The Sign at Six Part 7

"Are you sure?"

"I know my instruments pretty well; and I've had experience enough so I can tell by the sound of the sending about how far off they come from."

"And this was from somewhere about one to two hundred miles away, you think?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you know whether any other instruments caught this?"

"No, only mine." He was very positive.

"How do you know?"

"Mr. McCarthy had me inquire."

"How do you account for it?"

"I don't know, except that maybe my instrument happened to be just tuned to catch it. That's another reason I know it was from far off. The farther away the sending instrument, the nearer exactly it has to be tuned to the receiving instrument. If it was nearer, 'most anybody'd get it."

Percy Darrow nodded.

"That's all, I guess. No, hold on. Did any of these come between six and eight last evening?"

For the first time the operator smiled.

"No, sir; my instrument was dead."

He went out.

"Well?" growled McCarthy.

"I don't know; but I can see more trouble."

"Let him turn off his juice," bl.u.s.tered the boss; "we'll be ready, next time."

Percy Darrow smiled.

"Will you?" he contented himself by saying. Then, after a moment's pause, he added, "I'll agree to stop this fellow if you'll give me an absolutely free hand. I'll even agree to find him."

"What do you want?"

"I want a job, a good engineering-construction job, for a friend of mine."

"What can he do?"

"He can learn. I want a good honest place where he can learn under a good man."

"Who is he?"

"I'll bring him in."

A moment later Jack, in answer to a summons, entered the office.

McCarthy stared at him. "What kind of a job?" he growled.

"Something active and out of doors," Darrow answered for him; "streets, water, engineering."

"It's a holdup," said McCarthy sullenly drawing a tablet toward himself, and thrusting the stub of a pencil into his mouth.

"A beneficent and just holdup," added Darrow; "the first of its kind in this city."

McCarthy glared at him malevolently.

"It don't go unless you deliver the goods," he threatened.

"Understood," agreed Darrow.

"What's his name?" demanded McCarthy, withdrawing the pencil stub, and preparing to write.

"His name," answered Darrow, "is John Warford, Junior."

McCarthy started to his feet with a bellow of rage, his face turning purple.

"Of all the infernal--!" he roared, and stopped, as though stricken dumb.

For two or three words further his mouth and throat went through the motions of speech. Then an expression of mingled fear and astonishment overspread his countenance. He sank back into his chair. Percy Darrow nodded twice and smiled.

CHAPTER VII

A WORLD OF GHOSTS

A deathly stillness had all at once fallen like a blanket, blotting out McCarthy's violent speech. The rattling typewriter in the next room was abruptly stilled. The roar of the city died as a living creature is cut by the sword--all at once, without the transitionary running down of most silences. Absolute dense stillness, like that of a sea calm at night, took the place of the customary city noises. In his astonishment McCarthy thrust a heavy inkstand off the edge of his desk. It hit the floor, spilled, rolled away; but noiselessly, as would the inkstand in a moving picture.

To have one's world thus suddenly stricken dumb, to be transported orally from the roar of a city to the peace of a woodland or a becalmed sea is certainly astonishing enough.

But this silence was particularly terrifying to both McCarthy and Jack Warford, though neither would have been able to a.n.a.lyze the reason for its weirdness. For silence is in reality a composite of many lesser noises. In a woodland almost inaudible insects hum, breezes blow, leaves and gra.s.ses rustle; at sea the tiny waves lap the sides and equally tiny breaths of air stir the cordage; within the confines of the human sh.e.l.l the mere physical acts of breathing, swallowing, winking, the mere physical facts of the circulation of the blood, the beating of the heart, produce each its sound.

Even a man totally deaf feels the subtle influence of these latter physical phenomena. And underneath all sound, perceptible alike to those who can hear and those who can not, are the vibrations that accompany every activity of nature as the manifestations of motion or of life. An ordinary deep silence is not so much an absence of sound as an absence of accustomed or loud sound. And in that unusual hush often for the first time a man becomes acutely aware of the singing of the blood in his ears.

But this silence was absolute. All these minor sounds had been eliminated.

For a moment Boss McCarthy stared; then shoved back his chair with a violent motion, and rose. He was like a shadow on a screen. The filching from the world of one element of its every-day life had unexpectedly rendered it all phantasmagoric.

As McCarthy shouted, and no sound came; as he moved from behind his desk, and no jar accompanied his heavy footfall, he appeared to lose blood and substance, to become unreal. As no sound issued from his contorted face, So it seemed that no force would follow his blow, were he to deliver one.