CHAPTER III
THE CALL FROM WITHOUT
It was four hours later that the man in the raincoat reappeared on the bridge deck. The night was thick, and McKinnon, the operator, worked with his coat off and his door hooked back against the wall-plates.
He looked up for only a moment as he saw the huge figure once more confronting him. The stranger, unrebuffed by his silence, stepped calmly inside.
"Anything come in over this machinery o' yours for me?" he inquired as he took out a cigar, pushed his hat back on his head, and struck a light. The operator looked up with his habitually abstracted and unseeing stare.
"What's the name!" he asked, once more studying his "tuner."
The other was indignantly silent for a moment; then he laughed a little, forgivingly. "Duffy," he answered. "Michael Duffy."
The operator shook his head; the movement was followed by another minute or two of silence.
"It might've come under the name of Cody, Richard Cody," explained the intruder. Something in the younger man's smile caused him to add: "You see, that's our firm name, Duffy & Cody."
An alias, south of the twentieth parallel, often enough carries its own explanation. The Laminian's bow was pointing towards a land of patriots where a change of name only too often synchronised with a change of continents. But McKinnon merely gave a shake of the head. It was several minutes before he glanced about at the other man, with a closeness of scrutiny that might have been impertinent had it seemed less frankly impersonal.
"There's nothing in for passengers this trip," he announced as he turned back to his "tuner." He drummed impatiently on the table-edge for a moment before readjusting his helmet-receiver. But the huge-shouldered intruder was not to be so easily shaken off.
"Your machine's working, isn't it?" he asked, preoccupied with an inspection of the end of his cigar. This cigar was soft and thick and short, like his own fingers. Despite its dark and baleful colour, he kept inhaling and expelling great lungsful of it as he talked. The operator idly registered the mental decision that cigars such as those were surely of Hondurian make.
"I saw you giving a message to the captain, didn't I?" And again the bellows-like lungs expelled their languid cloud.
"That was not to take on coffee at Puerto Locombia!" answered McKinnon. He delivered himself of this information casually, almost with amusement, though his half-averted eyes were not unconscious of the effect produced by what he had said.
The stranger was suddenly offering him one of the thick, short cigars. A shadow seemed to have lifted from his face.
"I don't smoke," said the ungracious man at the key, seeming to draw back into his shell of reticence. "And I'm busy sending."
"You mean you're actually talking to New York now?" amiably persisted the other. The operator's hand went out to the switch, black against the unpainted boards, and flanked on either side by a fuse.
"I've been tuning for Atlantic City. We're just picking him up," he answered as his fingers hovered over the starting-box lever, clamped to the same pine boards, above the switch. A sudden deep buzzing filled the cabin. It grew louder and louder as the lever crossed farther and farther down on the contact-pins. It sounded like a hive of bees stirred into anger. The stranger peered in at the dynamo under the operating table.
"So you're talking!" he murmured meditatively, appreciatively.
"How long will you be in communication with them?" he went on after a second or two of thought.
The other raised an earphone to listen, as the question was repeated. Then he turned back and bent over the carborundum tip between his responder-points.
"We're never really out of touch with 'em, on this run," he retorted. He seemed to resent his own increasing concessions to the other's imperturbable good-nature.
"You mean you can call up New York from the Caribbean?"
The operator put down his earphones and shook out his small cardboard box of carborundum fragments, picking through them for a fresh piece for his responder-points. It seemed apparent enough, to the patient-eyed man across the cabin from him, that he was neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was simply that he was busy.
"No, I don't mean that, exactly. New York never works south of Atlantic City, as a rule. He's got too much to handle there, too many ships going in and out. But New York can relay to Galilee and then down to NF—that's Norfolk—and from there on to Hatteras. Then Hatteras could throw a message over to Charleston, and if we're depending on land stations alone, Charleston can relay to Savannah, and then Savannah can get in touch with the naval station at Saint Augustine."
"And then where?" asked the stranger, leaning back against the cabin wall.
"Then Key West could catch it up, and if there wasn't a gunboat or an Atlas fruit liner crawling somewhere around Cuba, why, the navy yard at Guantanamo could get it relayed over to Limon, and from Limon, in decent weather, you'd catch the navy yard operator at Colon. And if the night was clear, you'd run one chance in a hundred of waking up the Cocoanut Trail aerials behind Puerto Locombia."
There was a moment or two of silence.
"Could Puerto Locombia get anything outside of a passing ship? Kingston, for instance?"
"Kingston never had wireless—it's prohibited by the British Government."
"Then there's New Orleans, on a pinch."
"There's too much map between," explained the operator. He gathered up his box of scattered carborundum.
"Queer, isn't it, getting words on a tape that way, four hundred miles off?" said the stranger. He scratched his huge head in a sort of mute astonishment, as he surveyed the cabinful of apparatus.
"We don't use a tape," the other corrected, waving a preoccupied hand toward the inscription on the condenser case. "We're De Forest! And we don't claim to talk around the world yet."
The stranger was peering contentedly and aimlessly about the crowded little cabin. "Where the devil d'you suppose that cruiser was off to?" he next inquired.
"That's what I've been trying to find out."
"They all carry wireless?" asked the other as he sent an exhalation of pungent cigar smoke ceilingward.
"Yes; but they're not aching to talk just yet. Wait till they've been lying down there in the heat for three months. They'll be calling all night, just for the sake of seeing something doing with a coherer again. They'll kai-tow to a coal-tug, just to pick up a scrap of outside news."
The stranger, who seemed well satisfied with what he had learned, remained silent for a moment or two.
"By the way, could you take a message for New Orleans to-night?"
"I could take it all right, if you're willing to prepay land charges."
"I'll pay anything you say, so long as you get me in touch with my people there. I want to ask Jean Careche, at the St. Charles, just when a shipment of oil and mill shafting got out of that port."
"Wait a minute, then, until I get Atlantic City again. You can be writing out your message and I'll get the time-check on it.
McKinnon bent over his table, with a wrinkled brow, and started to "call." As he caught the lever-handle of the huge key in his fingers and worked it deliberately, yet slowly, up and down—he was sending "strong"—the sudden blue splash of flame exploded and leaped and hissed across the spark-gap, from one brass-knobbed discharging-rod to the other. It filled the roughly improvised station with a sound like the rattle of musketry. The ceiling and walls of the room, crusted with many paintings of white lead, mirrored and refracted the purplish-blue flashes. A faint ozonic odour, not unlike a subliminated smell of brimstone, filled the air.
The operator threw off his switch again and listened intently, with his two handkerchiefs muffling his earphones. Then he suddenly swung about and looked at the man behind him.
"That cruiser's going to Culebra, off Porto Rico. She's ordered south on account of the Locombian trouble."
"You don't mean she's going to mix up in that mess?" the intruder cried with a note of disgust.
"No; Atlantic City says she's just going to lie there and wait for instructions from Washington."
The operator turned back to his table without apparently noticing the interest in the other man's eyes. He sat seemingly detached and unconscious of any presence in the room except that of the mysterious spirit which came and went at a touch of his hand. A smile began to play about his mouth as he listened. It was held there in suspension, while his gaze shifted from side to side, vivaciously, in response to that far-off and mysterious voice that was winging its invisible way across so many miles of rain-washed sea and emptiness, to creep along a slender thread of metal into his closed and crowded cabin.
He still seemed unconscious of the mounting look of determination, of obdurate belligerency, that smouldered up into the square-jawed face of the watching stranger as his eyes travelled from a wall map of the Caribbean down to the brass key, and then back to the map again.
"You'd think our Uncle Samuel had enough troubles without trying to play school-teacher to those dinky little fire-eaters down there," he meditatively ventured as he took out another of his black Hondurian cigars, and once more fell to studying the map of the Caribbean.
The operator, bent low over his apparatus, did not deign to answer him.