<h2 id="c15">XV</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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 <i>Trunella</i> were not in
motion. “Why aren’t we under way?”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_210">[210]</div>
<p>“They’re having trouble up there, with the
<i>Commandante</i>. 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!”</p>
<p>“Where’ll you get me?” asked Blake. He
was on his feet by this time, arraying himself
in his wet and ragged clothing.</p>
<p>“That’s what I’ve been talking over with
the Chief,” began the young engineer. Blake
wheeled about and fixed him with his eye.</p>
<p>“Did you let your Chief in on this?” he
demanded, and he found it hard to keep his
anger in check.</p>
<p>“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!”</p>
<p>“Well, supposing I’m not?”</p>
<p>“Then they’d haul you back and give you a
half year in that <i>Lazaretto</i> o’ theirs!”</p>
<p>“Well, what do I have to do to keep from
being hauled back?”</p>
<p>“You’ll have to be one o’ the workin’ crew,
until we get off. The Chief says that, and I
think he’s right!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_211">[211]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“You don’t mean stoke-hole work?” he demanded.</p>
<p>The fourth engineer continued to look worried.</p>
<p>“You don’t happen to know anything about
machinery, do you?” he began.</p>
<p>“Of course I do,” retorted Blake, thinking
gratefully of his early days as a steamfitter.</p>
<p>“Then why couldn’t I put you in a cap
and jumper and work you in as one of the
greasers?”</p>
<p>“What do you mean by greasers?”</p>
<p>“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!”</p>
<p>And it was in this way, thirty minutes later,
that Blake became a greaser in the engine-room
of the <i>Trunella</i>.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_212">[212]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_213">[213]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_214">[214]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>dungaree</i> 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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_215">[215]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_216">[216]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>cargadores</i>. He was a
<i>dungaree</i>-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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_217">[217]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_218">[218]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_219">[219]</div>
<p>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 <i>Trunella</i> 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 <i>Trunella</i> had steamed many miles southward
on her long journey towards the Straits
of Magellan.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_220">[220]</div>
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