By keeping faithfully at it, our gang got the recalcitrant thrust bearing in shape by the middle of the afternoon, the fires were broken out and the blowers put on, and by four o'clock the Andromeda was once more under way and pointing her sharp nose for the open water. As I came up out of the engine-hold to make a bolt for a bath and clean clothes, I saw that Van Dyck had the wheel and was apparently heading the ship straight out toward the Mosquito Cays. As the trim little vessel—which was little only by comparison with the great liners of which it was a copy in the small—went shearing its way at full speed through the heaving ground swell with the westering sun fairly astern, I could not help wondering what our next port of call would be, and if it would be a disabled piece of machinery which would drive us into it.
VI
A SEA CHANGE
With the Nicaraguan coast fairly astern, and the Andromeda picking her way gingerly among the cays and reefs which extend from fifty to one hundred miles off the eastern hump of the Central American camel, we soon made the open Caribbean, and our course was once more laid indefinitely to the south and east. If we were to hold this general direction we should bring up in due time somewhere upon the Colombian or Venezuelan coast of South America.
Watching my opportunity, I cornered Van Dyck on the bridge at a moment when he had relieved the man at the wheel; this on our second evening out from Gracias á Dios. As I came up, he was changing the course more to the southward, and I asked him if we were slated to do the Isthmus and the Canal.
"I hadn't thought very much about it," he answered half-absently. "Do you think the others would like it?"
"The Isthmus is pretty badly hackneyed, nowadays," I suggested; "and for your particular purpose——"
"Forget it!" he broke in abruptly. And then: "It's a hideous failure, Dick, as you have doubtless found out for yourself."
"Which part of it is a failure—your experiment, or the other thing?"