Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/54

 farther and farther down on the contact-pins. It sounded like a hive of bees stirred into anger. The stranger peered in at the dynamo under the operating table.

"So you're talking!" he murmured meditatively, appreciatively.

"How long will you be in communication with them?" he went on after a second or two of thought.

The other raised an earphone to listen, as the question was repeated. Then he turned back and bent over the carborundum tip between his responder-points.

"We're never really out of touch with 'em, on this run," he retorted. He seemed to resent his own increasing concessions to the other's imperturbable good-nature.

"You mean you can call up New York from the Caribbean?"

The operator put down his earphones and shook out his small cardboard box of carborundum fragments, picking through them for a fresh piece for his responder-points. It seemed apparent enough, to the patient-eyed man across the cabin from him, that he was neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was simply that he was busy.

"No, I don't mean that, exactly. New York never works south of Atlantic City, as a rule. He's got too much to handle there, too many