"By the way, captain," said Grace. "What has become of that poor fireman who made such a disturbance the day we sailed from New York?"
The captain frowned.
"Oh, he's down where he belongs—shoveling coal." Then he added: "Don't waste any sympathy on him. He's about as hard a character as you could find. Stokers are all troublesome as a class, but this Armitage fellow is quite unmanageable. I shall be glad to get rid of him. We had to put him on bread and water the first ten days out. It wasn't until he was nearly dead from starvation that he consented to go to work."
"Stoking down in that pit in that terrific heat must be fearful!" exclaimed the professor.
"Yes," growled the captain. "It is pretty bad. Most of them don't mind it, though. They aren't good for anything else. They're tough, coarse-fibered creatures, scarcely superior in instincts to the savage. They'd think nothing of running a knife into you, and that Armitage chap is worse than the worst of them. We've had trouble with him all along."
"Still, after all," mused the professor, "we mustn't forget that it is they who make the ship go. We couldn't do without them. Every man has his place in the world's economy."
"It must be very interesting to see them at work," remarked Grace. "I'd like to see what the stoke-hold looks like. Mr. Fitzhugh said he would take me down." Looking down the deck, she added: "Here he comes now. I'll ask him."
"There's no time like the present," said the captain. "See Mr. Wetherbee, the chief engineer. He'll take you down."
"Yes," said the professor pedantically. "The spectacle will be a good object lesson for you—a pampered daughter of the plutocracy. With a little imagination, you can see in the stoke-hold social conditions as they actually are in the world to-day. In the stokers you have the laborers, the mill-hands, the sweat-shop workers, the common people who toil painfully for pitiful wages, for their daily bread. We others up here, lolling in our luxurious steamer-chairs, living on the fat of the land—or, rather, sea, to be more correct—are the masters, the capitalists. It is the slave system of ancient Rome under another name, that's all. It's all wrong. Man's injustice to man is the great crime of the centuries. Why should I be here enjoying every comfort and those unfortunate men down there condemned to tortures as cruel as those devised by the merciless Inquisition."
Captain Summers shrugged his massive shoulders, and, as he turned to go, said laughingly: