"Gold-dust! The niggers bring it down from the Western Soudan, and I believe they're ostrich quills. One of the trader fellows told me a good deal about them over a dinner at the Metropole. A bushman had once stuck him with a lot of brass filings. Are you going down to look for them?"
Jefferson, it was evident from his face, laid a strong restraint upon himself.
"No," he said, with curious quietness. "Funnel-paint knows nothing about these islets yet, or he wouldn't have come to you, and it's my first business to heave this steamer off. To do it we'll want her engines, and there's a heavy job in front of us before we start them. The rains won't wait for any man."
He broke off, for a glare of blue light fell through the open frames above and flooded the engine room. It flickered on rusty columns and dripping, discoloured steel, and vanished, leaving grey shadow behind it, amidst which the smoky lamplight showed feeble and pale. Then there was a crash that left them dazed and deafened, and in another moment was followed by a dull crescendo roar, while a splashing trickle ran down into the engine room. The glass frames quivered under the deluge, and one could almost have fancied that the heavens had opened. Jefferson whirled round and gripped the donkey-man's arm, shaking him as he stood blinking about him in a bewildered fashion.
"If you tell any of the rest what you have heard, I'll fling you into the creek! And now up with you, and bring every man who is fit to work. There's no time to lose," he said.
Tom made for the ladder, and Austin, who went with him, carrying the book, was drenched before he reached the skipper's room. The air was filled with falling water that came down in rods, and blotted out the mangroves a dozen yards away. Steam rose from the sluicing deck, the creek boiled beneath the deluge, but there was no longer any trace of the insufferable tension, and he stood a moment or two relaxing under the rush of lukewarm water that beat his thin clothing flat against his skin. Then he splashed forward to the forecastle, where Tom had little difficulty in rousing the men. They crawled out, gaunt and haggard, in filthy rags, some of them apparently scarcely fit to stand, for the rain had come, and every inch the water rose would bring them so much nearer home. There was no need to urge them when they floundered into the engine room, and hour after hour they strained and sweated on big spanner and chain-tackle willingly, while the big cylinder-heads and pistons were hauled up to the beams. The one thought which animated them was that the engines would be wanted soon.
It mattered little that platform-grating and slippery floor-plates slanted sharply under them, and each ponderous mass they loosened must be held in with guy and preventer lest it should swing wildly into vertical equilibrium. That was only one more difficulty, and they had already beaten down so many. So day after day they worked on sloping platforms, slipping with naked feet, and only grinned when Tom flung foul epithets, and now and then a hammer, at one of them. Much of what he said was incomprehensible, and, in any case, he was lord supreme of the machinery; and Bill, whose speech was also vitriolic, acted as his working deputy. The latter had served as greaser in another steamer, and for the time being even Jefferson deferred to him.
They stripped her until the big cylinders stood naked on their columns, and the engine room resembled the erecting shop of a foundry, and then the work grew harder when the reassembling began. Since the skeleton engines slanted, nothing would hang or lower as they wanted it, and they toiled with wedge and lever in semi-darkness by the blinking gleam of lamps, while the rain that shut the light out roared upon the shut-down frames above. It was very hot down in the engine room, and when a small forge was lighted to expand joints they could not spring apart, and to burn off saponified grease, men with less at stake would probably have fancied themselves suffocated. Still, each massive piece was cleaned and polished, keyed home, or bolted fast, and, when the hardest work was over, the slope of the platforms lessened little by little as the Cumbria rose upright. It was evident to all of them that the water was rising in the creek.
In a month her deck was almost leveled, but the muddy flood that gurgled about her still lay beneath her corroded water line, and Jefferson seized the opportunity of laying out an anchor to heave on before the stream ran too strong. The launch's boiler had given out, and they lashed her to the surfboat, with the hatch covers as a bracing between, but they spent an afternoon over it before Jefferson was satisfied, and the thick, steamy night was closing in when they warped the double craft under the Cumbria's forecastle. It rose above them blackly, with a blaze of flickering radiance over it where the blast-lamp hurled a shaft of fire upwards into the rain. Floundering figures cut against the uncertain brilliancy, voices came down muffled through the deluge, and there was a creaking and groaning as the ponderous stream anchor swung out overhead.
Austin stood, half naked, on the platform between launch and surfboat, with the water sluicing from him, and though he had toiled since early dawn, he was sensible only of a feverish impatience, and no weariness at all. He had had enough of the dark land, and what they were about to do was to ensure a start on the journey that would take them out of it. It grew rapidly darker, the long hull faded, and the flare of the lamp alone cut, a sheet of orange and saffron, against the blackness above them. Jefferson's voice fell through it sharply.