CHAPTER IX
THE CONVERGING TRAILS
McKinnon drew in a deeper breath, slowly and leisurely, but he did not speak.
"Can't you understand?" the young woman in the blue pilot-cloth gown was anxiously demanding of him. "Ganley has thought this all out. He found out we carry wireless equipment. He knew this call would come to us. He has foreseen that we could relay it from Puerto Locombia to the Princeton. He knows that you, and you alone, could send that message out of Locombia."
"And you still think he's tried to tie me up, to keep me from sending it! And you insist that those first despatches he filed were simply blinds!"
"Just as his pretense of shadowing Ganley was a blind!" was her prompt retort.
McKinnon fell to pacing the cabin again. The woman watched him without speaking. Then the operator came to a sudden pause.
"But I'm not free yet. That schemer still has me tied down to him, as you say. We haven't got that paper out of his hands."
The woman nodded her head slowly, without any outward emotion.
"He could still discredit me with the captain of this tub, if that happened to be part of his game! He'd show us both to be a pair of liars the moment we tried to corner him!"
"And once at Puerto Locombia, if his plans have worked out as he wants them to, he can have us dragged ashore! And if Guariqui falls he can have us held as enemies of the new government!"
"This is a nice mess!" calmly meditated the long-limbed man standing before her, facing her, for the moment, with abstracted and unseeing eyes. He even seemed to have forgotten the presence of the woman.
She rose from her chair and stood before him.
"We have to get back that foolish paper," she said. "Before everything else we must get back your receipt."
The quiet determination of her voice startled him a little. He stood regarding her with a new light in his eyes. All his training had been repressional; his life had taught him to resist every threatened surrender to the emotional. Yet, as he saw her there, so isolated from her kind, so apparently unfitted for the tasks before her, so insidiously appealing in her tender womanhood, a warm and winelike current of sympathy began to creep incongruously through his veins. She must have caught some inkling of that soft invasion, for suddenly, and without apparent reason, her face deepened in colour and then grew paler than before. She held out her hand as though to bridge the awkward silence that had fallen between them. McKinnon saw it was a gesture of farewell.
"Will you promise me to do nothing until I have got this receipt back for you?" she asked as he still held her outstretched hand.
"But why should you fight my battles for me?" he asked, wincing a little before her open and courageous gaze. "I can't have you turn highwayman for me?"
There was welling up in him a wayward sense of guardianship over her isolated and fragile figure, of responsibility for her safety and well-being.
"It must be done," she declared with a bitterness that surprised him a little. "There are two doors to Ganley's cabin. It is one of a suite. I can get in through one of those doors."
"Through one of those doors?" echoed the man before her.
"Yes; to-night."
"To-night?" cried McKinnon, looking down at her in mingled protest and astonishment.
"Hush!" she warned, with her fingers held up close before his face. Their accidental contact with his lips sent a responsive thrill through his nervous body.
"But I won't hear of you doing this sort of thing just because I've been all kinds of a fool. I'm going to this man Duffy, or Ganley, or whatever his name is—I'm going to face him myself and make him put this whole thing right."
"That is impossible," she warned him in her tense whisper. "You do not understand. You don't know this man's ways."
He could see some definite yet mysterious fear shadowed on her face.
"But think of what you're threatening to do!" McKinnon argued. "You have to break into this brute's cabin and steal back a receipt! Think of the risk you'd be running!"
"It has to be done; the sooner it's done the better."
"But why does it have to be done in this way?" persisted McKinnon.
"Because you must not do it!"
"Why not?"
"It would be like cannonading canaries—you must save yourself for the bigger risks!"
Her unuttered misery, her inarticulate anxiety, more and more disturbed and depressed him. But there were many things on which he was still uncertain, and above all things he knew that he must go slow.
The woman confronting him must have seen some flash of doubt on his face, for she caught at his arm with a sudden little movement that was as imploring as it was feminine.
"You don't trust me? You don't believe what I have told you?" she cried in her hurrying, low-toned whisper.
"No! no! It's not that!" McKinnon answered. "But I can't quite see my way out—I can't see what it's all leading to."
"But nothing can happen now, here at sea. And you will understand later. Promise me you'll wait!"
"Yes; but wait for what?"
"Until you are free to act, and you know what I have said is true."
He took a turn up and down the cabin. "Is this paper so important? I mean, isn't this a lot of fuss and feathers about a small thing?"
"It's one of the small things that count in war—and this is war."
Still again he felt the inapposite and insidious appeal of her womanhood. It wound about him and tugged at him, eroding away his self-will, his old-time careless audacity of spirit, like a current eating under a sand-bank. It made sacrifice on her behalf seem a burden to be almost gladly borne.
"Only promise me that you'll wait!" she pleaded. His career had been one of much contention; but never before had he been compelled to fight against what seemed his own self-interest. He felt, in doing so, that he was being thrust and involved in entanglements which should have been evaded as mere side issues. He even marvelled at his sheer lack of resentment against capitulation so indeterminate and yet so complete.
"Promise me!" she whispered. He wanted to beg for time, to think things out, but her troubled face was bewilderingly close to his, and the memory that he was not innocent of the anxiety weighing upon her made him more and more miserable.
"I promise," he answered. The clasp of her hand sent a second inapposite tingle of joy through his body.
"You will wait?" she insisted, as though doubly to impress on each of them some future course of action. "You will say nothing until I have done what I promise?"
"There's nothing I can say or do," he replied, still demanding of himself if it could be right to put her to such a test.
"Then remember," she said, and her voice was little more than a whisper, "we are acting together."
McKinnon still stood there, watching her, as she opened the cabin door and stepped out to the wet and gloomy deck. Something about her departure so paralleled that of the man who had gone before her that the coincidence struck him with a start. It brought the thought through him like an arrow that he had openly pledged himself to two opponents, that he had made a promise to act for two enemies. This was followed by a second and an equally disturbing thought: he had not once been honest or open with her; he was letting his lack of candour make her path a harder one than she deserved.
He sprang through the door after her, swept by a sudden fierce fire of self-hate, of contempt for the things in which he found himself involved.
A moment later he had called her back across the midnight gloom of the dipping and rocking deck.
"What is it?" she asked, as she stepped into the cabin, her eyes wide with wonder. He made sure the deck was empty, and closed the door. Then, with an obvious effort, he wheeled about and faced her.
"It may not be too late for us to get out of this mess," he told her, "and get out of it in the right way."
"But what way?" she asked, puzzled by his unheralded change of front.
"The quick way, and the sure way," he answered, swinging across the cabin until he stood before his switch-lever. His hand hovered about the apparatus as he went on. "I mean our way out is to get the Princeton now, to-night, before she's out of touch with us! I mean it's best for us to play our card at once, when it's not too late! The Princeton has already passed us on her way to Culebra, to replace the gunboat Eagle; she's leaving us farther and farther behind every hour!"
"But what do we gain by getting the Princeton now?" Alicia Boynton demanded.
He was at the key by this time, and the "crash—rash—rrrrash" of the great spark as it leaped and exploded from the discharging-rods filled the cabin with a peremptory and authoritative tumult of sound. The woman stood watching him, spellbound. A moment later McKinnon's left hand was fidgeting above his tuner, while his right pressed a 'phone-receiver close to his ear.
"What we've got to do is to get that cruiser to Puerto Locombia," he hurriedly went on, as he waited there, without looking up. "She will be needed; she is needed; and she may as well be told of it now. I mean we'll do what we've got to do while the way's still clear."
"But how can you order about an American warship as though it were a street cab you'd hired?"
"It won't be me—it'll be the wireless that does the ordering."
"But who are you?"
"That's just it—I'm nobody! I'm like those canaries you spoke of; I wouldn't be worth cannonading."
"But you have no power to do this!" demurred the still puzzled woman. "You are not the President of the United States! You have no authority to order about a battleship!"
"I'll make the authority!" he cried as he sprang to his key and once more called through the night. "You've said just enough to give me my chance to make my course plain. American interests are threatened in Guariqui at this very moment; American property has already been destroyed in Puerto Locombia. It's only forestalling the inevitable. I mean I'm going to send an official call for that cruiser myself!"
The woman looked at him in amazement as he swung about and clapped the 'phones once more to his ears.
"If we can only get her!" he half groaned as he stood with bent head and fixed eyes, listening, while the seconds dragged slowly by. "If we can only get her!" he repeated less hopefully.
He turned to his switch again, and still again the great blue spark erupted and crashed and volleyed from the discharging-rods. Then again he waited and listened, the lines on his face deepening in the hard light from the electrics above him.
"The night's against us!" he exclaimed almost despairingly as the switch came purringly down on the contact-pins and his hand once more went out to his key-lever. His fingers closed on the handle, but the intended call was not sent. No nervous flash of blue flame bridged the waiting spark-gap. For even before he turned, McKinnon knew that his cabin door had been suddenly opened and that a squat and thick-set figure stood there peering in at him.
"What're you workin' that key for?" demanded the figure. It was the thunderous voice of the ship's master, Captain Yandel. McKinnon remembered that he must have overheard the spark-kiss at the masthead, from the bridge.
"What're you tryin' to send out there?" repeated the officer.
"I'm getting distances from a Standard Oil tank," answered the man at the table after just a moment of hesitation.
"Distances at this time o' night!"
"You heard what I said, didn't you!" cried the defiant McKinnon.
The enraged officer let his glance wander to the woman, who had backed away a little, as near to the door as possible. McKinnon did not move, but he was thinking both hard and fast. He had already seen the look on the other man's face.
"What's this woman doing here?" demanded Captain Yandel.
The long-limbed operator shot up out of his chair angrily at the barb in that thunderous voice. He kept telling himself to keep cool. It was plainly to be seen that he was still untutored in accepting insolence without protest. Yet still again the challenge was flung at him.
"What's this woman doing in this station at this time o night?"
McKinnon turned slowly about.
"Shall I tell him?" he asked. His voice was so quiet and seemingly self-contained that the woman's first blind panic of fear slipped away from her.
"Yes, tell him," she answered.
The captain strode into the cabin. He stood behind Alicia Boynton, a little to one side; McKinnon, from the operating-table, faced the intruder. The tones of his voice as he spoke carried a tacit reproof to his superior, a reproof for the boisterous note that had been thrust upon their quiet and orderly talk.
"This woman is my wife!"
"Your what?" cried the captain.
"This woman is my wife!" repeated the operator, without so much as a glance at the panting girl's colourless face. "As you may have the discernment to discover, she is a civilised being, and brutality has no particular fascination for her!"
"And what's all that to do with it?" demanded the captain, warming up to a scene from which he could usually wring his sardonic delights.
"It has this to do with it—that she is making this trip as a passenger. I mention the fact because you may see her in this cabin again, at many times, and at hours quite as unusual as the present."
"I will, will I?" retorted the other.
"You will! And what's more, so long as I do my duty by this ship, and by my company, her presence here calls for no insolence, either official or unofficial!"
"You be damned!" roared the master of the ship, aghast at such effrontery.
"There again I'm afraid I must both disappoint you and disagree with you. And at the same time I'd like to call your attention to the fact that this is a wireless station, and that it stands under the protection of the Berlin International Concordat!"
"To hell with you and your Concordats! This is my ship"
"Precisely; and I, unfortunately, have been put here to do my work, and I'm"
"Yes, by Heaven!" broke in the irate captain, "you're here to do your work! You were stuck in here under my nose, for reasons I don't understand; but when you're here you're goin' to do your work as I say! And what's more, I want you to bear in mind that I intend to stay master o' this ship! And while I'm master o' this ship I want no insolence from upstart wire-stretchers! So you do your despatchin' in regular hours, and when I say so, or I'll ship you back to your company in irons!"