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A start was made down the river at 11:15 A.M., the engines making about 180 revolutions per minute, and the boat running at some 11½ or 12 knots. During this time the stokehole hatches were open, but the fans were kept running at slow speed to maintain a moderate draught. The fuel used throughout the trip was briquettes made of the best Welsh anthracite worked up with a little tar.
The resting-place which I myself had selected was a stack of firewood over the stokehole shoot; and as I lay upon it I could see the hills gradually darkening the water with a mourning veil as calmly they advanced to meet the steamer; while in the meadows, a last lingering glow of the sunset's radiance was reddening the stems of the birches, and making the newly mended roof of a hut look as though it were cased in red fustian communicating to everything else in the vicinity a semblance of floating amid fire and effacing all outline, and causing the scene as a whole to dissolve into streaks of red and orange and blue, save where, on a hill above the hut, a black grove of firs stood thrown into tense, keen, and clear-cut relief.
The pumps made no impression on the roaring flood; they lifted floor plates to strengthen the bulkheads and worked until it was death to work longer. Then, fighting for every foot, the little band retreated to the after stokehole. Lights were out forward. The Chief was the last to escape. He carried an oil lantern, and squeezed through the bulkhead door with a wall of water behind him.
The after stokehole was flooded and water rolled sickeningly in the engine-pits. Each second it seemed the ship must take its fearful dive into the quiet sea that so insistently reached up for her. With infinite labour the Seconds got the Chief up to the fiddley, twenty feet or less out of a hundred, and straight ladders instead of a steel staircase.
He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every corner of the ship called the engines by name and the men by epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge. "Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy.
Eleanore smiled frankly. "Yes I thought I might need him," she said. I did not talk to her father of Joe his plans for a strike were his secret, not mine. But with Eleanore pushing me on, I described the hell I had seen in the stokehole. "You're right, it's hell," her father agreed. "But in time we'll do away with it." "I knew it," Eleanore put in. "How?" I asked. "By using oil instead of coal.
He was still the Chief; he lay on the floor propped up against something and directed the fight. The something he leaned against was the strained body of the Red Un, who held him up and sniffled shamefaced tears. She was down by the head already and rolling like a dying thing. When the water came into the after stokehole they carried the Chief into the engine room the lights were going there.
And none of the native crew will go into the stokehole, that's certain." "Well then, something serious will happen. I can keep her going at four or five knots for another hour or so, and that is all I can do. The second engineer and myself are dead-beat. She'll broach-to presently, and then you will see a pretty mess." "I can't help it, Morrison," said the mate gloomily, as he went to his cabin.
So then we descended another mile or two to an inferno, full of naked, sooty devils forever feeding sulphurous pitfires in the nethermost parlors of the damned; but they said this was the stokehole; and I was in no condition to argue with them, for I had suddenly begun to realize that I was far from being a well person.
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