_By_ HENRY LEVERAGE
The _Seriphus_ was a ten thousand ton, straight bow ocean tanker, and
her history was the common one of Clyde-built ships—a voyage here and
a passage there, charters by strange oil companies, petrol for Brazil,
crude petroleum that went to Asia (for anointment purposes among the
heathen) and once there was a hurried call to some unpronounceable Aegean
port where the _Seriphus_ acted against the Turks in their flare-up after
the Great War.
The ordinary and usual—the up and down the trade routes—passed away from
the _Seriphus_ when Ezra Morgan, senior captain in the service of William
Henningay and Son, took over the tanker and drove her bow into strange
Eastern seas, loading with oil at California and discharging cargo in a
hundred unknown ports.
Of Ezra Morgan it was said that he had the daring of a Norseman and
the thrift of a Maine Yankee; he worked the _Seriphus_ for everything
the tanker could give William Henningay and Son; he ranted against the
outlandish people of the Orient and traded with them, on the side, for
all that he could gain for his own personal benefit.
[Illustration]
Trading skippers and engineers with an inclination toward increasing
wage by rum-running and smuggling were common in the Eastern service.
Ezra Morgan’s rival in that direction aboard the _Seriphus_ ruled the
engine-room and took pride in declaring that every passage was a gold
mine for the skipper and himself.
The chief engineer of the _Seriphus_ saw no glory in steam, save
dollars; he mopped up oil to save money. His name was Paul Richter—a
brutal-featured man given to boasting about his daughter, ashore, and
what a lady he was making of her.
Paul Richter—whom Morgan hated and watched—was far too skilled in
anything pertaining to steam and its ramifications to be removed from his
position aboard the _Seriphus_. Henningay, Senior, believed in opposing
forces on his many tankers—it led to rivalry and efficiency, instead of
closeheadedness and scheming against owners.
The _Seriphus_, after a round passage to Laichau Bay, which is in the
Gulf of Pechili, returned to San Francisco and was dry-docked near
Oakland, for general overhauling.
Richter, after making an exact and detailed report to Henningay, Jr.,
visited the opera, banked certain money he had made on the round-passage,
then went south to his daughter’s home. He found trouble in the house;
Hylda, his daughter, had a heart affair with a marine electrician,
Gathright by name, a young man with a meager wage and unbounded ambition.
Through the Seven Seas, from the time of his Bavarian wife’s death, from
cancer of the breast, Richter, chief engineer of the _Seriphus_, had
sweated, slaved, saved and smuggled contraband from port in order to say:
“This is my daughter! _Look at her!_”
Now, as Richter discovered, Hylda, twenty-seven years of age, somewhat
prim and musical, had given her promise to an electrician whom the
engineer believed was not fit to dust her shoes. Richter, used to
breaking and thrashing coolie oilers, ordered Gathright from the house
and locked up his daughter.
She cried for seven days. Gathright was seen in town. Richter’s rage gave
way to an engineer’s calculation.
“What for I study in University and college? Why do I hold certificates?
I fix Gathright!”
No oil was smoother than Richter’s well-laid plan; he sent Hylda away and
met Gathright.
“All right about my daughter,” he told the electrician. “You go one
voyage with me—we’ll see Henningay—I’ll fix you up so that you can draw
one hundred and fifty dollars in wage, with a rating as electrician
aboard the _Seriphus_.”
Gathright went with Richter to San Francisco. They recrossed the Bay,
without seeing Henningay, Jr., and, at dusk, climbed over the shoring
timbers and went aboard the _Seriphus_. Richter’s voice awoke echoes in
the deserted ship and dry-dock:
“Come, I show you my dynamo and motors. We go to the boiler-room first,
where the pumps are.”
The boiler-room, forward the engine-room of the tanker, was a place
of many snakelike pipes, valves, sea-plates and oily seepage from the
feedtanks. The _Seriphus_ was a converted oil-burner, having been built
before crude petroleum was used for steaming purposes. Three double-end
Scotch boilers made the steam that drove the tanker’s triple-expansion
engine.
Richter knew the way down to the boiler-room, blindfolded. He struck
matches, however, to guide Gathright, and remarked that the newer ships
of Henningay’s fleet had a storage-battery reserve for lighting purposes
when the dynamo ceased running.
Gathright, somewhat suspicious of Hylda’s father, took care to keep
two steps behind the chief-engineer. They reached and ducked under
the bulkhead beam where the door connected the engine-room with the
boiler-room. Richter found a flashlamp, snapped it on, swung its rays
around and about as if showing Gathright his new duties.
“There’s a motor-driven feed-pump,” he said. “Something’s the matter with
the motor’s commutator. It sparks under load—can you fix it up?”
There was a professional challenge in the chief engineer’s voice;
Gathright forgot caution, got down on his knees, leaned toward the motor
and ran one finger over the commutator bars. They seemed polished and
free from carbon.
Richter reversed his grip on the flashlamp, swung once, twice, and
smashed the battery-end of the lamp down on Gathright’s head, just over
the top of the electrician’s right ear.
Gathright fell as if pole-axed and dropped with his hands twitching on a
metal plate.
Striking a match, Richter surveyed the electrical engineer.
“Good!” he grunted. “Now I put you where nobody’ll ever look—unless I
give the order.”
* * * * *
A stump of candle, stuck by wax to a feed-pipe, allowed Richter
illumination sufficient to work by. Swearing, sweating, listening once,
he fitted a spanner to bolt-heads on a man-plate in the spare boiler and
removed the stubborn bolts until the plate clanged at his feet.
Gathright was a slender man, easy to insert through the man-hole; Richter
had no trouble at all lifting the electrician and thrusting him out of
sight.
It seemed to the engineer, as he hesitated, that Hylda’s lover moaned
once and filled the boiler with a hollow sound.
Hesitation passed; and Richter swallowed his superstitious fears, put
back the man-hole plate, bolted it tighter than it ever was before,
almost stripping the threads, and stepped back, mopping his brow with the
sleeve of a shore-coat.
There was nothing very unusual in Richter’s further actions that evening.
The ship-keeper, who came aboard at daylight, long before the dry-dock
men began work, noticed a wet shore-hose, a thin plume of steam aft the
tanker’s squat funnel, and there was a trailing line of smoke drifting
aslant the _Seriphus’_ littered deck.
“Been testing that spare boiler,” explained Richter, when the ship-keeper
ducked through the bulkhead door. “I think it’s tight an’ unscaled, but
th’ starboard one will need new tubes and general cleaning. Get me some
soap—I want to wash up.”
Richter dried his hands on a towel, tossed it toward the motor-driven
feed-pump, then, when he left the boiler-room, his glance ranged from the
tightly-bolted man-hole cover up to a gauge on a steam-pipe. The gauge
read seventy-pounds—sufficient to parboil a heavier man than Hylda’s
lover.
“I think that was a good job,” concluded the first engineer of the
_Seriphus_.
The second engineer of the tanker, a Scot with a burr on his voice like a
file rasping the edge of a plate, stood watching Richter balance himself
as the stout chief came along a shoring-beam.
“I mark ye ha’ steam up,” commented the Scotchman, when Richter climbed
over the dry dock’s wall.
“Yes, in the spareboiler.”
Mr. S. V. Fergerson tapped a pipe on his heel.
“I made an inspection, myself, of that, not later than yesterday
forenoon. She was tight as a drum an’ free from scale. I left th’
man-hole—”
“Damn badly gasketed!” growled Richter.
Fergerson started to explain something; but the chief was in a hurry to
get away from sight of the _Seriphus_. There was a memory on the tanker
that required a drink or two in order to bring forgetfulness. Richter
gave the Scot an order that admitted of no answering back.
“Go aboard an’ blow off steam! That boiler’s all right!”
A roar, when Richter strode past the dry-dock’s sheds, caused him to
wheel around and listen. Fergerson, according to orders, was blowing off
the steam from the spare boiler.
Something, perhaps water or waste, clogged the pipe; and the escaping
vapor whistled, sputtered, and rose to a high piercing note that sounded
to the chief’s irritated nerves like the cry of a soul in agony. The note
died, resumed its piercing screeching. Richter’s arm and hand shook when
he mopped his brow and drew a wet sleeve down with an angry motion.
In fancy the noise that came from the _Seriphus’_ starboard side, echoed
and deflated by the hollow dock, was Gathright calling for Hylda. Richter
covered his ears and staggered away.
* * * * *
Ezra Morgan hastened such repairs as were required for making the
_Seriphus_ ready for sea; the tanker left the dry-dock, steamed out the
Golden Gate, and took aboard oil at a Southern California port.
All tanks, a well-lashed deck load of cased-lubricant—consigned to a
railroad in Manchuri—petroleum for the furnaces, brought the _Seriphus_
down to the Plimsoll Mark; she drove from shore and crossed the Pacific
where, at three God-forsaken Eastern roadsteads, she unloaded and made
agents for the oil-purchasers happy with shipments delivered on time.
The romance of caravan routes, and pale kerosene lamps burning in
Tartar tents, escaped both Ezra Morgan and Richter; they went about
their business of changing American and English minted gold for certain
contrabands much wanted in the States. The chief engineer favored
gum-opium as a road to riches; Ezra dealt in liquors and silks, uncut
gems and rare laces.
Fortunately for the chief engineer’s peace of mind, the spare, double-end
Scotch boiler was not used on the Russian voyage. Gathright was forgotten
and Hylda, safe in an eastern music school, was not likely to take up
with another objectionable lover. Richter, relieved of a weight, went
about the engine-room and boiler-room humming a score of tunes, all set
to purring dynamos, clanking pumps, and musical cross-heads.
At mid-Pacific, on a second voyage—this time to an oilless country, if
ever there were one, Mindanao—a frightened water-tender came through
the bulkhead door propelled by scalding steam, and there was much to do
aboard the _Seriphus_. The port boiler had blown out a tube; the spare,
midship boiler was filled with fresh water and the oil-jets started.
Richter, stripped to the waist, it being one hundred and seventeen
degrees hot on deck, drove his force to superhuman effort. Ezra Morgan,
seven hours after the accident, had the steam and speed he ordered, in no
uncertain tones, through the bridge speaking-tube.
Fergerson, a quiet man always, had occasion, the next day, to enter the
chief’s cabin, where Richter sat writing a letter to Hylda, which he
expected to post via a homeward bound ship. Richter glared at the second
engineer.
“That spare boiler—” began Fergerson.
“What of it?”
“Well, mon, it’s been foamin’ an’ a gauge-glass broke, an’ there’s
something wrong wi’ it.”
“We can’t repair th’ port boiler until we reach Mindanao.”
Fergerson turned to go.
“Ye have m’ report,” he said acidly. “That boiler’s bewitched, or
somethin’.”
“Go aft!” snarled Richter, who resumed writing his letter.
He hesitated once, chewed on the end of the pen, tried to frame the words
he wanted to say to Hylda. Then he went on:
“—_expect to return to San Francisco within thirty-five days.
Keep up your music—forget Gathright—I’ll get you a good man,
with straight shoulders and a big fortune, when I come back and
have time to look around._”
Richter succeeded in posting the letter, along with the Captain’s mail,
when the _Seriphus_ spoke a Government collier that afternoon and sheered
close enough to toss a package aboard. Ezra Morgan leaned over the
bridge-rail and eyed the smudge of smoke and plume of steam that came
from the tanker’s squat funnel. He called for Richter, who climbed the
bridge-ladder to the captain’s side.
“We’re only logging nine, point five knots,” said Ezra Morgan. “Your
steam is low—it’s getting lower. What’s th’ matter? Saving oil?”
“That spare boiler is foaming,” the chief explained.
“Damn you and your spare boiler! What business had you leaving San
Francisco with a defective boiler? Your report to Mr. Henningay stated
that everything was all right in engine-room and boiler-room.”
“Foam comes from soap or—something else in the water.”
“Something else—”
Richter got away from Ezra Morgan on a pretense of going below to the
boiler-room. Instead of going below, however, he went aft and leaned
over the taffrail. Somehow or other, he feared that spare boiler and the
consequence of conscience.
Limping, with three-quarters of the necessary steam pressure, the
_Seriphus_ reached Mindanao and was forced to return to California
without repairs to the port boiler. While repairs, new tubes and
tube-sheet were put in place by boilersmiths, Richter saw his daughter,
who had come west from music school.
The change in her was pronounced; she spoke not at all of Gathright,
whose disappearance she could not understand; and Richter, keen where his
daughter was concerned, realized that her thinness and preoccupation was
on account of the missing electrician.
“I get you a fine fellow,” he promised Hylda.
He brought several eligible marine engineers to the house. Hylda snubbed
them and cried in secret.
An urgent telegram called Richter back to the _Seriphus_. He made two
long voyages, one down Chili-way, the other half around the world, before
the tanker’s bow was turned toward California. Much time had elapsed from
the night he had thrust Gathright into the spare boiler and turned on the
oil-jets beneath its many tubes. Once, in Valparaiso, an under engineer
pointed out red rust leaking from the gauge-glass of the spare boiler.
“Looks like blood,” commented this engineer.
Richter scoffed, but that afternoon he drank himself stupid on kummel,
obtained from an engineer’s club ashore. Another time, just after the
tanker left the port of Aden on her homebound passage, a stowaway crawled
out from beneath the cold boiler and gave Richter the fright of his life.
“Why, mon,” said Fergerson, who was present in the boiler-room, “that’s
only a poor wisp o’ an Arab.”
“I thought it was a ghost,” blabbered Richter.
Barometer pressure rose when the _Seriphus_ neared mid-Pacific. Ezra
Morgan predicted a typhoon before the tanker was on the longitude of
Guam. Long rollers came slicing across the _Seriphus’_ bow, drenched the
forecastle, filled the ventilators and flooded the boiler-room.
Richter went below, braced himself in the rolling engine-room, listened
to his engines clanking their sturdy song, then waddled over the gratings
and ducked below the beam that marked the bulkhead door. An oiler in high
rubber-boots lunged toward the chief engineer.
“There’s something inside th’ spare boiler!” shouted the man. “Th’
boiler-room crew won’t work, sir.”
Richter waded toward a frightened group all of whom were staring at
the spare boiler. A hollow rattling sounded when the tanker heaved and
pitched—as if some one were knocking bony knuckles against the stubborn
iron plates.
“A loose bolt,” whispered Richter. “Keep th’ steam to th’ mark, or I’ll
wipe a Stillson across th’ backs of all of you,” he added in a voice that
they could hear and understand.
Superstition, due to the menacing storm and high barometer, the uncanny
noises in the racked boiler-room, Richter’s bullying manner, put fear in
the hearts of the deck crew. Oil-pipes clogged, pumps refused to work,
valves stuck and could scarcely be moved.
“I’ve noo doot,” Fergerson told his Chief, “there’s a ghost taken up its
abode wi’ us.”
Richter drank quart after quart of trade-gin.
* * * * *
The barometer became unsteady, the sky hazy, the air melting hot, and a
low, rugged cloud bank appeared over the _Seriphus’_ port bow.
Down fell the barometer, a half-inch, almost, and the avalanche of rain
and wind that struck the freighter was as if Thor was hammering her iron
plates.
Ezra Morgan, unable to escape from the typhoon’s center, prepared to ride
out the storm by bringing the _Seriphus_ up until she had the sea on the
bow, and he had held her there by going half speed ahead. A night of
terror ruled the tanker; the decks were awash, stays snapped, spume rose
and dashed over the squat funnel aft the bridge.
Morning, red-hued, with greenish patches, revealed a harrowed ocean,
waves of tidal height, and astern lay a battered hulk—a freighter,
dismasted, smashed, going down slowly by the bow.
“A Japanese tramp,” said Ezra Morgan. “Some _Marau_ or other, out of the
Carolines bound for Yokohama.”
Richter, stupid from trade-gin, was on the bridge with the Yankee skipper.
“We can’t help her,” the engineer said heavily. “I think we got all we
can do to save ourselves.”
Ezra Morgan entertained another opinion. The storm had somewhat subsided,
and the wind was lighter, but the waves were higher than ever he had
known them. They broke over the doomed freighter like surf on a reef.
“Yon’s a distress signal flying,” said Ezra Morgan. “There’s a few seamen
aft that look like drowned rats. We’ll go before th’ sea—I’ll put th’ sea
abart th’ beam, an’ we’ll outboard oil enough to lower a small-boat an’
take those men off that freighter.”
The maneuver was executed, the screw turned slowly, oil was poured
through the waste-pipes and spread magically down the wind until the
freighter’s deck, from aft the forehouse, could be seen above the waves.
Over the patch of comparative calm oars dipped, and a mate, in charge of
the small boat lowered from the _Seriphus_, succeeded in getting off the
survivors who were clinging to the freighter’s taffrail.
The small boat lived in a sea that had foundered big ships. It returned
to the tanker’s bow; and the four men, bruised, broken, all half-dead
from immersion, were hoisted to the forepeak and taken aft. Two were
Japanese sailors and two were Americans—a wireless operator and an
engineer. The engineer had a broken leg which required setting, and the
wireless operator was in a bad fix; wreckage had stove in his features,
and twisted his limbs.
Ezra Morgan was a rough and ready surgeon-doctor; he turned the
_Seriphus_ over to the first-mate and made a sick room out of Richter’s
cabin. The chief protested.
“Get below to your damn steam!” roared Ezra Morgan. “You hated to see me
bring aboard these poor seamen; you said I wasted fuel oil; your breath
smells like a gin-mill. Below with you, sir!”
The engine-room and boiler-room of the tanker, she being in water
ballast, was not unlike an inferno; the first-mate, acting on Ezra
Morgan’s instructions, drove the _Seriphus_ at three-quarter speed into a
series of head-on waves; the ship rolled and yawed, tossed, settled down
astern, then her screw raced in mingled foam and brine.
Richter’s stomach belched gas; he became sea-sick, climbed into a
foul-smelling “ditty-box” of a cabin, aft the engine-room, and attempted
to sleep off the effect of the gin. Picture-post-cards, mostly of
actresses, a glaring electric over the bunk, oil and water swishing the
metal deck below, and the irritating clank of irregular-running engines
drove sleep away from him.
Fergerson, the silent second-engineer, came into the “ditty-box” at eight
bells, or four o’clock. Fergerson’s thumb jerked forward.
“I’ll have t’ use that spare boiler,” said he.
“What’s th’ matter, now?”
“Feed-pipes clogged in starb’ard one, sir.”
“Use it,” said Richter.
Steam was gotten up on the spare, double-end Scotch boiler; the
starboard boiler was allowed to cool; Fergerson, despite the tanker’s
rolling motion, succeeded in satisfying Ezra Morgan by keeping up the
three-quarter speed set by the skipper.
Richter sobered when the last of the trade-gin was gone; the _Seriphus_
was between Guam and ’Frisco; the heavy seas encountered were the
afterkick of the simoon.
Rolling drunkenly, from habit, the chief went on the bridge and asked
about getting back his comfortable cabin aft. Ezra Morgan gave him no
satisfaction.
“Better stay near your boilers,” advised the captain. “Everything’s gone
to hell, sir, since you changed from kummel to gin!”
“Are not th’ injured seamen well yet?”
“Th’ wireless chap’s doing all right—but th’ engineer of that Japanese
freighter is hurt internally. You can’t have that cabin, this side of San
Francisco.”
“What were two Americans doing in that cheap service?”
Ezra Morgan glanced sharply at Richter.
“Everybody isn’t money mad—like you. There’s many a good engineer, and
mate, too, in th’ Japanese Merchant Marine. Nippon can teach us a thing
or two—particularly about keeping Scotch boilers up to th’ steaming
point.”
This cut direct sent Richter off the bridge; he encountered a bandaged
and goggled survivor of the freighter’s wreck at the head of the
engine-room ladder. The wireless operator, leaning on a crutch whittled
by a bo’sain, avoided Richter, who pushed him roughly aside and descended
the ladder, backward.
White steam, lurid oaths, Scotch anathema from the direction of the
boiler-room, indicated more trouble. Fergerson came from forward and
bumped into Richter, so thick was the escaping vapor.
“Out o’ my way, mon,” the second engineer started to say, then clamped
his teeth on his tongue.
“What’s happened, now!” queried Richter.
“It’s that wicked spare boiler—she’s aleak an’ foamin’, an’ there’s water
in th’ fire-boxes.”
Richter inclined his bullet shaped head; he heard steam hissing and
oilers cursing the day they had signed on the _Seriphus_. A blast when a
gasket gave way, hurtled scorched men between Richter and Fergerson; a
whine sounded from the direction of the boiler-room, the whine rose to an
unearthly roar: Richter saw a blanket of white vapor floating about the
engine’s cylinders. This vapor, to his muddled fancy, seemed to contain
the figure of a man wrapped in a winding shroud.
He clapped both hands over his eyes, hearing above the noise of escaping
steam a call so distinct it chilled his blood.
“_Hylda!_”
* * * * *
Now there was that in the ghostly voice that brought Richter’s
gin-swollen brain to the realization of the thing he had done in
disposing of Gathright by bolting him in the spare boiler.
No good luck had followed that action; Hylda was still disconsolate;
trade and smuggling was at a low ebb; there was talk, aboard and ashore,
of reducing engineers’ and skippers’ wage to the bone.
Richter had a Teutonic stubbornness; Ezra Morgan had certainly turned
against his chief engineer; the thing to do was to lay the ghostly
voice, make what repairs were necessary in the boiler-room, and give the
tanker’s engines the steam they needed in order to make a quick return
passage to San Francisco and please the Henningays.
An insane rage mastered Richter—the same red-vision he had experienced
when he threw Gathright out of his daughter’s house. He lowered his
bullet head, brushed the curling vapors from his eyes, and plunged
through the bulkhead door, bringing up in scalding steam before the after
end of the midship, or spare boiler.
Grotesquely loomed all three boilers. They resembled humped-camels
kneeling in a narrow shed by some misty river. Steam in quantity came
hissing from the central camel; out of the furnace-doors, from a
feed-pipe’s packing, around a flange where the gauge-glass was riveted.
The _Seriphus_ climbed a long Pacific roller, steadied, then rocked in
the trough between seas; iron plates, gratings, flue-cleaners, scrapers,
clattered around Richter who felt the flesh on neck and wrist rising into
water blisters.
No one had thought to close the globe-valve in the oil supply line, or to
extinguish the fires beneath the spare and leaking boiler. Richter groped
through a steam cloud, searching for the hand-wheel on the pipe line. All
the metal he touched was simmering hot.
A breath of sea air came down a ventilator; Richter gulped this air and
tried to locate the globe-valve with the iron wheel. Vision cleared, he
saw the red and open mouth of the central camel—the flannel-like flames
and he heard through toothed-bars a voice calling, “Hylda!”
Fergerson and a water tender dragged their chief from the boiler room by
the heels; blistered, with the skin peeled from his features, Richter’s
eyes resembled hot coals in their madness. Blabbering nonsense, the
engineer gave one understandable order:
“Put out th’ fire, draw th’ water, search inside th’ spare boiler—there’s
something there, damit!”
Ezra Morgan came below, while the spare boiler was cooling, and entered
Richter’s temporary cabin—the “ditty-box” with the play actresses’
pictures glued everywhere. Fergerson had applied rude doctoring—gauze
bandages soaked in petroleum—on face and arms.
“What’s th’ matter, man?” asked Ezra Morgan. “Have you gone mad?”
“I heard some one calling my daughter, Hylda.”
“Where do you keep your gin?”
“It’s gone! Th’ voice was there inside th’ spare boiler. Did Fergerson
look; did he find a skeleton, or—”
Ezra Morgan pinched Richter’s left arm, jabbed home a hypodermic
containing morphine, and left the chief engineer to sleep out his
delusions. Fergerson came to the “ditty-box” some watches later. Richter
sat up.
“What was in th’ spare boiler?” asked the chief.
“Scale, soda, a soapy substance.”
“Nothing else?”
“Why, mon, that’s enough to make her foam.”
Richter dropped back on the bunk and closed his lashless eyes.
“Suppose a man, a stowaway, had crawled through th’ aft man-hole, an’
died inside th’ boiler? Would that make it foam—make th’ soapy substance?”
“When could any stowaway do that?”
Richter framed his answer craftily: “Say it was done when th’ _Seriphus_
was at Oakland that time th’ boilers were repaired in dry-dock.”
Fergerson drew on his memory. “Th’ time, mon, ye went aboard an’ tested
th’ spare boiler? Th’ occasion when ye took th’ trouble to rig up a
shore-hose in order to fill th’ boiler wi’ water?”
“Yes.”
“Did ye ha’ a man-hole plate off th’ boiler?”
“I removed th’ after-end plate, then went for th’ hose. We had no steam
up, you remember, and our feed-pumps are motor-driven.”
“Ye think a mon might ha’ crawled through to th’ boiler during your
absence?”
“Yes!”
“Ye may b’ right—but if one did he could ha’ escaped by th’ fore man-hole
plate. I had that off, an’ wondered who put it back again so carelessly.
Ye know th’ boiler is a double-ender—wi’ twa man-holes.”
Richter was too numbed to show surprise. Fergerson left the “ditty-box”
and pulled shut the door. The tanker, under reduced steam, made slow
headway toward San Francisco.
One morning, a day out from soundings, the chief engineer awoke, felt
around in the gloom, and attempted to switch on the electric light.
He got up and threw his legs over the edge of the bunk. A man sat leaning
against the after plate. Richter blinked; the man, from the goggles on
him and the crutch that lay across his knees, was the wireless operator
who had been rescued from a sea grave.
“No need for light,” said the visitor in a familiar voice. “You can guess
who I am, Richter.”
“A ghost!” said the chief. “Gathright’s ghost! Come to haunt me!”
“Not exactly to haunt you. I assure you I am living flesh—somewhat
twisted, but living. I got out of that midship boiler, while you were
bolting me in so securely. I waited until you went on deck for a hose,
and replaced the after man-hole cover. I was stunned and lay hidden
aboard for two days. Then I looked for Hylda. She was gone. I shipped as
electrician for a port in Japan. I knocked around a bit—at radio work for
the Japanese. It was chance that the _Seriphus_ should have picked me up
from the _Nippon Maru_.”
“That voice calling for Hylda,” cried Richter.
“Was a little reminder that I sent through the boiler-room ventilator; I
knew you were down there, Richter.”
The marine engineer switched on the electric light.
“What do you want?” he whined to Gathright.
“Hylda—your daughter!”
Paul Richter covered his eyes.
“If she will atone for the harm I have done you, Gathright, she is yours
with her father’s blessing.”
[Illustration]