Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/61

 clothing, a pair of canvas-covered dumbbells, a shaving set, and a tin box of photographs. Against the farther wall, half way to the door, and directly in front of the dynamo, stood a broken steamer chair. In front of it was the rough pine table at which the operator sat and worked. On this table stood the tuning-box, with its mysterious rows of numerals along the three slots in which lever-heads moved back and forth, the great, long-handled despatching instrument, like a Brobdingnagian model of a telegraph key, and the delicately mounted little responder, the nerve center of the wireless system. Above this, on the outside wall, stood the switchboard. It was of unpainted pine, like the table. Set in it, near the top, was the starting-box, with its broken and roughly spliced lever, and below it the switch-arm itself, standing between its two protecting fuses. At the end of the table was the faded wall-map of the Caribbean and a shallow clothes-locker. Above this was tacked a lithograph of a stage dancer, pointing with a pink-satined toe to other and brighter worlds. It was a strange medley of the obvious and the inscrutable, of the commonplace and the mysterious. "How'd you get aboard this tub, anyway?" the stranger suddenly asked, with a sympathetic wag of the head.