CHAPTER IV
THE MAN ON BOARD
"You've made this trip before?" observed the stranger, studying the man before him with the same calm and half-closed eyes that he had bent on the faded wall-map. He seemed as strangely disturbed by his companion's note of quiet authority as he was by his incongruously sunburnt face and his unseemly length of limb.
"Never on this tub!" McKinnon responded, with a contemptuous side glance about his station.
The stranger followed that glance as it circled the crowded and disordered room. It was both a sleeping-cabin and an operating office. Under the wide shelf that supported a double row of Leyden jars, surmounted in turn by the De Forest helix, was the operator s narrow berth. Toward the foot of this berth, below the condenser, stood an enameled washbowl and a litter of tools. Next to these was a wooden-slatted trunk, on which lay a clutter of recently unpacked clothing, a pair of canvas-covered dumbbells, a shaving set, and a tin box of photographs. Against the farther wall, half way to the door, and directly in front of the dynamo, stood a broken steamer chair. In front of it was the rough pine table at which the operator sat and worked. On this table stood the tuning-box, with its mysterious rows of numerals along the three slots in which lever-heads moved back and forth, the great, long-handled despatching instrument, like a Brobdingnagian model of a telegraph key, and the delicately mounted little responder, the nerve center of the wireless system. Above this, on the outside wall, stood the switchboard. It was of unpainted pine, like the table. Set in it, near the top, was the starting-box, with its broken and roughly spliced lever, and below it the switch-arm itself, standing between its two protecting fuses. At the end of the table was the faded wall-map of the Caribbean and a shallow clothes-locker. Above this was tacked a lithograph of a stage dancer, pointing with a pink-satined toe to other and brighter worlds. It was a strange medley of the obvious and the inscrutable, of the commonplace and the mysterious.
"How'd you get aboard this tub, anyway?" the stranger suddenly asked, with a sympathetic wag of the head.
"I needed the money. But I never thought I'd have to face a mess like this." And the new operator disgustedly waved an arm about the room.
The stranger was meditatively rubbing his pendulous chin.
"You don't like the work, eh?"
"It's good enough when you've got a decent station. But this room isn't fit for a pig to live in! Look at that box of a sleeping-berth! It's worse than a coffin! And I'm going to kick a board out of that cabin wall if they don't get a ventilator tube in here—it's like sleeping in a dough-box! And look at that bunged-up tuner! And that operating-table, that's never seen a coat of paint; and that switchboard—nothing but raw pine! Why, nine of the connecters in those Leyden jars turned out to be broken, after I'd struck this place at noon. I had to patch them up with all the washbowl chains from the first cabins as we came down the bay. I got on to that dodge aboard the Prinz Joachim."
"She's a real boat!" interpolated the stranger.
The young operator was wistfully nodding his head. "They carry a German band, and an ice machine, and free beer for the officers."
"But you can make this snug enough," the other soothed.
"Snug! Why, this place looked like a box stall in a livery stable. I haven't even got a silence-room or an annunciator connecting me with the bridge—I've got to be hollered at like a sinker cook in an East Side beanery!"
The stranger laughed. It was altogether a laugh of sympathy. But his meditative eye kept roving about the stateroom.
"I suppose you've seen a good deal of the South?" he said at last.
"All I want to, thank you!" promptly answered McKinnon. The vigour of his retort made the other man smile again.
"You don't like it down there, eh?"
The operator, who had slowly adjusted his caplike receiving apparatus, performed his habitual rite of lifting the 'phone-receiver from his ear to catch the question as it was repeated.
"Do you?" demanded the operator.
The stranger did not answer the question. Instead of that he asked another.
"Why don't you keep out of it, then?" There was nothing, apparently, but off-handed good nature in the query. The operator laughed.
"I can't afford to," was all he said, though he added in an afterthought: "Until I can get at the work I want."
McKinnon's questioner looked relieved. He became more light-hearted, more suavely consolatory.
"But it's so deucedly mysterious—sending all kinds of messages for all kinds of people," he argued.
"What's so mysterious about it?" the man at the table demanded. "I think it s confoundedly simple."
"The machinery is, I suppose, when you understand it; but I mean the mixing up in the big events, the getting next to life with the shell off."
"Oh, it's mostly weather reports and 'sweetheart' messages and captains giving distances and saying they're coming into port or passing lights or wanting wharf room, if it isn't the Navy people asking for Sunday papers and news from home."
But think what a swath you could cut with wireless if you wanted to," pursued the other in his placid disregard of all side issues.
"Me?" said McKinnon, turning slowly about.
"I mean as a side line," interposed the stranger with a shrug. Still again McKinnon's nervous grey eyes swept the figure in the steamer-chair.
"But I have a side line," explained the operator as he noted the other man's puzzled gaze resting on his box of models.
"How'd you mean?"
"I mean that reed-disk and Ruhmkorff coil transmitter you see there. That's the work I want to get at."
"But what is it?" was the other's half-diffident inquiry. His lack of interest in no way seemed to depress the younger man.
"It's my wireless telephony scheme for pilot-boats and fleet manœuvres and yacht races and ten-mile work in general. For instance, there's a battle going on, and the whole top hamper of a cruiser gets blown away; all we'd have to do, with this, would be to run a wire up on an oar and call on the flagship for orders."
"But aren't other folks for getting in ahead of you on this?"
"Well, I can still use my outfit to smash their monopoly and stop royalty overcharges. You see, it's only an arrangement of steel reeds connected with a receiver, or say to a responder like this one on the table. These reeds are tuned in unison with the transmitter-reeds—it works on what we call the law of syntonic synchronism."
He noticed, as he went on, the other's companionable grimace at the polysyllables.
"But this is all Greek to you," he said, with a shoulder movement of humorous resignation.
"No, it ain't," protested the other. "Go on."
"Models cost money, of course," McKinnon continued more deliberately. "I have to go slow. But once I get that apparatus where I want it you'll never see me south of Hatteras again."
He stopped, and waited for the other man to speak.
"It's not a white man's country," admitted the stranger with a nod toward the South. "The only good thing in it's the mules."
"We've got to take that as it comes," McKinnon said with an unlooked-for placidity of tone. Then he leaned back, with half-closed eyes, and linked his long forefingers together behind his head. "You see, I can always save money on a coastwise run like this: there's no way of getting rid of it."
"Well, money's worth having now and then," the stranger remarked as his sagely ruminative eye fell on the little varnished box that held the wireless responder.
He was silent for a moment or two, though McKinnon watched him closely out of his half-shut eyes. Then the stranger swung slowly about and touched the operator on his soiled shirt-sleeve. McKinnon felt the heavy forefinger on his arm, but he did not move.
"See here," said the stranger, and both his voice and his expression had undergone some quick and pregnant change, "see here; d'you want to make ten times what you get out of this key-operating business? D'you want to make a good round sum, helping me out of a hole?"
The Laminian's operator looked closely at the man who had invaded his cabin. He had apparently been afraid of some such undercurrent of self-interest in the other's advances. He seemed to possess the man of thought's persistent horror of material and entangling alliances; he seemed to feel that some secret web of inveiglement had been woven about him.
"How could I help you out of a hole?" he curtly demanded.
The stranger did not answer at once. The other's suddenly aroused suspicion had warned him to go slow. Instead of speaking he leaned back in the steamer-chair and studied his companion. The path before him seemed a precarious one. His pursed-up lips worked slowly in and out as he sat there temporising. There was something suggestive of the ruminant in his large and heavy silence.
"Could we talk here—us two, man to man?" he finally asked, with a look at the door.
"Of course we can," the operator retorted, nettled by the sense of mystery the other was conjuring up about so simple a situation. This vague feeling of irritation seemed to merge into something that was almost anger as he watched the stranger slowly rise to his feet and cross over to the cabin door, held back against the wall-plates by its brass hook. He lifted the end of this hook on his toe and let the freed door swing shut with the slow dip of the steamer's deck. Then he ruffled out the faded denim curtain and came back and sat down. The two men continued to look at each other guardedly.
"I've got a hard job ahead of me," began the intruder, seeming to feel his way as he went. "A hard job—and you're the only man on this ship who can help me along."
"Go on," McKinnon commanded with an impatient reach for his discarded coat.
"That's just it. I'll be hanged if I know how to go on!" the other explained. He gave vent to a guttural laugh of uneasiness and sat stroking his pendulous, turkey-cock throat.
The operator, drumming on his pine table-edge, waited in silence. The other man was also silent. The pulse and throb of the engines crept into the white-walled cabin.
"Well," said McKinnon with a significant glance toward his large and authoritative silver watch. The stranger's eye, following him, passed on to the key-lever and then on again to the helix wires.
"You may recall that you sent a couple of messages out for me this afternoon," he finally began.
McKinnon recalled the fact of the two despatches.
"Maybe you happen to remember the wording of those two particular messages?"
McKinnon, with wrinkled brow, turned to his "send-hook." He found the two sheets, and straightened them out on his knee. Then he looked up to say: "We never hold these things in our head, you know. We can't, any more than a wire can."
He let his gaze run over the sheets of paper before him. The other man sat watching him as he read. For just a moment, as he made note of what seemed the operator's half-forbearing, half-cynical indifference, a shadow of disappointment flitted across his face, typifying, apparently, some passing regret for a reconnaissance at last recognised as unnecessary. But he pulled himself together at once, as though determined to face the problem immediately before him.
"Would you mind reading that first despatch out to me?" he asked with the placid authority of a prestidigitateur sure of his trick.
McKinnon rattled through the message at a breath: "Varrel, sixty Wall Street, New York. Our man on board Laminian, bound Puerto Locombia. Wire Washington. Will have him held by authorities to await instructions. Duffy
The operator put the message on the table and calmly weighted it with his carborundum box. The other man suddenly realised, as he made note of McKinnon's attitude of unmoved neutrality, how automatic the human mind can become; how, when once immersed in the method of doing a thing, it can lose all sense of the thing itself. The man of the key had seen nothing but a string of words to be "sent." It was only too apparent that their meaning had escaped him.
"I suppose I've got to explain that," said the stranger, fondling one of his thick, short cigars in his thick, short fingers. "You'll notice that this message went to 60 Wall Street. You may or may not know that that's the Information Bureau of the Consolidated Fruit Concern. And if you've knocked about the Banana Belt long enough you've found out that those people just about own those little yam-eating republics down there.
McKinnon nodded as a sign that he understood.
"They've got a good many millions of money locked up in that export business o' theirs. And when you're doing business in a republic that's built on bullets you've got to watch where you're walking. It means that you've got to keep your ear to the ground; see that your governments are stable, I mean; and your marionettes in their nice little red and gold uniforms running smooth and true. That's why they retain a big man like Varrel for their information bureau—just to know who's poking a finger into the political pie down there, and to be ready for trouble when it blows up."
It was all obvious enough to the listening operator.
"Well, I'm here acting for Varrel and the Consolidated Fruit people. The Locombian charge d'affaires at Washington tipped our office off some five weeks ago about trouble ahead in Guariqui."
"Where's Guariqui?" quietly asked McKinnon.
"Guariqui's their capital—the capital of Locombia. Since we've heard that, of course, we've been co-operating with the department at Washington, keeping an eye on any Locombian likely to be interested in the Guariqui mix-up."
McKinnon confessed that he had known of detectives engaged in the sole pursuit of shadowing Latin-American exiles.
"And it's right here under this deck"—Duffy tapped the floor with his heel as he spoke—"it's right here on this ship o' yours that we've got Ganley—the one and only Ganley!"