea.
"There are four men and an officer," he mused irrelevantly. Then he looked down at his watch, and turned abruptly to the girl again.
"You have a revolver?” he asked. She showed him the weapon. He looked it over, saw that it was fully loaded, and handed it back to her.
"Have you ever learned to use it?” he asked. She looked at him with growing wonder.
"I don’t think I could kill a man," she said, very quietly and very slowly.
"But could you protect yourself, at a pinch? Could you shoot round a little with it, I mean?"
"I have learned to shoot,” she said, white-lipped.
"Good; then that makes three!" he exclaimed. Her wide eyes, following him as he crossed to his trunk and opened it, detected the fact that, for all his assumption of jocularity, his hand was shaking a little as he held Ganley’s huge revolver and his own under the electric light. He first saw that these two revolvers were fully loaded. Then he overturned a green cardboard box and counted his cartridges. There were one hundred and eighty-three, all told.
"What must I do?" she asked, as bravely as she could, taking the handful of cartridges he had doled out for her.
He stood once more studying her with his impersonal and abstracted eyes.
"Could you run a motor, a track-motor like this?" he asked, with a side-jerk of his head toward the pier.
"I have run one, often," was her quiet answer. "There is no steering-wheel. It is simply a starting and speed-lever and the brakes—though we always took a boy, to blow, to keep the tracks clear!"
"The boy will not be needed, to-night," was his grim rejoinder, as he once more studied his watch. She drew back from him, slowly, step by step, aghast.
"You are not going to try to take that motor from them?" she asked.
"We've got to take that motor. It's our only way out. And with your help I can do it."
"But these sentries! And there are five men! And forty-eight miles of country held by De Brigard!"
"Listen," he said, so simply, so matter-of-fact in the facing of the problem, that his very quietness brought her stampeding thoughts back to her. "There are just two danger-zones. The first is in the weigh-scales shed, where those five men will be. The second will be in De Brigard's lines."
"Yes," she said, doing her best to meet his mood of calm-eyed practicality.
"The officer will be the only man armed, of those five. I'll attend to him. Before the other four can get to their carbines we'll be off—you'll be off, I mean, for remember, whatever happens, you are to get to that starting-lever and get away with the car. I'll be holding the men off until we’re clear."
"Clear of what?"
"Clear of that shed—and of the wharf. Then, once out of the town, we've got a clear run until we strike De Brigard's outposts. It will be simply a matter of rushing them—and trusting to luck.”
"It's hopeless," she sobbed.
"To stay six more hours on this steamer is more hopeless!"
"Even if we did get through," she tried to explain, "we couldn't get into Guariqui. They would fire on a car breaking into their lines—they would kill us both, before they could understand!"
He shook his head dissentingly.
“We'll have to warn them in some way ..... that is only one of the smaller problems!"
He caught up his coat, and dropped a revolver into each side pocket, and after them the loose cartridges, in handfuls.
Then, after another moment’s thought, he crossed the cabin again, and leaned over the open trunk.
"I've got a pocketful of milk tablets here," he explained, "and a pound or two of German army chocolate.”
He swung about and looked at her, with his almost boyish smile.
"And I'm terribly sorry, but it isn't sweetened!" he said. Although there was no answering smile on her face, he thought he saw a fleeting look of gratitude in her eyes, as though she was struggling to thank him for even his foolish and futile efforts at lightheartedness. And while she still gravely looked up at him he slipped his huge wicker-covered brandy-flask into his hip pocket, and once more consulted his watch.
"Our time is up!" he said, with every semblance of levity suddenly fading from his face. It tortured him to see such resigned hopelessness in her quiet eyes, but he knew it was perilous to surrender to his feelings.
"I know it's hard," was all he said, "but it has to be done."
"I understand," she said.
He turned, with his hand on the light-switch. "Is there anything you feel you ought to take along with you?"
"Nothing," she whispered.
"Then are you ready?"
"Quite ready," was her answer.
She heard the snap of the light-switch. She heard him quietly turn the key in the cabin door. She knew, as she stood with her hand on his sleeve, that he was listening and waiting for the sentry's steps. He waited until they passed and died away toward the bow of the ship. Then he noiselessly opened the door and drew her out after him into the blackness of the balmy, musky-odoured midnight air.