It was a cheerful cherry. It blinded her—her dull eyes.
But it gave the girl with a face like a white cameo, who had been kept all her life, as a gem, in cotton wool, a sense of power she had never known before.
“Master of the Hidden Fire!”
She began to feel she was on top.
Quite steadily she did the next half-familiar thing, closed the aërial switch, connecting the whole set, cast a glance at the dial with the needle on it in the face of the panel-like transmitter, to see if now the miracle was working—the powerful set in action.
“It is. The needle moves.... The message! If I can only send it out, tell where I am, Pemrose—somebody—will g-get it! If only my head weren’t so ‘whirley-hirly’!” piteously. “Our sign, the sign with which we always begin a message: Di-dit-di-dit-di-dit! Dah-dah-dah-dah! That’s—it. Six dots, four dashes.” The two first fingers of her right hand, pressing the key, were ticking it off now, while her swollen lips murmured, talking aloud, like her captor. “Now—if I can only give my name—or the first letter of it! They’d know. ‘Dot-dot-dash’: di-dit-dah; yes, I guess that stands for ‘U’. Where—am I? Oh! on Speckle Mountain—I never can spell that all out ... and she’ll be coming back. What—what was the abbreviation we had for it: ‘L. S’?”
Straining memory to a white heat now, she ticked that off—both letters clearly.
“But—I must give it again. Pemrose—that’s what she said. Three times. A distress signal! And that woman—”
Again—again—she ticked it off, the bulbs glaring at her until she felt their incandescence in her brain—light-headed, delirious—as if she were sending herself out into the ether, while she tried to add to her message and give the call-letters of the home-camp, beginning at the wrong end, as she would be sure to do.
“She—she’s coming!”