“The crown sheet’s covered now, chief!”
“On with that manhead!” I roared back.
The clanking of Bartlett’s sledge hammer, breaking away the ice round the manhole so the cover would fit, was my only answer. The worn-out coalheavers dropped their buckets, rested for the first time in hours, sagging back against the boiler fronts to keep from dropping into the icy water. No time for that. I seized a slice bar, started savagely to slice the fire in the outboard furnace, sang out,
“Boyd, get busy with another slice bar on that inboard fire! Lauterbach, relieve Lee on filling that barrel! Lee, get back to your pump now! And, Sharvell, you and Iversen, get into those bunkers and break out some more coal! Come to life now, all of you!”
Boyd, nearly dead from his half of heaving up over eight tons of water, staggered over to my side, gripped a slice bar. Together we labored over the fires, forcing them to the limit, nursing in more coal without deadening the blaze, till helped by an amazing draft from the stack, we had them roaring like the very flames of hell itself. Never have I seen such fires!
Leaving the stoking job now wholly to Boyd, I dropped my slice bar and stepped back to examine the gauge glasses. Water was barely showing in the sight glass, but, thank God, it was showing! And the needle of the pressure gauge was starting to flutter off the zero pin. Steam was coming up! If we could only hold down the flood for a few minutes more now, till I could get that pump warmed up and going, we were saved! But that part was up to Jack Cole.
“Jack!” I shouted up the hatch. “A little more and you can quit. But right now, for God’s sake, shake it up; faster with that barrel!”
“Aye, aye, sor!” Then to his strangely conglomerate crew, ready undoubtedly to collapse in their tracks, Cole called gruffly,
“C’mon me byes! Lit’s raylly git to liftin’ now, an’ work up a sweat, or we’ll freeze to death in this cowld! Lay back on ut, Starr! Heave there, Manson! Wud yez have thim two Chinks outpullin’ yez? An’ step out there now, ye Chinese seacooks, an’ don’t be clutterin’ up the decks, or whin that Rooshian gits goin’, he’ll be treadin’ heavy on thim pigtails! Yo heave! Up wid ut!” And with astonishing speed I saw the loaded barrel vanish up the hatch.
I breasted my way through the water aft to where Lee in the engine room stood by my largest steam pump. No need to worry about priming the pump for suction; another foot higher on that flood and we would have to go diving to reach the pump valves. I felt the steam line. The frosty chill was gone; a little steam at least was already coming through to the pump.