After seven cataleptic hours of unbroken sleep Blake awakened to find his
shoulder being prodded and shaken by the pale-eyed fourth engineer. The
stowaway’s tired body, during that sleep, had soaked in renewed strength
as a squeezed sponge soaks up water. He could afford to blink with
impassive eyes up at the troubled face of the young man wearing the
oil-stained cap.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, awakening to a luxurious comprehension of
where he was and what he had escaped. Then he sat up in the narrow berth,
for it began to dawn on him that the engines of the _Trunella_ were not
in motion. “Why aren’t we under way?”
“They’re having trouble up there, with the _Commandante_. We can’t get
off inside of an hour—and anything’s likely to happen in that time.
That’s why I’ve got to get you out of here!”
“Where’ll you get me?” asked Blake. He was on his feet by this time,
arraying himself in his wet and ragged clothing.
“That’s what I’ve been talking over with the Chief,” began the young
engineer. Blake wheeled about and fixed him with his eye.
“Did you let your Chief in on this?” he demanded, and he found it hard to
keep his anger in check.
“I had to let him in on it,” complained the other. “If it came to a line
up or a searching party through here, they’d spot you first thing. You’re
not a passenger; you’re not signed; you’re not anything!”
“Well, supposing I’m not?”
“Then they’d haul you back and give you a half year in that _Lazaretto_
o’ theirs!”
“Well, what do I have to do to keep from being hauled back?”
“You’ll have to be one o’ the workin’ crew, until we get off. The Chief
says that, and I think he’s right!”
A vague foreboding filled Blake’s soul. He had imagined that the ignominy
and agony of physical labor was a thing of the past with him. And he was
still sore in every sinew and muscle of his huge body.
“You don’t mean stoke-hole work?” he demanded.
The fourth engineer continued to look worried.
“You don’t happen to know anything about machinery, do you?” he began.
“Of course I do,” retorted Blake, thinking gratefully of his early days
as a steamfitter.
“Then why couldn’t I put you in a cap and jumper and work you in as one
of the greasers?”
“What do you mean by greasers?”
“That’s an oiler in the engine-room. It—it may not be the coolest place
on earth, in this latitude, but it sure beats the stoke-hole!”
And it was in this way, thirty minutes later, that Blake became a greaser
in the engine-room of the _Trunella_.
Already, far above him, he could hear the rattle and shriek of
winch-engines and the far-off muffled roar of the whistle, rumbling its
triumph of returning life. Already the great propeller engines themselves
had been tested, after their weeks of idleness, languidly stretching and
moving like an awakening sleeper, slowly swinging their solemn tons
forward through their projected cycles and then as solemnly back again.
About this vast pyramid-shaped machinery, galleried like a Latin
house-court, tremulous with the breath of life that sang and hissed
through its veins, the new greaser could see his fellow workers with
their dripping oil-cans, groping gallery by gallery up towards the square
of daylight that sifted down into the oil-scented pit where he stood. He
could see his pale-eyed friend, the fourth engineer, spanner in hand,
clinging to a moving network of steel like a spider to its tremulous
web—and in his breast, for the first time, a latent respect for that
youth awakened. He could see other greasers wriggling about between
intricate shafts and wheels, crawling cat-like along narrow steel ledges,
mounting steep metal ladders guarded by hot hand rails, peering into oil
boxes, “worrying” the vacuum pump, squatting and kneeling about iron
floors where oil-pits pooled and pump-valves clacked and electric
machines whirred and the antiphonal song of the mounting steam roared
like music in the ears of the listening Blake, aching as he was for the
first relieving throb of the screws. Stolidly and calmly the men about
him worked, threatened by flailing steel, hissed at by venomously
quiescent powers, beleaguered by mysteriously moving shafts, surrounded
by countless valves and an inexplicable tangle of pipes, hemmed in by an
incomprehensible labyrinth of copper wires, menaced by the very
shimmering joints and rods over which they could run such carelessly
affectionate fingers.
Blake could see the assistant engineers, with their eyes on the pointers
that stood out against two white dials. He could see the Chief, the Chief
whom he would so soon have to buy over and placate, moving about nervous
and alert. Then he heard the tinkle of the telegraph bell, and the
repeated gasp of energy as the engineers threw the levers. He could hear
the vicious hum of the reversing-engines, and then the great muffled
cough of power as the ponderous valve-gear was thrown into position and
the vaster machinery above him was coerced into a motion that seemed
languid yet relentless.
He could see the slow rise and fall of the great cranks. He could hear
the renewed signals and bells tinkles, the more insistent clack of pumps,
the more resolute rise and fall of the ponderous cranks. And he knew that
they were at last under way. He gave no thought to the heat of the
oil-dripping pit in which he stood. He was oblivious of the perilous
steel that whirred and throbbed about him. He was unconscious of the hot
hand rails and the greasy foot-ways and the mingling odor of steam and
parching lubricant and ammonia-gas from a leaking “beef engine.” He quite
forgot the fact that his _dungaree_ jumper was wet with sweat, that his
cap was already fouled with oil. All he knew was that he and Binhart were
at last under way.
He was filled with a new lightness of spirit as he felt the throb of
“full speed ahead” shake the steel hull about which he so contentedly
climbed and crawled. He found something fortifying in the thought that
this vast hull was swinging out to her appointed sea lanes, that she was
now intent on a way from which no caprice could turn her. There seemed
something appeasingly ordered and implacable in the mere revolutions of
the engines. And as those engines settled down to their labors the
intent-eyed men about him fell almost as automatically into the routines
of toil as did the steel mechanism itself.
When at the end of the first four-houred watch a gong sounded and the
next crew filed cluttering in from the half-lighted between-deck gangways
and came sliding down the polished steel stair rails, Blake felt that his
greatest danger was over.
There would still be an occasional palm to grease, he told himself, an
occasional bit of pad money to be paid out. But he could meet those
emergencies with the fortitude of a man already inured to the exactions
of venal accomplices.
Then a new discovery came to him. It came as he approached the chief
engineer, with the object in view of throwing a little light on his
presence there. And as he looked into that officer’s coldly indignant eye
he awakened to the fact that he was no longer on land, but afloat on a
tiny world with an autocracy and an authority of its own. He was in a
tiny world, he saw, where his career and his traditions were not to be
reckoned with, where he ranked no higher than conch-niggers and
beach-combers and _cargadores_. He was a _dungaree_-clad greaser in an
engine-room, and he was promptly ordered back with the rest of his crew.
He was not even allowed to talk.
When his watch came round he went on duty again. He saw the futility of
revolt, until the time was ripe. He went through his appointed tasks with
the solemn precision of an apprentice. He did what he was commanded to
do. Yet sometimes the heat would grow so intense that the great sweating
body would have to shamble to a ventilator and there drink in long drafts
of the cooler air. The pressure of invisible hoops about the great
heaving chest would then release itself, the haggard face would regain
some touch of color, and the new greaser would go back to his work again.
One or two of the more observant toilers about him, experienced in
engine-room life, marveled at the newcomer and the sense of mystery which
hung over him. One or two of them fell to wondering what inner spirit
could stay him through those four-houred ordeals of heat and labor.
Yet they looked after him with even more inquisitive eyes when, on the
second day out, he was peremptorily summoned to the Captain’s room. What
took place in that room no one in the ship ever actually knew.
But the large-bodied stowaway returned below-decks, white of face and
grim of jaw. He went back to his work in silence, in dogged and unbroken
silence which those about him knew enough to respect.
It was whispered about, it is true, that among other things a large and
ugly-looking revolver had been taken from his clothing, and that he had
been denied the use of the ship’s wireless service. A steward outside the
Captain’s door, it was also whispered, had over-heard the shipmaster’s
angry threat to put the stowaway in irons for the rest of the voyage and
return him to the Ecuadorean authorities. It was rumored, too, that late
in the afternoon of the same day, when the new greaser had complained of
faintness and was seeking a breath of fresh air at the foot of a midships
deck-ladder, he had chanced to turn and look up at a man standing on the
promenade deck above him.
The two men stood staring at each other for several moments, and for all
the balmy air about him the great body of the stranger just up from the
engine-room had shivered and shaken, as though with a malarial chill.
What it meant, no one quite knew. Nor could anything be added to that
rumor, beyond the fact that the first-class passenger, who was known to
be a doctor and who had stared so intently down at the quiet-eyed
greaser, had turned the color of ashes and without a word had slipped
away. And the bewilderment of the entire situation was further increased
when the _Trunella_ swung in at Callao and the large-bodied man of
mystery was peremptorily and none too gently put ashore. It was noted,
however, that the first-class passenger who had stared down at him from
the promenade-deck remained aboard the vessel as she started southward
again. It was further remarked that he seemed more at ease when Callao
was left well behind, although he sat smoking side by side with the
operator in the wireless room until the _Trunella_ had steamed many miles
southward on her long journey towards the Straits of Magellan.