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"Your message has gone. The operator's a queer duck. Dealing faro. Made me play through a case before he'd quit. I stung him for twenty. Here's some stuff I thought might be useful." From a cotton bag he discharged a miscellaneous heap of patent preparations; salves, ointments, emollients, liniments, plasters. "All I could get," he explained. "No drug-store in the funny burg."
So far as one could tell from watching these rather clumsy operations on the part of the inventor, his apparatus for steadying an aeroplane was surely showing signs of being a success. It consisted of a small iron bar weighing an ounce or so, which was hung as a pendulum from an arm projecting from under the operator's seat.
"I appreciate your friendship, and assure you that I shall always bear it in mind," said Rodney, stopping long enough to give the operator's hand a cordial gripe and shake. "That's all right," said the latter. "I haven't forgotten the winter when I was down with the chills and couldn't work, and that mortgage of ours liked to have worried my mother into a sick bed "
A word or two of kindness and of caution were all that were necessary, although, in order to prevent accidents, she had been bound securely. The flesh quivered as the knife pursued its course a moan or two escaped her, but yet she did not struggle; and her first act, after all was over, was to lick the operator's hand.
Wicks had merely brought a key, a battery and a ground wire with him and he had cut in on a telephone line. There were, he remembered now, two instruments on the operator's table here. One was the twin to the thing upon which the resourceful Wricks was playing.
It had been used to spray instead of burning the bodies of the two men who'd tried to murder him, and their wrecked ground car, and everywhere that the car was known to have run. It was a decontaminant spray; credited with the ability to destroy the contagion that made paras out of men. Calhoun saw the grid operator's face. It was resolute beyond expression, but it was very, very bitter.
"Look here, you guy, this'll show you whether I'm in earnest or not!" A bullet passed within a few inches of the operator's head. He came slowly across the room. Below they could hear the roar of the freight. "This ain't your job," the Irishman continued savagely. "We want the cop, and we're going to have him." Quest had stolen a yard or two nearer during this brief colloquy.
Besides, if the Lord had a spare rib in stock he might have made a woman of it, without cutting poor Adam open and making a pre mortem examination of his inside. The divine operator's purpose was a good one, whatever we may think of his means. He had discovered, what Omniscience would have foreknown, that it was not good for man to be alone, and had resolved to make him a help-meet.
Then finally, as from far away, a strained voice came, the operator's: "Ice had gotten packed on the rails already. One-eleven tried to keep on without a pick and shovel gang. Got derailed on a curve just below Crestline and went over. One-twelve's crew got the men up. The plow's smashed to nothing. Fifty-three thousand dollars' worth of junk now. Wait a minute here's Denver."
Here, he treats the game on the ground; and, under these conditions, it is easy for me to rear him at home and to follow the operator's performance down to the smallest detail. I will try to make the reader a witness of the strange sight. I place a little grass in a wide glass jar.
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