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Updated: May 31, 2025
In the case of any small body of men, say the force in one fire-room, the connecting wire joining each man to the petty officer in charge of that fire-room is almost visible, because the petty officer is familiar, by experience, with the work of each man; for he has done that work himself, knows just how it should be done, and knows how to instruct each man.
I worked at top speed, filling the iron wheelbarrow with coal, running it on the scales and weighing the load, then trundling it into the fire-room and dumping it on the plates before the fires. Work! I did more than the two men whom I had displaced. They had merely wheeled in the coal and dumped it on the plates.
But let a machinist's mate tell you in his own way of the night he was standing a fire-room watch this with all due respect to the chart-house bulkhead, the trolley line, the buckling decks, and the radio operator who was confined this night he was on watch in the fire-room. Was it rough? He thought so.
He was interrupted by Harris bawling in the passage, and the Chinese stokers swarming up the fire-room ladder, chattering and yelling to their mates below. The news of the murder had spread through the ship and had created a great turmoil. The mate thrust a man into the doorway, whom I recognized as one of the men who had brought Meeker's organ on board.
When he looked down at his feet, there were the fire-room deck-plates folding in and out like a concertina. Destroyer crews do not loaf overmuch around deck. They can't. They live below decks mostly, strapped in when it is rough to a stretch of canvas laced to four pieces of iron pipe, set on an angle down against the ship's sides, and called a bunk.
"All right; have your pistols ready, but don't use them, for it will be bad for us if we have to kill any one." The party walked down to the Woodville. All was still on board of her, except the sound of escaping steam. Ethan stood sentry at the door of the stateroom containing the gold, and the man on watch in the fire-room was busy reading a newspaper.
Kwaque was no longer compelled to enjoy his jews' harp on the gratings over the fire-room, now that Michael's presence on the Makambo was known, and, in the stateroom, on stolen occasions, he made experiments of his own with Michael. Once the jews' harp began emitting its barbaric rhythms, Michael was helpless. He needs must open his mouth and pour forth an unwilling, gushing howl.
For the next hour and the next the fire-room force and the two men in the engine-room stuck doggedly to their work. They knew that the San Gardo was making a desperate struggle, that it was touch and go whether the ship would live out the hurricane or sink to the bottom.
I had boasted of the coal we piled on the fire-room floor. Lo, it is always foolish to give information to the enemy always, sahib always! There is no exception. Said they to us now: "We Germans are devoting all our energy to prosecution of this war. Nearly all our able-bodied men are with the regiments. Every man must do his part, for we are a nation in arms. Even prisoners must do their part.
Though the buckling plates still thundered, though the floor under their feet still pitched at crazy angles, there was a "feel" in the fire-room that ribs and beams and rivets were not so near the breaking-point. Neville came to the end of the passage. "The hurricane's blowing itself to death," he shouted. "Stick to it, boys, for an hour longer; the second watch can reach us by then."
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