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"Singing 'I'm afraid to go home in the dark," interposed the India-rubber Man dryly. He got down off the table and stretched his arms. "Well, I shan't be sorry to get some sleep." "Sleep!" echoed Thorogood. "You ought to see the stokers' mess-deck. The watch-off have just come up from below after sixteen hours in the stokeholds.
Of course the stoke-hold was instantly filled with high-pressure steam, and before the stokers could escape, three of them were scalded to death. It was horrible to hear their screams and at the same time to realise the impossibility of doing anything to save them.
East of Sandy Hook the pilot was dropped and the real voyage begun. Fifty feet below her deck, in an inferno of noise, and heat, and light, and shadow, coal-passers wheeled the picked fuel from the bunkers to the fire-hold, where half-naked stokers, with faces like those of tortured fiends, tossed it into the eighty white-hot mouths of the furnaces.
The United States government, determined to delay, if possible, the progress of the fleet toward the Philippines, instructed its consul to protest to the English government against the coaling of the fleet at Port Said. In response to such protest the Egyptian government refused Admiral Camara’s request to buy coal, and also refused to allow him to hire a hundred and fifty native stokers.
Delighted at receiving this important commission, Murray Frobisher had hurried back to his little ship, helped the astonished stokers with his own hands to raise steam, and at midnight on a dark, blustering night, with half a gale blowing from the south-east, the sea running steeply, and a heavy driving rain lashing right in their faces, he and his little crew cleared from Portland Roads, dashed across Weymouth Bay at a reckless speed considering the height of the sea and doubled Saint Alban's Head.
Even the boys who answered bell-calls and polished the brasses and the shoes, were from Soudan or Bombay, and the stokers down in the engine-room were Seedees, black as the coals they kept flinging into those yawning red mouths, which made one think of an opening into the great pit of Hades.
For God's sake, give him air. Then the death-struggle began, with crampings and twistings and jerkings of the white bulk to and fro, till our little steamer rolled again, and each gray wave coated her plates with the gray slime. The sun was clear, there was no wind, and we watched, the whole crew, stokers and all, in wonder and pity, but chiefly pity.
By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of expressing that belief, he had invented a Corporation a Public Service Corporation that had a soul, and consequently worked. They stay not in their hold These stokers, Stooping to hell To feed a ship. Below the ocean floors. Before their awful doors Bathed in flame, I hear their human lives Drip drip.
The stokers placed him with them on the tender of the engine of the train, which was about to start. He only had the clothes which he had worn since the 2d; no clean linen, no trunk, a little money. In December, the day breaks late and the night closes in early, which is favorable to proscribed persons. He reached the frontier at night without hindrance.
Here where the heat was almost intolerable and the red tongues sprang like forked daggers before dulled eyes, brutality and hatred alone seemed to reign. The prince might be the prodigal, free-handed gentleman to his officers; he was the slave-driver, by proxy, to his stokers.
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