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Updated: May 7, 2025
Two hours or more passed before the unsubmerged, wooden portion of the wreck had been consumed by the flames, and at 11.30 P. M. the smoke-stacks of the ill-fated ship fell.
There was a fine bright moon mounting above the housetops of the water-front when we slid away from our jetty berth. Slid is the word. She was all power, this Channel steamer of hardly 1,500 tons, yet with two great smoke-stacks, three propellers, turbine-engines, and burning oil for fuel. That last is a cheerful item when you have to walk the deck it means no cinders in your eyes. Fuss?
There is no town, there are no smoke-stacks very few workmen. Piles of lumber lie about on the grass. A gasoline engine under a temporary shelter is operating a long crane that reaches down among the piles of boards and beams, lifts a load, silently and deliberately swings it over to one of the skeleton vessels, and lowers it somewhere into the body of the motionless thing.
The lightning's blue flame plays with the steel masts, and overhead thunders drown the noise of engines and propellers. Thick black smoke and red-hot cinders shoot forth from the three black-throated smoke-stacks.
Then the bells distilled metallic crashes that were like physical pain, the smoke-stacks volleyed in slow acceleration at the sky, and in a moment of noise and gray gaseous turbulence the line of faces ran by, moved off, became indistinct until suddenly there was only the sun slanting east across the tracks and a volume of sound decreasing far off like a train made out of tin thunder.
He was a clever man within his limitations, and cultured up to a point; but he was not philosopher enough to know that he viewed the purlieus of Limehouse through a haze of Oriental mystery conjured up by the conversation of his companion. Temple bells there were in the clangour of the road cars. The smoke-stacks had a semblance of pagodas.
You know how cold the North Sea is no, you cannot, unless you have been out in a torpedo boat dancing the tango in the teeth of that bitter wind, with the spray whipping up to the tops of the smoke-stacks. In the dead of night they would come into this pitch- dark harbour. How they found their way is past me. It's a trick of those young fellows, who command."
It was after midnight when they crept slowly down the timber on the other side of Rattlesnake Gulch, and Job dismounted and stole on ahead. A gloom rested on the Yellow Jacket. A few lights shone out of shanty windows and in saloons. The stars seemed to rest on the top of the smoke-stacks which rose like vast shadows in the distance.
Across wide stretches of flat, open prairie they could see lines of telegraph poles stalking across the fields toward the great city. Far away were indications of suburban towns, some big smoke-stacks towering high in the air. Frequently there were two-story frame houses standing out in the open fields, without fences or trees, lone outposts of the approaching army of homes.
They'd advise right right right; fight fight fight, just as you do; but the point is can a fellow do right by them if he chucks his job in a losing fight?" The old-mannish air had returned. She followed the Ranger's glance over the edge of the Ridge into the Valley where the smoke-stacks of the distant Smelter City belched inky clouds against an evening sky.
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