Page:C Q, or, In the Wireless House (Train, 1912).djvu/266

 Again the crackle of the leaping sparks.

“I ’ve asked Bruyere to lend you a hand, and he says he will. Wants you to swim around to the starboard chains and he ’ll throw you a line. Are you on?”

“Yes!” replied Graeme.

Micky dropped his receivers and turned to where Graeme was sitting in the dark.

“Ever since that fellow from Sadi-bel-Abas got off all that stuff about the foreign legion I ’ve had a hunch Africa was the only place for you. This is your chance. You can trust whatever Bruyere says—and you ’re safe on board the Frenchman. No extradition papers are valid on the high seas. And it mast be a great life—fighting the desert and the Arabs!”

“I ’ve thought of it myself—often,” answered Graeme. “Yes, I ’ll take the chance and thank you for it.”

They crept out of the wireless house, climbed down the ladder to the after-deck and side by side walked silently towards the stern—the stern where a week before they two had struggled so fiercely together in the moonlight. Not more than two hundred feet away the