The white man was a mechanic born, but he had never seen an oil engine in his life, knew nothing of clutch, water-jackets, or reversing gear, and had to make his first acquaintanceship with a carburetor. The men at the factory were frankly ignorant of the launch's mechanism; said so indeed before they sold her.
"But I know we have got a plan-thing of the works stowed away somewhere," the agent stated. "Can you understand a machine from seeing a drawing?"
"Rather," said Carter.
"Well, we'll find it," said the agent, and they wasted two days in turning over every scrap of paper the factory contained, but the blue prints refused to discover themselves.
"Let you off your bargain if you like," said the agent ruefully, when the place had been searched through without success.
"Not a bit," said Carter. "Lend me a couple of boys and I'll take those engines down and learn 'em for myself."
Now, to anyone who does not know the hot, steamy climate of a West African river from personal experience, the manner in which unguarded ironwork can decay would sound beyond the borderland of fact. A nut left long enough on a bolt in that moist stew of heat does not always rust fast. As often as not, when one takes hold of it with a spanner, the whole thing crumbles away into oxide.
The forty-five-foot launch, when Carter first took her over, lay half water-logged in the middle of a slimy creek. She was an open boat with her engines housed under a wooden hutch aft, which had been further reinforced by some rotten tarpaulin. She had no in-board reversing gear, but was fitted with a feathering propeller, which if all went well would drive her astern.
As she lay there she was a perfect picture of what could be done by neglect and ignorant handling, and there was not another man then resident under that enervating West African climate who would have thought her worthy of salvage. But Carter had got just that dogged drop in him that brings men out to the front, and he proceeded to clean up the launch's meagre tools and her spares, to borrow what others he could from the factory, and then to attack the engines. It was here that the prodigiousness of his job first displayed itself. The brasswork was sound enough—even West Africa could not eat into that—but everything iron was spongy with rust, and he had to set up a forge, and weld and shape afresh, out of any scrap he could find about the factory, each part as he destroyed it.
There was no such thing as a lathe about the place; there were not even taps and dies. He had to punch slots through his bolts and tighten them up with forged and filed wedges. For the out-board work on the feathering propeller he put the launch on the bank and worked up to his armpits in the stinking slime, fitting, drilling, and rivetting with his imperfect tools.