Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/265

 in there?" he demanded, with his guttural running obligate of mariner's oaths. "Or have you been too taken up with your own fightin'?"

"I've picked up nothing," was McKinnon's answer.

"Then why can't you get Guariqui?"

The ship's master was still slow in grasping the situation.

"I tell you we're cut off from everything! My responder's gone!"

"Can't you fix it?"

"No!"

"You can't?"

"Not unless there's a De Forest responder brought aboard from Puerto Locombia."

"Can't you shift without it?"

"No more than you can live without a heart."

The captain turned on the strangely placid-eyed and listening Ganley. The latter's indifference seemed to sting him into a renewed ecstasy of anger.

"You'll cool your heels in the Puerto Locombia quartel for this," he declared, with another of his explosive oaths. "I'll damned soon hand you over where you belong!"

His threat had no ponderable effect on his placid-eyed listener. The gun-runner's heavy face, with its houndlike, pendulous jaws, and the drooping-lidded, deep-set eyes, with their