Just enough presence of mind remained for her to pull the switches—turn the rheostat knob again.
“It will take a few seconds to cool off. But she can’t call it back—the message.”
Slowly those radiant bulbs, the shining vacuum tubes dimmed—became blind eyes, the cherry-red plates fading out.
But the current turned off from them was switched on—for ever—in the eyes of the girl-prisoner, little white filaments glowing in their lamp-like blackness as she shot back to the bunk.
A knife, an old camp-knife, lay on a stool in the way. She whipped that back with her.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Ring
“I tell you I’m not going a step further—not going to ride any further—until I stop and ‘listen in!’ This—this lit-tle ring-set,” chokingly, “that’s why I brought it—brought it on the search.”
“But, heavens, dear-oh! I know you’re in torture about her—but it seems like—Jove! like shooting off peas at a battleship ... a time like this.”
The nineteen-year-old boy looked distractedly at the white-faced girl, who flung herself off her horse upon the mountainside—her eyes a “blue day”, flinty—determined.
“But it isn’t: it isn’t just fiddle-faddle—fooling! Your ‘soft-boiled peas at a battleship’!” She stamped her foot.