CHAPTER V
THE WEB OF INTRIGUE
The stranger peered across the cabin at the unperturbed operator.
"Who's Ganley?" asked McKinnon.
The man in the steamer-chair let his astonishment explode in a ceiling-ward belch of smoke.
"Ganley! Why, Ganley's the biggest gun-runner doing business in the Caribbean!"
"Gun-runner?"
"Yes, the slickest revolution-maker that ever shipped carbines and smokeless into a Latin-American republic!"
"He's new to me," McKinnon protested.
"He's the man who's always smelling out a country that's looking for a liberator. And he gets a rake-off from the patriots and a rake-off from the Birmingham gun people, and another rake-off from the nitro-makers. Why, he's the man who's been engineering this Locombian uprising for the last seven months! But now we've got him good, and got him where we want him."
"Then what's he doing on a steamer like this? Couldn't he see he was going to be cornered?"
The disposition of the operator was not altogether an inflammable one.
"That's just the point, my friend. He couldn't get out of Charleston or Mobile or New Orleans. We had those ports watched. So he slipped quietly up to New York, engaged a passage on Saturday's Hamburg-American steamer for Colon, and then slipped over to the Laminian in a closed cab when he thought we weren't keeping tab on him. But, pshaw! you know all this already, don't you?"
"Not all of it," replied McKinnon.
"But you saw that yellow-skinned man who was helped aboard? The sick-looking fellow with the Spanish servant, who was almost carried up from that cab on the wharf?"
McKinnon confessed to some vague remembrance of the incident.
"That man is Ganley!" said the other. "And he's under this deck, down there in cabin fourteen, and you'll find that he's going to stay there until we slip into the roadstead at Puerto Locombia."
A meditative silence filled the little white-walled cabin.
"But what have I got to do with all this?" McKinnon at last demanded. His face seemed to carry the complaint that he had always found dissension on shipboard hard to endure; it was never easy to get away from disturbances in a world so small, or to put hate behind one in a life so circumscribed. Yet he smiled a little, in spite of himself. A ship, he had somewhere heard, must be either a heaven or a hell. The next fortnight, he felt, would find little of the celestial about the Laminian.
"That's just what I'm coming around to," the intruder was saying to him. "This Ganley, remember, has got his 'fences' and confederates and small-fry helpers. He works the thing thorough when he does it. And as likely as not, between here and Puerto Locombia, he's going to get messages sent in to him, or he's going to send out some despatches on his own hook—so as to keep in touch with his people."
The stranger came to a stop and sat regarding the younger man as though he looked for some word of encouragement or comprehension from him.
"The thing I've got to guard against most," the stranger who called himself Duffy continued, "is the department at Washington. If they sent something in, and it got out all over the ship, it would be likely to spoil everything."
"But it won't get out all over the ship," the operator corrected.
"You'll promise me that?" asked the other with a look of relief.
"Of course I'll promise you that—it's part of my business."
"But there's the other side of the question," the stranger discreetly continued. "Ganley is almost sure to be sending or receiving some thing. Why, I shouldn't be surprised if you've been handling something for him already."
The operator reached out for his message-hooks. The movement was merely perfunctory, for the hooks were all but empty.
"What name would he be travelling under?" McKinnon looked up to ask.
"He's booked as John Siebert, cabin fourteen," was the answer.
The man in the steamer-chair looked relieved, but only for a moment, when he learned that nothing had come or gone.
"Of course I may be wrong about his trying to keep in touch with those people of his. And it may happen the department won't even try to have him held. Perhaps they won't do anything until we get him ashore at Puerto Locombia. But we've got to get him there—it's our last chance. We've worked too hard on this thing not to see it put through to a finish."
"And?" asked McKinnon, waiting.
"All I want you to do is to keep tab on anything that comes in for this man Ganley, or about him and his tin-horn warfare down there—and on anything that's to go out, until we land."
"Are you acting officially?" McKinnon demanded, with a studied effort towards impersonality. "I mean, are you acting for the department at Washington?"
"I'm acting as the confidential agent of the Consolidated Fruit people, and the Consolidated Fruit people have been co-operating with the department for several weeks now."
"And you simply want to know what these messages are?"
"Yes, that's all; I mean that's all, unless they're of such a nature as to defeat the ends of justice. We don't want anything to get through that's going to help our man slip away from us."
"You mean for me to hold back everything that looks suspicious until you O.K. it?"
"And couldn't you do that if I made it worth while for you?" quietly inquired the stranger.
"How do you mean worth while?"
"Why, I'll pay you for your trouble. I'll"
But McKinnon's seemingly indignant start brought the older man to a stop.
"You don't suppose I'm going to take money to hold up the company's business?" he demanded.
The stranger raised a thick, red hand protestingiy. McKinnon noticed a scar in the centre of the wide palm. He inappositely wondered if it could be a bullet wound.
"Hold on a minute!" he warned the other, appeasingly. "This isn't a matter o' messenger-boy tips. It's out and out business. You've got to remember they're big things involved in this, and big people, too."
"Why do you want to mix me up in the mess, whether it's big or little?" complained the operator. The other man permitted the protest to go unanswered.
"But can't you tell me what it's worth for you to co-operate with us in this?" he blandly insisted.
"It would be worth my job!" McKinnon cried. The other man, eyeing him closely, could not rid himself of the impression that the operator was acting a part, that he was feigning reluctance for some potentially better bargain yet to be driven.
"Well, what's your job worth?" was the older man's undisturbed query. In fact, there was an undertone of contempt in his guttural question.
"Oh, it's not what the job's worth," protested McKinnon. "It's the putting outside business before the business I'm paid to do. It's the acting against regulations and getting the company officers down on me. It's the doing of something I'm not here to do."
"But this is merely a matter between us two, man to man. The company doesn't have anything to do with this."
"They own this junk," broke out the operator, with a wave of the hand that designated the apparatus about him. "And they about own me, too, as long as I'm on their pay-roll."
"Of course they do," the other soothed tranquilly. "But you're here, and they're in New York, and you've got the running of this apparatus until we dock at Puerto Locombia."
The operator sat looking at the other man in silence.
"Why, you told me yourself, a few minutes ago, that your machinery doesn't always work right. And you say you haven't a tape, or anything that registers the messages as they come to you. Isn't that right?"
The operator nodded.
"Then why couldn't you accidentally miss a message? Or why couldn't you send it out without being sure that it was going to carry clear across to the next operator?"
McKinnon still looked at the other man. There was something so placid and intimate about the tones of the stranger's voice that the very purport of his suggestion had seemed robbed of its enormity.
"I wouldn't do a thing like that for five hundred dollars!" the operator at last declared.
The stranger looked back at him without a move of his great body in the steamer-chair. McKinnon's glance of open contempt in nowise disturbed him.
"I'll give you one thousand dollars if you do it!" he said. His voice was quiet and casual as he spoke, but again the operator swung about and peered at him. He opened his lips to reply, and then suddenly became silent. He shifted in his chair, as though to draw away from some tangible and precipitating temptation.
"I'll give you one thousand dollars," repeated the stranger, "and I'll promise to stand between you and any trouble you're afraid of."
"It's not what I'm afraid of," the other retorted.
"Then what is it? You fail to catch a message or two, and no one's the wiser. What of that? Good heavens, man, you're not doing anything crooked! Nobody's cut a throat back there in New York! Nobody's trying to get away from your Centre Street people. You're not doing anything against the penal code."
"Why didn't you go to the captain about this?" complained the operator. The tacit note of concession in that complaint did not escape his companion.
"That low-brow!" he grunted in disgust.
"Being a low-brow, as you call him, ought to make him all the easier to handle," suggested McKinnon, with his short and puzzling laugh. "And he's still the master of the ship."
"The captain has no more to do with this than De Forest himself! And I imagine he'd rather be soaking in brandy pawnees than talking business to outsiders. This is something between us two. You're not cheating anybody. You're not hurting anybody. All you do is to help me win a big case, and get well paid for your trouble. And a twist of the wrist is what it costs you. For I'm assuming, of course, you can put that machinery of yours out of business for the time being without exactly showing how.
"That's easy enough," said the operator, with a stare at his apparatus. "There are a dozen ways of throwing a complicated thing like that out of kilter. It's my getting out of kilter with the company that worries me."
"The company doesn't count, my friend. They're outsiders in this. And you get your thousand dollars in cold cash, to work on that reed-disk of yours for half a year, if you want to."
McKinnon laughed a little. Then he grew more thoughtful, and was about to speak, when the quick tread of feet sounded on the deck with out. He caught up the phone "set" hurriedly and bent over the pine table. The steps passed on, but the betrayal of disingenuousness remained a consoling and obvious fact to the man in the steamer-chair. It left him no longer in doubt.
He reached down into his capacious trouser pocket and produced a roll of treasury notes, held together by a double rubber band. He peeled off three orange-tinted twenty-dollar bills and folded them neatly across the middle, lengthwise. Then, with equal deliberation, he thrust them into McKinnon's still hesitating fingers. The operator looked down at the money doubtfully and then up at the stranger.
"That's just a trio of twenties to bind the bargain," the latter explained. "You've got to get something for me taking up your time like this."
"But how are you going to clear me—I mean how are you going to make them see I haven't been acting against the ship, if it ever comes to a showdown!" asked the operator, not so much with timidity, but more as though he took a morbid joy in toying with the dangers of the situation.
"There'll be nothing to clear, and nothing to show," the other retorted. "All you've got to do is to have a bad ear when a certain message or two happens along. But I'll go further than that just to put your mind at rest. To-morrow, when I pay over the balance, I'll put it down on paper, with my name to it, that I guarantee to protect you. We can both sign a note showing we're acting straight and where we stand. Then you'll have me tied down in black and white. That seems square enough, doesn't it!"
"Oh, it's square enough. But suppose this man Ganley comes to me with a message to send out. I've got to show it to you, and if you don't approve of it I've got to act the lie that the message has been sent and keep lying to him every time he asks me about it."
"You're not paid to be a 'fence' for a gun-runner, are you?"
The older man laughed a little. Then he rose heavily to his feet. His head almost touched the cabin ceiling. "There's not much danger he'll ever ask about it. And when you know the man and his business you'll never let things like that worry you."
"That doesn't excuse me—his being a gun-runner."
"Well, if you felt that way, of course, you could send the message. Only you might send it as I mentioned—with the risk of falling short, I mean; some time when the engine-room doesn't happen to be giving you quite enough power."
The operator weighed and pondered the question. The man beside him was anarchistic enough in his ideals of conduct. He recognised no authority beyond the dictates of expediency. He went back to primal and feral conditions—went back to them with the disquieting directness of a savage.
"I'd have to call until I got my station," temporised the operator, "and the other fellow's O.K. after he'd got my call. Then he'd signal 'Go ahead,' to show he was ready to receive, and if I failed to reach him he'd keep 'coming back' for me to repeat. Then, too, what I was trying to send might be picked up by any stray operator behind the skyline. On the other hand, if I let the message die, after getting my 'go-ahead' signal, the thing would be reported and looked into. And that would mean trouble with the company when I got back."
"Then when you get your 'go-ahead' signal why couldn't you just lay low and complain that your receiver or coherer, or something, was out of order—that you were cut off from receiving?"
"I hate to lie about my machinery," retorted the operator with what seemed a blind and foolish pride in his tools.
The older man's curl of lip showed a slowly mounting dislike for further argument. Then he lifted his wide shoulders with a movement of resignation.
"Of course, I don't want you to lose either your job or your self-respect just because my official duty's been making me shadow a man."
The wireless operator seemed groping about for an answer when the quietness of the ship was broken by a sudden sound. It was the Laminian's foghorn, hoarse and mournful through the darkness, tearing the quiet with its slowly repeated call. The two men stood side by side, listening, as the bass-noted complaint was repeated.
"We're running into thick weather," said the operator, turning to take up his earphones. The two men, immured in their own ends and aims, had lost all thought of time and environment.
A moment later heavy footsteps sounded on the deck and the captain appeared in the doorway. He stood in the narrow opening, red-nosed, gnome-like, with the white light glistening on his waterproofed figure.
"Are you keeping an ear open for everything in there?" he demanded, with a scowl of disapproval at the man beside the steamer-chair.
"I'm listening for anything," McKinnon answered, with the "set" over his head. The door shut again. McKinnon turned back to the littered pine table. The foghorn sounded and grew silent; the dynamo purred and buzzed as the starting-box lever crossed down on the contact-pins.
The stranger beside the steamer-chair buttoned his coat. Then he crossed the cabin and turned back to peer at the operator, bent low over his table as he called and listened, and called again.
"So I can count on you in this?" he asked in his quiet and reassuring guttural. His hand was already on the cabin door-knob.
"To the finish," answered the other man pregnantly, replacing his earphones and holding them close to his head with his muffling handkerchiefs.