The captain swore, and the China boy gabbled as he mopped wildly with the ineffectual paper napkin. “God forgive me if ever I go to sea again with a lot of damned Chinamen. I’d have tried kedging before this, if I had a crew that could understand anything but routine orders. As it is I’ll be lucky if I get the coal out in time.”
“I can’t promise you sailors, but say the word, and I’ll get you some sort of volunteers. How many?”
“Well, just to get the coal overboard we’ll need two or three shifts. And if I have to kedge, after all—it’s no fun!—but with eight good men I could do it.”
“I’ll undertake to get you the best twenty on the ship, and you can hold a dozen in reserve.”
As the girl, at last able to get out dryshod, was going down the companionway, a bird’s-eye view of the upper deck gave fresh meaning to the scrap of conversation she had just heard. Out of the black square of the hold the blue-cotton coolies crawled up the ladder with vast burdens to add to the chaos of trunks, crates, and machinery, piled already so perilously high about the deck, and leaving so narrow a gangway for people to crowd through that the able-bodied swarmed over the obstructions.
There was Mrs. Locke reading in a sheltered nook, walled in by towering crates, and just the other side, to leeward of the smoke-stack, Gedge, in close conclave with his body-guard.
When Hildegarde, with some difficulty, reached Mrs. Locke, that lady held up her hand for silence, but, behold, she wasn’t reading at all. As the girl sank quietly down, Gedge’s voice reached her clear, although it was lifted with more than common caution. For ten, fifteen, twenty minutes he must have gone on airing his seditious notions; when Mrs. Locke, half rising, whispered, “If there’s nobody else I think I must go round and talk to those men myself.”
Just then a sound of some one flying over the crates on the wings of haste, and Cheviot’s voice: “Gedge, are you there?”
“You bet I’m here,” was the surly answer. “And not likely to get away in a hurry, so far’s I see.”