He came out, and, leaning down, dropped the case into the hands of the man below.
"Put it back, and don't let Mr. Austin know," he said. "Señor Austin no savvy, you comprenny?"
Wall-eye grinned as he went away. He could, of course, hold his tongue, but the little case was sodden already, and it could not have got so wet as that in Austin's room.
In the meanwhile Austin had gone down to the stoke-hold. The place was dimly lighted, and insufferably hot, for, with the Cumbria stationary, no more air came down the ventilator shafts than the fires would draw, and they were burning sulkily. In fact, it was only by strenuous labour that steam could be raised at all. Here and there the pale flicker of an oil lamp emphasised the gloom, though there were three half-moon patches of brightness in each of the two boilers, until a fierce red glow beat out as Tom, the donkey-man, flung open a furnace door. Then Austin gained some impression of his surroundings.
The bent figures of half naked men with shovels were forced out of the shadows. Another man, dripping with perspiration, pushed a clattering truck, and several more lay, apparently inert, upon the floor-plates, with water thick with coal grime trickling from them. Only two of them were professional firemen, and all were weakened by the climate or shaken by the fever, while as the red light touched them, Austin could see how worn they were, and the suggestive hollows in their uncovered skin. There are also things which it is unfit that a white man should do, and firing in a calm in the tropics is one of them. Austin, however, had little time to look about him in, for Tom thrust an iron bar into one of the Spaniards's hands.
"Stand by with the bucket, you. Now, out with the clinker!" he said.
It is probable that the last man addressed did not understand what was said, but he knew how to clean a fire, and stood, half crouching, before the furnace, with face averted, while he plied the bar. There was a rattling beneath the grate-bars and an overpowering wave of heat, in the midst of which the man stood bowed, with thin garments scorching and his hair frizzling visibly. Austin could hear his gasping breath, and became possessed by a sense of futile indignation. Toil of that kind was, he felt, more than could be expected of anything made in the image of a man. Then the Canario let the bar fall clanging, and seized another, while the heat grew more intense when he raked out the ash and glowing clinker from the flaming tunnel. Austin shrank back with a hand upon his eyes and singlet singeing, and his voice broke through Tom's cry of "Damp her down!"
"Por misericordia," he said, "echadle agua!"
Somebody swung a bucket, and a cloud of steam whirled up; but the man who had cleaned the fire let his scraper fall, and lurching with a half strangled cry, went down amidst the vapour. He lay with scorched chest and arms on the floor-plates, making little stertorous noises, until Tom, who tore the bucket from his comrade's hands, flung the rest of its contents over him.
"Drag him away!" he said, and turned to Austin. "He's the second one, but he'll come round by and by. Did you come down to look on or give us a hand?"