Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/165

 something had cropped up to arouse his suspicions.

But McKinnon, without a moment's loss, sprang back into his wireless-room and faced his switch-lever. He threw the ebony handle of his starting-box down across the contact-pins with a force that seemed almost to explode the dynamo into a roar of droning protest. It was like the burst and sound-rush of an ascending rocket. Then his hand darted out to his key and he broke and closed the great current, quick and strong, sending the huge blue spark exploding from his coils until it cannonaded through the closed cabin with a crash and throb like the quickened thunder-claps of a tropical storm. Madly he repeated the call, again and again, wondering, as he feverishly worked the key in that one brief word of warning, if he had been too late; praying, as the moments dragged away and nothing broke the midnight quietness about him, that the girl in the cabin below had heard and understood his warning.

He suddenly began to reprove himself as he stood there counting off the seconds, and listening to the interminable muffled throb of the far-off engines, for not thinking in time, for not holding Ganley back, even though it had to be by force. Or he might have done it, he felt, by the mere pretense of some fresh message