Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/196

 into which they were drifting. Things had gone too far for a long-continued armistice. And the longer a truce was maintained, McKinnon felt, the more decisive would be the final action. Events were merely framing themselves for that ultimate surprise which he was hopeless to forecast. He was oppressed by the feeling of vague conspiracies being enwoven about him. What these conspiracies were, he could not even guess.

His one escape from this wearing sense of arrested action lay in his key and recorder. At all times of the day he worked busily at his apparatus or brooded patiently over his tuner and coherer. Morning, noon, and night he remained on the lookout for any word that might creep in to him. And all the while he kept calling, doggedly, hoping against hope to get in touch with the Princeton or at least to pick up some stray ship or station. He came to feel something forlorn, something poignant, in his repeated calls, fluttering out and dying away unanswered in those vague etheric wildernesses between a lonely sea and a lonely sky. They seemed to endow the wandering ship with a pathos like that of a lost ewe crying alone and unheard in the night.

Ganley's own attitude made this waiting game a still harder one. He sauntered about