Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/284

 Between the toppling peaks of the Cordilleras and the littoral mangrove swamps hung a crawling and miasmal fog, curling and feeling its way inward, like a snake trying to escape the heel of the hot sun. McKinnon's flesh tingled and crept a little as he looked on it, for it disquieted and overawed him, that land of crawling mists and blazing light and flaming heat. The thought of its overcrowded and self-strangling vegetation, of its ceaseless and sinister and over-exuberant life, depressed him. He was glad enough to shut and lock his door on it all.

"You haven't eaten?" he said, as his eye fell on the untouched breakfast.

"I don't think I could," she protested. "But you must!" he declared; and she found, to her wonder, that his note of authority held something vaguely appealing and consoling to her.

"I couldn't until I knew you were sending again!"

He thought over that statement, for the situation had its difficulties.

"Not a word, not a dot, goes out until we've had our breakfast," was his ultimatum. He knew that she needed nourishment. He also knew that it would be unwise to bank too strongly on his untested apparatus. And he knew that defeat, if defeat it was, would be a