Argosy and Railroad Man's Magazine, Vol. 107 No. 3 — page 105: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SHIP THAT CRUMBLED. His sole reason, indeed, for believing that the girl at the St. Francis and Miss Mur- dock were different beings, was that Miss Murdock, despite her loveliness, owned a countenance absolutely at variance with the one his imagination had created! Be- cause he had not been afforded a glimpse of the other girl’s face, he had drawn it entirely from imaginative pigments, or fig- ments! Yet his meeting again of Ellen Murdock was, in spite of all that, something to look forward to with tingling anticipation. Her reaction to her father’s suggestion of mar- riage was worthy of profound speculation. At all events, the future was an intoxica- ting view, a venture for a red-blooded in- dividual—madmen and tropical stars—a rotting hulk for a fling in sapphire oceans! What if she was a floating madhouse? Here was adventure corked in a bottle and ready to be decanted like a ripe, rich, and dangerous wine—for him a sip of stark and bloody experience! In that light the Barracouda’s vices swiftly became virtues. Murdock became a cutlassed Morgan, no longer a scamp of dark harbors; Cordella ceased being a mad- man to conform (temporarily) to the measurements of a debonair and romantic caballero, Reynard was transformed. into an uncannily shrewd and plotting devil who drew his inspiration for misdeeds from a tin box of Khorassan opium! Even the Hartman pack received their glamour—strictly a group of businesslike cutthroats with headquarters somewhere in Mexico, men who would perform any sort of criminal act for others or for themselves (though always for money). It was a thrilling symposium. And putting to sea in a sinking ship struck the keynote. Donn Riley, with his cheeks flushed, went to work with energy, first truing up the gummed commutator, then repairing the aerial switch, finally connecting the head phones into the detector circuit. In the tool-box he came across a silvery fragment of metallic silicon, which he in- serted deftly between the detector prongs, snapping a mandolin E-string along the jagged edge for the necessary high-resis- tance contact. 447 With these arrangements completed, and the various switches set to their proper ad- justments, his labor was rewarded, as soon as he established the receivers upon his ears, by a vigorous grating noise—radio signals from some near-by station. Donn Riley’s trained ears recognized them at once as the high-power stridula- tions of KPH—the Marconi station at San Francisco. KPH was striving to transmit a message through “static” to Honolulu. He adjusted the tuning handle, setting it for longer waves. Immediately the pow- erful vibrations of KPH were diminished, and a shrill, flutelike mnote—the high- pitched voice of some war-ship at sea— took its place. Depositing the receivers on the instru- ment ledge, Donn Riley drew out a hand- ful of blue, paper-bound booklets, all of which bore the imprint of the government printing office at Washington. One of the baby-blue booklets contained a list of in- ternational radio call letters, every wireless station on board ship or ashore having as- signed to it a distinctive call. He thumbed through the well-used pamphlet several times before he consid- ered that the Barracouda was perhaps not of United States registry. He tried Peru, the Argentine, and, finally, Mexico. And it evolved that the ancient blockade run- ner, registered with a scattered list of Mex- ican shore stations, had had designated as her call the letters XYL. Below decks a bell rang briefly. The larch-sheathed engine seemed to thump with closer regularity. He was surprised to note that the hands of the wireless-room clock pointed to 1.55. His former nervousness revisited him. Had the old hooker been able to get away with a clean pair of heels, or was she now apprehended and followed? Had the ele- ments of such a problematic situation not been so serious he might have smiled. The Barracouda, with those decayed boilers of hers, would be approaching the impossible if she exceeded ten knots. The most slug- gish war-ship in port could double that Snail-pace without half trying. @pening the door he thrust out head and shoulders and peered into a wall of black- NOO > (C(O) S (C(O) mM