Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/295

 curving from the pier-end stood a dismantled train of cars, so small that they looked like a child's toys. Near-by lay a derailed locomotive, brown with rust, strangely pathetic in its attitude of resigned helplessness. Thirty paces from this stood the tottering remains of a corrugated-iron warehouse, its fallen roof and twisted wall-plates showing plainly enough that it had been blown up by either Ulloa or the insurgents.

Farther out along the broken pier rolled and creaked a soft-coal-burning tug. About her single deck, under her overlarge and drooping ensign of red and yellow and blue, lounged and waited a number of figures in red-striped uniforms. Obsolete brass cannon shimmered at her bow and stern, and a carbine-rack showed out just aft of her wheel-house.

It was while this strangely accoutred tug cast off and came puffing and wheeling about to meet the newcomer into the roadstead that McKinnon and Alicia Boynton stood at the rail, gazing landward. Nothing seemed left for them now but to watch and wait. Everything that lay in their power had been done; all they could do now was to study the cards as Fate threw them on the board.

"That's one of De Brigard's gunboats!" said the watching and anxious-eyed girl.

"So those are the tools that Ganley works