So the Port Edes drew up this narrow, unknown sea-river, through the shallows which fill that bight of the S. W. Floridan coast, and the tired man who was governing her steered every hour with stronger confidence and duller consciousness. Now he held on to what was apparently an unbroken line of surf, where, if the steamer struck, she would be a stove-in wreck within the hour; but as she closed with it a passage opened out which took her through in clear water, although the yeasty surges of the backwash would leap like live things far up her sides, and scream and bellow through the scuppers. Now he dodged, with helm hard a-starboard one minute, hard to port the next, amongst an archipelago of unnamed keys, where the first mangrove trees were getting to work at building these outlying scraps of animal stone into part of the North American continent.
Beyond was a broad, smooth lagoon, shimmering in the sunlight, dancing with little silver waves, and beyond, again, was a wall of woodwork growing in one solid mass of trunks from behind the tangle of slimy mangroves which sprawled along the water’s edge. Bare land was to be seen nowhere; all was blotted out by the rank luxuriance of the subtropical flora.
The steamer held on her course athwart this placid sea-lake, aiming straight as a rifle-shot for what appeared to be the densest part of the forest. But as she neared it, an overlapping cape gradually distinguished itself from the rest of the greenery, and directly afterwards banks of milky sand opened out, with a gut of river between them.
Onslow steered on, sitting upon the grating now, and holding the wheel one-handed by the lower spokes; and in the fat, hot stew of the stokehold below, Kettle and the donkeyman shoveled coal to the light of reeking slush-lamps and the tune of furnace-roar.
The steamer, in grip of the river-stream, swung round the bights and twistings, finding deep water everywhere, though often she could not make the turn quickly enough, and bruised with her forefoot the slimy mangrove-stems which marked the bank. But the current was strong, and each time swept her clear, and those below were scarcely conscious of the graze.
Knot by knot, the brine of the Mexican Gulf was being left behind, and the noises of the woods and odors of the trees and the swamps were closing in upon them. The swell fanning out from the steamer’s wake wetted the alligators in their basking-places behind the saw-grass; and the reek from her smoke-stacks scared the stilt-legged waterfowl afish in the shallows. She coasted round a bayou of black water, walled in by stern ranks of cypress-trees; she cut across another with graceful-leaved palmetto-scrub on either hand, and ragged cabbage-palms sprouting out from above. And then she swung again where the river forked, and steamed down a straight, unswerving water-line, which led to the very heart of the Everglades.
But the pace was slowing now; slowing, indeed, till the steamer would hardly steer against the current, which ever and anon gripped her by the head or the tail, and carried her with sullen sheerings on to mangrove cluster or tree-clad bluff. And the reason was that the head of steam was failing. Captain Owen Kettle, as more Christian men have done before, ignored his own previous preachings when the application came in, and proved only human soon after he had taken up the rôle of fireman. Driven half lunatic by the heat and the work, he kept dipping his lips in the water-bucket, and drinking heavy draughts. As a consequence, that unpoetical complaint, cramp in the stomach, overtook him at last, and tied him into those ungainly knots of torture which he had so frequently observed upon scientifically in others. But, as there was no one at hand to administer the heroic remedy of chlorodyne cum rhubarb cum laudanum cum pill, and give him something else to think about, in the original kind of knots he remained.
The donkeyman, with a hearty Belfast curse, tried to do double work; but, as he had been laboring quite to the top of his strength for many hours previously, the effort did not meet with unqualified success. As anyone with less dogged, wooden pluck might have known, it is impossible for one man to fire a twelve-furnace steamer, wheel himself coal from the bunkers, and act as engineer and greaser when required, however great be the initial supply of brute force with which God has endowed him. Every time he wiped the wet from his eyes and looked at the steam-gauge, it had climbed down since the time before; and however furiously he might heave new fuel on to the caking clinkers, that jumping index would continue its downward crawl.
The oiled rumbling of the engines slowed, and grew more sluggish, and then the ponderous cranks took to stopping on a turn, as though to gain strength for the next round. But this did not go on for long. The donkeyman felt a gentle heave of the foot-plates beneath him, and then a heel which was not recovered. “And begor!” said he, “the bucking old tramp’s tuk the ground at last, thanks be!”
He pitched his shovel through a dull glowing furnace-door, and turned to where the little Captain was lying on the polished foot-plates, holding a yellow, flaring slush-lamp before him to see through the stifling, dusty gloom.