Arthur Stringer

“ I hate the thought of Arturo being dealt with so unfairly. It—it—— Oh, I think it must be because my own father was a soldier himself!"
"I rather imagine I know the feeling," McKinnon told her. "I think I've carried the same fighting madness in my own blood for quite a number of years."
"But you're a man, and you're still young," she murmured, looking up at him a little sorrowfully, wondering at the touch of bitterness that had crept into his voice. "You do it from choice; I must do it from necessity. You can glory in it—it's unselfishness with you; it's the spirit of adventure. ”

“ A space was cleared on the deck, promptly, solemnly, as though for the despatch of some casual and duly appointed ship's business. Then the circle re-formed, watching and silent, waiting with set faces, for what was to come. And McKinnon saw that it was indeed to come, that there was no escaping it.
For one moment only did Ganley hesitate. Just once did the deepset and malicious little eyes shift in one sidelong glance of hesitancy. McKinnon, from his cabin door, could see that look. He could see the change of colour that crept slowly up through the gun-runner's flaccid face. ”

“ A wayward sense of loneliness, of desertion, crept over him, and he turned about, not ungratefully, to listen to the familiar swish of deck-hose and thump of holy-stone as the early awakened deck-crew washed down the decks. It was commonplace enough, that swish of sea-water and thump of mumbling workers. But at the moment there was something wordlessly companionable in it to the listening McKinnon. It reminded him that the every-day trivialities, the orderly actualities that sustain the machinery of life, must always go on, no matter how close may brood the spirit of outer tragedy. ”

“ It was then that McKinnon lifted her bodily into the driving-seat, whispering to her to sit low, even catching at her outstretched hand and conveying it to the starting-lever.
"Start as the door opens," she heard whisper, and she knew that he had crept forward again, and that she was alone in the car. She tried to school herself to calmness, to coerce her attention on which was the starting-lever and which the speed-lever, to force into life the hope that all might still turn out well. Once free of that door, she felt, she could breathe again. ”

“ And once in Guariqui was safety, and rest, and sleep—above all things, sleep. There would first be good hot coffee, in plenty, and food. And then he would be given a bed somewhere. The thought of that bed seemed the most consoling of all. It suggested a Nirodha of utter indifference after a night of utter anguish; it grew to symbolise an utter Nirvana of rest for his over-wearied body.
But a new fear suddenly stabbed through him as he stooped and laboured so doggedly over his lumbering sticks of logwood. Would daylight come before they were on their way again? ”

“ McKinnon continued to look down at Guariqui, after Aikens had gone back to his work. He could see the iron-fenced Palace gardens, cool and shadowy and secluded-looking. In the Plaza beyond he could see the splash of water from a frond-hidden fountain, and the white statue of some unknown hero who had died in some unknown war for Locombian liberty. He could see the yellow front of the cathedral and the sun-steeped Prado white with dust. He could see the American bluejackets, from the Princeton, who were still picketing the streets, and a bullock-cart that crawled noisily over the cobblestones. ”

“ It lay engulfed in twilight mysteries, enriched with unlooked-for possibilities. Its narrow acres of brick and stone and asphalt became something unbounded and infinite, as bewildering and wide as the open Atlantic. It seemed to harbour fantastic potentialities. It seemed to release the spirit of romance, as moonlight unfetters a lover s lips.
Yet Lingg, the wireless operator of the Laminian, became more and more alarmed at the opacity of this fog. He felt, as he burrowed mole-like across the mist-blanketed city, that he had been a fool to leave the ship. He should have listened to reason. ”

“ At the head of Avenida Sacramento he could, see another detachment of white-helmeted marines clustered about one of the Princeton's machine guns. He could make out a scattered group of Ulloa's mounted Irregulars crawling in toward Guariqui, across the undulating, flat-shadowed plain of burnt grass. He could see rows of flat houses and red-tiled roofs, and tame buzzards perched on ridge-poles, and a lonely and high-standing royal palm or two. And beyond the sun-bathed town and the burnt plain lay the gray-green hills and the lonely blue peaks of the Cordilleras. ”

“ He could see the gathering street crowds, the men in linen and duck, the bareheaded women in mantillas, the Princeton's midshipmen in tight-fitting tunics, pretending to ignore the heat, the marching lines of barefooted men in grotesquely soiled and ragged uniforms.
He knew that De Brigard's movement had been crushed, that the revolution was already a thing of the past. There was a smouldering province or two on the lower Pacific slope, but a week or two of gun-seizing by Arturo Boynton's mounted police would stifle all that was left of Ganley's coup d'état. ”

“ Ganley, togged out in a loose-fitting and many-wrinkled suit of white duck, was pacing the Laminian's bridge-deck, like a polar bear pacing its cage.
He watched the morning sun come up, bright and brazen, like a newly minted penny. He watched the aerials bridging the mastheads and waiting like a seine to net any wandering school of æolian notes. He watched the barefooted sailors sluice the steaming deck-boards. But most of all he watched the sky-line ahead, with many ruminative uplifts of his heavy iron-grey eyebrows. ”

“ Yet as she stood there at McKinnon's side the strangeness and the loneliness of Guariqui seemed almost to fade away. She humanised it and brought it nearer to him. Then his eyes fell on the figure of an officer in full uniform, passing in through the Palace gates, with his scabbard in his gauntleted hand. He was as gilded and as ornamental as a character from a Broadway musical comedy. But he served to bring a wayward surge of misery over the soul of the American. ”

“ The woman stirred uneasily.
"Wait!" cried McKinnon, with suddenly inclined head. His face, now seamed with runnels of sweat, was drawn and the jaw muscles were set and knotted. He jerked a nervous hand to ward the droning fan, peevishly, as though its presence were a personal affront to him.
"Shut off that fan," he commanded.
The woman rose without a word and shut it off. There was a malicious little spit of the rebellious current, a spark of blue under the japanned standard, and the revolving brass wheel-wings came to a stop. Nothing but the sound of breathing filled the cabin. ”

“ As she crept on, forging ever southward under the high-arching azure sky, this sense of quietness and completion grew deeper. The air became warm and soft. The sun streamed down on the patched awnings, on the worn deck that seemed bone-white in the flat, strong light of noonday. Through the ventilators, all day long, came the purposeful throb and beat of the engines, muffled, like the throbbing of a great heart. There seemed something inevitable and ordered in that unhurried and undeviating pulse, as though the ship and all she carried were forever at peace with the world. ”

“ McKinnon took a deep breath of that soft and balmy air, and felt that life was still beautiful. He felt that there were still great hopes to be thankful for, great hazards to be gladly faced, great ends to be attained.
Then his thoughts came down to more material things, as he looked about and beheld a dirty-jacketed and heavy-eyed steward carrying a pewter coffee-pot and a tray of fruit and toast and eggs along the deck to the captain's stateroom, but who veered about to the wireless-room door, at a sign from McKinnon. ”

“ Once, as McKinnon stood alone at the ship's rail, Ganley sauntered over with his ponderous and deliberate strides, and joined him in his silent study of the star-strewn heavens. The operator waited, feeling that at last his enigmatic enemy was about to speak. But the gun-runner's meditative eyes remained turned up to the stars, soft and warm and luminous against a sky of velvety blackness. He seemed utterly at peace with the world and his own soul, as McKinnon left him there, contemplating the intimidating vast dome of the tropical heavens. ”

“ His one thought was to reach that engine-room and to reach it with out loss of time. He accepted the momentary obstruction as nothing more than a clumsy sea man who had scarcely been given time to step aside. He struggled to edge about the unyielding bulk, swinging to one side with a preoccupied half-growl of impatience. It was not until he found himself seized and almost carried back into his cabin that he saw either the meaning or the menace of the situation.
"Is that message for me?" demanded Ganley, his huge figure blocking the doorway, his glance on the top sheet of the form-pad. ”

“ A touch of desolation clung about each figure that groped its way through the short-vistaed street, as though the thoroughfare it trod were a lonely moraine and the figure itself the last man that walked a ruined world. It was the worst fog that New York had known for years; the city lay under it like a mummy swathed in grey.
Yet the gloom seemed to crown it with a new wonder, to endow it with a new dignity. That all too shallow tongue of land that is lipped by the East and North rivers took on strange and undreamt-of distances. ”

“ They seemed to endow the wandering ship with a pathos like that of a lost ewe crying alone and unheard in the night.
Ganley's own attitude made this waiting game a still harder one. He sauntered about under the Laminian's gently flapping awnings, smoking his flat-bellied Hondurian cigars, as placid and unperturbed as a commodore pacing his own yacht deck. He accosted McKinnon, from time to time, with the off-handed geniality of long-established comradeship. ”

“ Things did not go McKinnon's way as easily as he had expected, or had so bravely pretended to expect. The first gray tinge of morning, deepening slowly to pearl, showed along the eastern sky-line before he had completed his task.
He sat back with a sigh of relief; he sat back like a god who had wearied of creation, looking on his work and seeing that it was good. The gray and pearl along the sky-line had by this time turned to pale rose, and slender pencils of light were showing through the chinks in his cabin shutter. ”

“ The air seemed to grow clearer, the darkness less abysmal. He could see that they were at last on the edge of the banana-belt, still climbing and pounding and swaying upward. Their path was now a lonely aisle through the forest of rustling greenery that crowded up to the very track-edge; sometimes a leaf swept the car-roof. At times they could hear the ripple of water in the irrigation ditches. Once a light swung across the track, a mile ahead. It brought the lever out to full speed again, and a carbine ready, and the two figures in the car lower down behind their barricade. ”

“ Then all thought of prayer went from his mind, for his squinting eyes had fallen on what looked like a salt-barrel as it appeared over the brink of the creek-bank, a ludicrous and unlooked-for thing of staves and hoops.
McKinnon watched this barrel, in wonder, for it seemed to shift about by itself. Then it began to roll slowly forward. It advanced towards the rifle-pit, inch by inch, propelled by no visible human hand. It moved ponderously onward, foot by foot, as though it had been endowed with some miraculous power of locomotion. ”

“ The ship crept on, the centre of its circle of water overhung by its circle of sky. Along the flat fringe of this sky were ranged low tiers of cumulus clouds. They seemed as fixed and orderly as the clouds on a painted stage-drop; they stood like floating flecks of cotton, making a circling amphitheatre of the lonely sea. And in the ever-shifting centre of this amphitheatre throbbed and pulsed the thing of flashing brass-work and bone-white decks, of sadly flapping awnings, of quiet men with watching and melancholy faces, of a world complete in it self. ”

“ Ganley once more broke in on her as she stopped to pant for breath.
"These are a pack o' lies!" he cried, and his voice was rasping and forced, as though it required a great effort for him to utter the words, "These are all damned lies!"
The woman pointed to the little particles of white paper scattered about the floor.
"And that was not an agreement with this man?" she derisively asked.
"This man made an agreement with me, an open and honest agreement."
"Honest!" interpolated the scornful woman. ”

“ The huge-shouldered man in the raincoat made no effort to conceal his disappointment. It was what one deserved, he conceded, for travelling in such a punk-riveted, slush-pitted, coal-eating second-rater!
But he remained up on the bridge-deck. He continued to lean nonchalantly against the dripping rail, peering out from under bushy iron-grey eyebrows drawn close to the flat-bridged nose, unmindful of the rain that beat in from the northeast as the Laminian plowed her way down through the Narrows and the Lower Bay. ”

“ McKinnon looked down at her, puzzled, not by her proposal, but by the sheer fact that she could make it. He began to feel that some kindred and companionable love for the casually adventurous linked them together; he began to realise that, for all her sex, she was not without her youthful and full-blooded relish for the hazard of any true game that was worth its candle.
"Suppose Ganley suspects something?"
"He can suspect nothing if we only do our part of it in the right way," admonished the youthful intrigante before him. ”

“ He turned at the step, before following the operator into that cab, and spoke a crisp word or two to the still blinking patrolman. Then he lurched angrily and impatiently into the cab and slammed the door shut as they went clattering and swinging away through the heavy fog.
He left the patrolman gazing after him through the gloom, his idle night-stick dangling from his wrist like a bird's broken wing.
"Can you beat it!" gasped the astounded officer to the other man busy prodding and feeling his own body, very much as a housewife might explore a market-fowl. ”