“It’s over already, Melville! Successful too, the doctor says. I watched it and helped a bit. And, chief, I hardly know which to admire most—the skill and speed with which Ambler, weak as he was, worked, or the nerve and heroic endurance with which Dan stood it. He’s back in his stateroom now, all bandaged again. God grant the ship doesn’t go out from under us before those bandages are ready to come off!”
Well, that was that. With a somewhat lighter heart, I resumed blowing steam on my frozen line. De Long crawled back into the forepeak to resume his study of the leak.
But my happier frame of mind did not last. If it was not one thing on the Jeannette to drive us to distraction, it was a couple of others. The captain soon squirmed back through the hatch with a long face to join me again beside the deck pump.
“How much coal have we got in our bunkers, now, chief?” he asked.
“Eighty-three tons and a fraction,” I answered promptly. I felt that I knew almost every lump of coal in our bunkers by name, so to speak.
“And what are we burning now?” he continued.
“A ton a day, captain, to run our pumps and for all other purposes, but as soon as that bulkhead’s finished and the leak’s stopped, we ought to get down to 300 pounds again, our old allowance.”
De Long shook his head sadly.
“No, chief, we never will. The way the ship’s built, I see now we’ll never get that bulkhead really tight; she’s going to keep on leaking and we’re going to keep on pumping. But a ton of coal a day’ll ruin us! By April, at that rate, the bunkers’ll be bare. Can’t you do something, anything, to cut down that coal consumption?”
I thought hastily. Our main boiler, designed of course for furnishing steam to propel the ship, was far bigger than necessary just to run a couple of pumps, and consequently it was wasteful of fuel. If pumping, instead of lasting only a few days more, was to be our steady occupation, I ought to get some setup more nearly suited to the job. Before me in the deckhouse was the little Baxter boiler I had rigged for an evaporator. That might run the forward pump. And looking speculatively aft through the deckhouse door, my eye fell on our useless steam cutter, half buried in a mound of snow and ice covering its cradle on the poop. There was a small boiler in that cutter. Perhaps I could remove it, rig it somehow to run a pump in the engine room. And then I might let fires die out under the main boiler again and do the job with less coal.