He lowered himself down the ladder circumspectly, and found it somewhat difficult to reach the room beneath the bridge; but five minutes after he got there he was sleeping heavily.
They made some four knots in each of the next thirty hours, with the gale on their starboard bow. When at last it broke, Jimmy, who got an observation, headed the Shasta southeastward, and a day or two later ran her in behind an island. Then two boats pulled ashore across a sluice of tide, and came back some hours later when it had slackened a little, loaded rather deeper than was safe with sawn-up pines. Fleming also brought two very rude saws with him, and invited Jimmy's attention to one of them.
"Saws," he said, "are in a general way made of steel, and you can't expect too much from soft plate-iron. The boys did well; there's not a man among the crowd of them can get his back straight. You'd understand the reason if you had tried to cut down big trees with an instrument that has an edge like a nutmeg-grater."
Jimmy smiled, for he considered it very likely. "Well," he said, "what are you going to do to make them serviceable?"
"Sit up all night re-gulletting them with a file. I want four loads of billets before we start again; but we'll take another axe ashore in the morning."
They went off early, when the tide was slack, taking an extra axe along, while it was noon when they came back, with one man who had badly cut his leg lying upon the billets. Fleming, however, insisted on his four loads, and it was evening when he brought the last two off. The men were almost too wearied to pull across the tide, and only the handles attached to them suggested that the two worn strips of iron they passed up had been meant for saws.
"That," said Fleming, who held one up before Jimmy, "says a good deal for the boys; but if I drove them the same way any longer there would be a mutiny."
Jimmy laughed, and told him to raise steam enough to take the Shasta to sea. She made six knots most of that night; and two days later the men went ashore again. Fleming, at least, never forgot the rest of that trip down the wild West Coast. He mixed his resinous billets with saturated coal-dust and broken hemlock bark, but in spite of it he stopped the Shasta every now and then when his boilers gave him water instead of steam.
Still, she crept on south, and at last all of them were sincerely glad when the pithead gear of the Dunsmore mines rose up against the forests of Vancouver Island over the starboard hand. An hour or two later Fleming stood blackened all over amidst a gritty cloud while the coal that was to free him from his cares clattered into the Shasta's bunkers, and Jimmy sat in the room beneath her bridge with one of the coaling clerks writing out a telegram.
"I'll get it sent off for you right away," said the coaling man. "Guess it will be a big relief to somebody. It seems they've 'most given you up in Vancouver."