Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/264



was nothing but an eye-glance that passed between Alicia and McKinnon. Yet in that fraction of a second intimacies flashed between them, a message was delivered and received, the encouragement of one lonely soul offering its help to another was cryptically given and taken. It showed her, too, that judgment and intelligence were once more on their throne with her ally, that he was no longer beating and threshing his way about on the primordial sloughs of mere assault and defence. He was a thinking being once more, with his own secret ends and his own secret means to them. And she was sick of the primordial; every woman's fibre in her body was offended and felt degraded by that caveman's hand-to-hand fight through which she had passed.

The shaking-limbed captain had swung about on McKinnon.

"Have you picked up anything about fightin'