“This mucky old tramp’ll be blowed up sure’s death, and I shall be killed.”
“Well, bless me!” retorted the donkeyman; “who’d miss you if you was killed—always supposing you weren’t wanted for our furnaces? Here, get up, you half-baked scum of the workhouse, and tumble below. Thank your stars the old man hasn’t seen you from the bridge. But don’t give me any more of your lip, or I’ll report you to him and the chief to boot. Now, mosey.”
The coal-trimmer blew his nose on his gray neck-handkerchief, and shambled off below, muttering. The donkeyman returned to his winch, unbent the chain, and sent it down into the adjacent hold. Then he retired to the poop deck-house, where he lived with the carpenter and boatswain, and offered to bet those worthies (who had just come in for dinner) that Captain Kettle shot some one on board before the Port Edes tied up against New Orleans levee.
“He’s a just holy terror, our old man,” observed the donkeyman cheerfully. “I sailed with him once before, and he unbent a quartermaster’s front teeth with the bridge telescope before we were three days out. With the smudgy crowd we’ve got here now, it’s a pound to a brick they start him moving, even sooner than that. Not that I mind myself. Sea’s dull enough as a general thing, and I like to see a bit of life throwing about. And at that game, little Red Kettle’s good as a Yankee skipper any day.”
CHAPTER IX.
GROUND-BAIT.
For reasons, the Port Edes took the “North about” course; that is, she headed across south of the Banks of Newfoundland nearly to Cape Hatteras, and then braved the three-knot current of the Gulf Stream by passing down the Florida Channel on the western side of the Bahamas. They had carried good weather with them—light head breezes or calms—all the way; and, although coals were dear and the day’s outlay was limited to twenty-eight tons by order, the steamer usually averaged ten and a half knots, despite the unskilfulness of the engine-room staff.
In a canvas chair on the bridge deck under the lee of the fiddley sat Patrick Onslow, with a pipe between his teeth and Pierre Loti’s “Fantôme d’Orient” in his lap. He was distinctly idling. For the moment he was wondering how, from so transparently blue a sea, the spray which jumped from the wave-crests could be colorless and opaque. Then, by following with the eye a tangle of yellow Gulf weed which floated past, his attention was carried away to some little gray spouts of fog, which told of whales and their calves taking a summer outing in the milk-warm waters of the south. Beyond, his eyes fell upon one of the screw-pile lighthouses with which the United States Government has fringed the Florida shoal; and on the far horizon sprouted the wind-threshed tops of some scattered cabbage palms, which told that there at least the shallow sea was sea no more. At the back of these palms lay the mysterious shelter of the Everglades.
A thought passed through Patrick Onslow’s mind, a thought of the drama to be played under shelter of those recesses within the next few days, and he frowned. He thrust the thought from him as an impertinence, and turned again to his novel. But he was destined just then to read no more from that dainty vignette of Stamboul. Through the grating of the fiddley above his head came a frightened shout; then a chorus; then a prolonged clattering, as iron tools were thrown on the floor-plates, and the boots of scared men smote the rungs of the ladders.
Onslow gave a quick smile to himself, as though he understood something; then mounted a look of concern on his face, and, getting up from his chair, crossed to port and strode up to the break of the bridge-deck. The captain, coming out of the chart-house, joined him. From the door of the alley-way beneath them rushed a crowd of frightened men—trimmers and stokers, stripped to the waist, engineers in dungaree—all the human contents of the lowest hold. Kettle singled out the Chief with his eye, and addressed him with sour irony—