Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/283

 "What is it?" she asked.

"It's your breakfast," he said, with studied cheeriness. "You're going to eat it while I start to send."

Then you can send?" she asked. Her world of reality seemed slow in coming back to her.

"I've got to go to the engine-room first," he explained, "to see about my power."

"What must I do?" she asked.

"Lock this door when I go out, and don't open it; don't open it for Captain Yandel himself, until you hear me knock three times."

She had made her hurried toilet by the time he was back, but the coffee and eggs remained untouched. McKinnon, at the still open door, could see that the brief tropical morning had already merged into open day. He could see, too, that they had drawn closer in to the Locombian coast. Along the southwest lay a broken blue line of mountains, remote and lonely-looking. They seemed to him, under their high-arching sky of abysmal blue, like some forlorn and ragged rampart of a world's end. Still nearer stretched the alluvial plains and the low, flat line of swamp-land, broken here and there by clumps of palms, along the higher spots where the ground-swell of the emerald-tinted shallows broke in blinding white on the coral beaches.