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Rout, without deigning a word, smoked austerely, nursing his right elbow in the palm of his left hand. Then Jukes was directed in the same subdued voice to keep the forward 'tween-deck clear of cargo. Two hundred coolies were going to be put down there. The Bun Hin Company were sending that lot home. Twenty-five bags of rice would be coming off in a sampan directly, for stores.
"I mean," said the doctor, emphatically, "that the first thing the acids mixed in the 'tween-deck to just about the right proportions, mind you would attack, on oozing through the skin, would be this glycerine; and the certain product of this union under intense cold this hull was frozen in the ice, remember would be nitro-glycerine; and, as the yield of the explosive is two hundred and twenty per cent. of the glycerine, we can be morally sure that in the bottom of this hold, each minute globule of it held firmly in a hard matrix of sulphate or nitrate of calcium which would be formed next when the acids met the hydrates and carbonates of lime is over one hundred and thirty tons of nitro-glycerine, all the more explosive from not being washed of free acids.
The rush of the sailors into the seething 'tween-deck was like a splash of cold water into a boiling cauldron. The commotion sank for a moment. The bulk of Chinamen were locked in such a compact scrimmage that, linking their arms and aided by an appalling dive of the ship, the seamen sent it forward in one great shove, like a solid block.
Jukes had written them in good faith, for he felt thus when he wrote. He described with lurid effect the scenes in the 'tween-deck. ". . . It struck me in a flash that those confounded Chinamen couldn't tell we weren't a desperate kind of robbers. 'Tisn't good to part the Chinaman from his money if he is the stronger party.
"You left them pretty safe?" began the Captain abruptly, as though the silence were unbearable. "Are you thinking of the coolies, sir? I rigged lifelines all ways across that 'tween-deck." "Did you? Good idea, Mr. Jukes."
Sheltered by one of the deck-houses below, the boatswain and the watch paced back and forth, enjoying the only two hours respite which steamship rules afforded, for the day's work had ended with the going down of the other watch, and at two o'clock the washing of the 'tween-deck would begin, as an opening task in the next day's labor.
"Are there any drains in the 'tween-deck to let water out, in case it gets into that deck from above a sea, for instance?" "Yes, always; three or four scupper-holes each side amidships. They lead the water into the bilges, where the pumps can reach it."
When the wash of water rolling on the deck died away for a moment, it seemed to Jukes, yet quivering from his exertions, that in his mad struggle down there he had overcome the wind somehow: that a silence had fallen upon the ship, a silence in which the sea struck thunderously at her sides. Everything had been cleared out of the 'tween-deck all the wreckage, as the men said.
Rowland, surprised at his sudden transfer from the disagreeable scrubbing to a "soldier's job" of painting life-buoys in the warm 'tween-deck, was shrewd enough to know that he was being closely watched by the boatswain that morning, but not shrewd enough to affect any symptoms of intoxication or drugging, which might have satisfied his anxious superiors and brought him more whisky.
"If most of them hadn't been half dead with seasickness and fright, not one of us would have come out of that 'tween-deck alive," said Jukes. "Had to do what's fair by them," mumbled MacWhirr, stolidly. "You don't find everything in books." "Why, I believe they would have risen on us if I hadn't ordered the hands out of that pretty quick," continued Jukes with warmth.
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