They use wood fuel on these small, ungainly steamers which do their business up in the savage heart of Africa on the waters of the Haut Congo, and because every man with a gun for many reasons feels himself to be an enemy of the Free State, the steamers carry their firing logs stacked in ramparts round their boilers and other vital parts. But wood, as compared with coal, is bulky stuff to carry, and as the stowage capacity of these stern-wheelers is small, they have to make frequent calls to rebunker.
Indeed, it was for this purpose that Kettle had originally put in at the village where Commandant Balliot had his headquarters; and, as other events happened there which he had not calculated upon, he had steamed out into the broad river again without a chance of taking any logs on board, and, in fact, with his stock of fuel down very near to the vanishing-point.
On this account, therefore, after the fatal shot into the boiler, and the subsequent disablement and drifting on to the sandbank, all repairing work had to be done under full exposure to the fire of the mutineers. The Central African negro is a fairly stolid person, and as the sight of a little slaughter does not in the least upset his nerves, he can stand bullet hail for a good long time without emotion, especially if there is no noise and bustle attached to it. But once let a scare get rubbed home into his stupid brain, and let him get started off on the run, and he is an awkward person to stop.
But Kettle did not start to hustle his black laborers back to work at once. He knew that there would be heavy mortality amongst them once they were exposed to fire, and he wanted to lose as few of them as possible. He had got use for them afterward. So for long enough he worked alone, and the bullets spattered around him gayly. He hammered out a lead templet to cover the wound in the boiler, which, of course, as bad luck would have it, was situated at a place where three plates met; and then whilst Balliot's armorer with fire and hammer beat out a plate of iron the exact counterpart of this, he rigged a ratchet drill and bored holes through the boiler's skin to carry the necessary bolts.
Clay volunteered assistance once, but as he was told he would be asked for help when it was needed, he squatted down under the sheltered side of the boiler again, and smoked, and played more music-hall ditties on the banjo. Commandant Balliot held to a sullen silence. He was growing to have a poisonous hatred for this contemptuous little Englishman who by sheer superiority had made him give up his treasured dictatorship, and he formed schemes for the Englishman's discomfiture in the near future.
But for the present he hoped very much that the man would not be killed; he recognized, with fresh spasms of anger every time he thought about it, that without Captain Kettle there would be no future--at any rate on this earth--for any of them.
And meanwhile Captain Owen Kettle, stripped to shoes and trousers, sweated over his work in the baking heat. Twice had a bullet grazed him, once on the neck, and once on the round of a shoulder, and red stains grew over the white satin of his skin. The work was strange to him certainly, but he set about it with more than an amateur's skill. All sailors have been handy with their fingers from time immemorial, but the modern steamer-sailor, during his apprenticeship as mate, has to turn his hand to a vast variety of trades. He is painter, carpenter, stevedore, crew-driver, all in one day; and on the next he is doctor, navigator, clerk, tailor, and engineer. And especially he is engineer. He must be able to drive winch, windlass, or crane, like an artist; he must have a good aptitude for using hand tools; and if he can work machine tools also, it is so much the better for him.
Yes, Captain Kettle put the patch on that boiler like a workman. He fitted his bolts, and made his joints; then luted the manhole and bolted that back in place; and then stepped down while a couple of negroes sluiced him with water from gourds, and rubbed him clean and dry with handfuls of wild cotton waste. So far, although the incessant hail of bullets had pitted the boiler's skin in a hundred places, no second shot had found a spot sufficiently soft to make a puncture. The range of the bombardment was long, perhaps, and though a bullet at seven hundred yards may, with convenience, kill a man, it will not pierce seven-eighths boiler plate. And so, theoretically, the boiler was safe for the time being.
But practically it was otherwise. The boiler was by no means new. It was corroded with years, and incapacity, and neglect, as is the custom with all parts of boats and machinery on the Haut Congo. But it had been brought up to that waterway by carriers at vast expense from Matadi, the highest steamer port on the Lower Congo, probably costing three months and a dozen lives in transit, so that it was debited in the books of the Free State as being worth its weight in silver, and destined to be used on without replacement till it saw fit to burst.
So Kettle knew that in places it would be not much thicker than stout brown paper, and was quite aware that if any of the pattering bullets investigated one of these patches, he would have to do his work over again. He had a strong--and, I think, natural--disinclination for this. He had come through terrific risks during the last four hours, and could not expect to do so a second time with equal immunity; his two wounds smarted; and (although it sounds ludicrous that such a thing should have weight) the dirt inseparable from such employment jarred against his neat and cleanly habits, and filled him with unutterable disgust.