"What do the men want?" pursued the mate.
"They have a complaint to make, sir."
"Oh, they have." Mr. Hawkes put down knife and fork, and chewed vigorously for a moment. "Out with it—what's the trouble?"
"It's the food, sir. It's not eatable. The bread's full of worms and weevils; the meat's tained; the potatoes—"
"That will do." Mr. Hawkes was on his feet. He picked up a slice of bread. "Does this look like it's full of worms?"
"That isn't the kind we're served, sir. I could bring you a piece."
"Do you dispute my word? The grub on this ship is first rate! I'll have no complaining yokels coming aft." Seating himself, he speared a slice of salame, thumped it down on the bread, and munched it in cheerful serenity.
"Come and see their food, sir," Tod insisted. "Then—"
He stopped as the mate rose in a flash and strode his way. He saw the man's mouth break into a leer of triumph; a hairy paw caught him by the tender flesh of his side. A cry of agony rose to his lips. The clutch was just over the wound, and the short fingers, biting to the ribs, slowly twisted.
"Make lying complaints to me, will yuh? I'll learn yuh."
Tod Moran drooped. A stabbing pain tore through him. "Don't," he whimpered. "Don't."
Mr. Hawke's malignant face bent over him. "Yuh never been no use on this ship, yuh haven't. I'll give yuh a real job now—you can go down to the stokehole." He twisted the flesh again, chuckling. "Yeh, that'll git yuh, all right—passin' coal in the bunkers."
The youth collapsed against the wall. "Captain Ramsey," he called. "Captain Ramsey!"
Mr. Hawkes flung him away with a laugh of derision. "When yuh want the cap'n of this ship, call me."
Tod Moran picked himself up, swaying against the bulkhead. Through burning eyes he say the mate go to the settee and shake the drunken captain into wakefulness. "Git up, you blamed fool," he scowled. "This here kid wants t' know who's master o' this ship. Is it you, or me?"
Captain Ramsey struggled to one elbow. "Gimme drink, old man," he hiccoughed. "Yesh, I'm master."
"You—master!" Mr. Hawkes chuckled scornfully. "All right. Then cut out the drink. Get up to the bridge."
The commander of the Araby swayed to a sitting position. "Gimme drink, Mr. Hawkes."
"No more," the mate snarled. "You get up to the bridge."
"Gimme drink, Mr. Hawkes." The man's mouth slid open; his bleary eyes, between granulated lids, peered out vaguely at the table.
The mate swung about with a swagger and filled a glass from a decanter on the sideboard. "Who's master now, Mr. Ramsey?"
Tod saw the captain's eyes fasten greedily on the brimming glass. "Yesh, Mr. Hawkes—you in charge now."
A deep laugh greeted the words. "Here, you swine, drink this. I'm commander now."
The mate spun about toward the youth; his beard shot forward. "Go tell that to the crew. They can eat it, see? Now git!"
Blindly Tod Moran stumbled to the door. Outside, his shoulder came in contact with an empty tray; behind it he glimpsed a flaming thatch of hair above a rat-like face.
"Say, why don't yeh look where yer goin'?"
Tod gave no answer. He groped his way to the nearest hatch and dropped upon it. His hands came up to his throbbing side.
A step followed him. "Kid, you ain't got no sense. You don't know how to git along. Ain't I right now?"
"Get away. Leave me alone."
Red Mitchell heaved a deep sigh. "What's the matter? What d' yeh want, anyway?"
The question brought a pang. What did he want? He only wanted to creep home. He wanted a room of his own where in privacy he might throw himself down with his face in his arms. It wasn't merely the pain in his side; it was the pain in his heart, as well.
A shudder passed through him. He raised his eyes, looked across the sunlit deck, and rose. Slowly he went forward. In the starboard alleyway he hesitated. Grouped about the forecastle doors were the firemen and deck hands, their eyes focussed aft.
Tod Moran, dropping his hand from his side, staggered to the fore-deck.
"Gawd strike me Mine!" shrilled a voice. "There comes our answer."
CHAPTER III
IN THE STOKEHOLD
NEXT morning, in the eight-to-twelve watch, Tod Moran went on duty in the bunkers.
As he emerged from the forecastle to the main deck, he presented a different appearance from the trim youth who had served the officers' mess in the cabin aft. Instead of a starched white coat with shining buttons, he now wore an old blue shirt and overalls. He started with a brisk step, nevertheless, toward the starboard alleyway; but paused when his eyes caught sight of a fireman climbing from the stokehole fiddley. The man, a Portuguese, lurched to the bulwarks where he rested his arms on the iron wall. His naked torso streamed with sweat; his powerful shoulders writhed in convulsed movements as his rough-hewn face contorted in jerks of agony.
"What's wrong with him?" Tod inquired of Nelson the Dane who sat against the mainmast splicing a frayed hawser.
"Ignorant cattle, that's what's the matter," commented Nelson with unwonted energy. "They're told not to drink so much water down below; but they will do it. They gulp it down by the gallon, and suffer for it. Lookit the beast! Ain't he a nice sight?"
Tod stared in silence at the anguished sufferer. The man moaned slightly now; bits of speech in a foreign tongue came, stifled, from his lips. Tod Moran dragged his eyes away. Looking up, he beheld a gull soaring against a burnished sky which dipped to a sea that was glazed.
The youth stirred, then proceeded slowly aft. He entered the engine-room entrance and was instantly struck by the terrific vibrations and the oppressive warmth of the place. A volcanic breath swept by him up toward the open skylight. He compressed his lips, swung down the iron rail of the ladder past the cylinders to the middle grating. Here the chief engineer, his Scotch face screwed into a frown, stood looking intently at the flashing rods and gleaming metal. Tod passed him and swung down the second ladder to the plates of the engine-room floor where an oiler, black and grimy, went about, oil can in hand. The cadenced throb of the engines almost deafened him; the steel plates beneath his feet vibrated as if they were alive. The hot atmosphere pressed about him even as the bunkers filled with coal pressed about the sides of the engine room. By golly, it was hot.
The second engineer, coming to relieve the third, called above the pulsing tumult: "How's the steam?"
Tod waited while the second peered at the blackboard and tried the gauges. He was a small but well-built man with a taciturn countenance that seemed overburdened with the weight of his constant watchfulness. The third engineer toiled up the ladder, and the second turned to Tod with a gruff "Come on, snipe, I'll show you your work."
He led the way past the telegraph with its indicator pointing to Full Ahead, around the ventilating fan to a small iron door leading forward. Tod stooped, entered a dark tunnel to one side of the boilers, and came out a moment later into the long black stokehole. The narrow compartment, its ceiling lost in the gloom above, ran directly across the ship. The boilers rose aft, an iron bulkhead forward, broken in the centre, Tod saw, by the fiddley opening with its ladders and grating.
Here, in this sombre hole, encased in steel, three men were at work. Before the port boiler near Tod, Tony the Wop looked up from his pile of coal; beyond him, Blackie Judson mopped a sweating brow before the centre; and in the murky distance a huge Finn clanged shut a furnace door of the starboard boiler. The men, stripped to the waist and wearing black dungarees, appeared in the flickering shadow like half-human figures, apparitions of a disordered brain. Sweat and grime ran down their flushed bodies; their faces were so black that Tod could barely make out their features. High on the bulkhead behind them, two electric bulbs, wire covered, tried vainly to pierce the dust-laden air.