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When the captain broke silence his voice was cool, almost casual. "Mr. Kirkenhead," he ordered the chief engineer, "take this man Hoak to the stokehold, and keep him there until we reach port. Give him double shift and if he makes a false move kill him." The giant made a passionate start forward, and found himself looking down the barrel of Coulter's magazine pistol.
He caught hold of the bridge-rail and stared ahead. The temperature in the engine-room had gone up to a hundred and seventeen degrees. Irritated voices were ascending through the skylight and through the fiddle of the stokehold in a harsh and resonant uproar, mingled with angry clangs and scrapes of metal, as if men with limbs of iron and throats of bronze had been quarrelling down there.
Thence they proceeded to the engine- room and stokehold, where they found much to admire in the scrupulous cleanliness and unusual form of the machinery, but no sign or trace of anything in the nature of contraband. Then they entered the main saloon, and examined it and the sleeping cabins, finishing up with the steward's storeroom, the sail-room, and the powder magazine.
"She lies with a sharp list; sand's high up her starboard bilge. Engine-room doors jambed, but I found the stokehold grating and got some way down the ladder. Sand's washed down and buried the starboard bunkers. To clear out the stuff will be a long job." "Packed hard?" The diver nodded. "Like cement! I reckon the pump won't move it." Lister understood the captain's frown.
Adam was silent for a few minutes, and while Kit mused, shovels clinked in the stokehold and the vessel began to lift. The tilted lamp straightened and its light rested on Adam's wasted form. His silk pyjamas rather emphasized than hid his gauntness; he looked strangely worn and weak, but Kit could picture the strong passion of his love-making.
`Old Hankey Pankey, though, as he was called on the lower deck sailors having always a nickname for their officers, whether they like them or dislike them possessed the rare art of managing those under his command to such a degree that he would have turned out a likely enough crew from much worse material; while he `got to win'ard' of the engineers so cleverly that they never grumbled at any orders he gave unlike those gentry in general thus enabling us to pile on steam and make the passage out from England in far less time than we expected, there being no complaints from the stokehold of `leaking tubes' and `priming' boilers necessitating our having to `slow down.
Then the noise ceased suddenly, and the second engineer appeared, emerging out of the stokehold streaked with grime and soaking wet like a chimney-sweep coming out of a well.
"Quite so," said Kettle. "I'll see the stonemason gets packed off to sea again in a stokehold before he has a chance of stirring up the mud ashore. When the black man gets too pampered, he has to be brought low again with a rush, just to make him understand his place." "I see," said Dayton-Phillips, and then he laughed. "There's something that tickles you, sir?"
Meanwhile, those on the German emigrant steamer had seen the coming of the shabby little English trader with bumping hearts. They were joined by the stokehold gangs, and they made at once for the boats, overpowering any officer who happened to come between them and their desires.
In the meantime Jack had written to Milsom, extending the time allowed the latter in which to pick up a suitable crew, and at the same time suggesting that Perkins and the rest of the crew of the Lalage should be afforded an opportunity to join the Thetis, should they care to do so, subject, of course, to Milsom's approval of them; and by the time that the extra fittings were in place, and the little ship drydocked and repainted outside, the Navy man had come north with his retinue, and the hands were duly shipped, Jack having, with the assistance of the superintendent of his fitting-shops, meanwhile selected a first-rate engine-room staff and stokehold crew.
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