Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/273

 as he stooped over her, he touched her hand and murmured: "I'm sorry." He was a man of action always before one of emotion. But he had to swallow hard, to clear the lump from his throat as he spoke.

He stroked the passive hand that lay on his pillow, with the rough timidity with which a seaman might stroke a tired and captured land bird. Then he drew back his berth-curtain and lifted his electric fan from its shelf, placing it on the operating-table so that the current of air from its whirring wings might blow in to where she rested. Then he locked and bolted and doubly secured his cabin door.

"Is it hopeless?" she asked at last, without turning her face to him. She struggled to ask it casually, but the bitter listlessness of her voice translated every tone and word of that question into the notes of utter tragedy.

"No, it's not hopeless," he said, combatively, aggressively, for her sake alone. "This is a De Forest station. We have the international rights common to all wireless operation. We can stand on those rights. We can hold this room until help of some sort arrives."

It was foolish, he knew, even as he uttered it. They could be driven out, or starved out, or baked out, in a single day. Yet as he kept up the pleasant fiction, he was infinitely glad