“It’s grown! Aye, it’s grown! Wot’s to prove this cargo growed there. It may have been brought to this cove in a sampan—it may have been brought in a Chinese junk—it may have——”
“’Vast with your ‘may-have’s!’ Get below to the boiler! ’Ere comes a caravan or a funeral. They’re Russians of the province of the Don. See their beards and their robes. There’s the big fellow who hired us. ’E’s a bloomin’ juke, that’s wot ’e is! Kow-tow when ’e comes aboard.”
“Ye told me to go below.”
“’urry hup! Never mind the kowtowin’. You walk straight and take my orders until we get on the ’igh seas.”
The first engineer fluttered a pair of pale lashes in the general direction of the squad of Russians who were winding around the shore shed. He climbed down the rusty bridge-ladder and glided for the engine-room companion. He went through the single grating and thrust his hands into the broken pockets of his dungaree trousers as he eyed the three coolies sitting on the crank-shaft of the cross-compound engine.
“On deck!” he roared at the chinamen. “Ye all get on deck, and don’t show yer miserable faces here again. Ye’re discharged! Ye built my fires in Oriental fashion—upside down with all the Japanese coal on the grates. Ye left me nothing but clinkers and salt water in the boiler and leaking gaskets and——”
The last yellow man stared down through the grating on his way to the deck and departure.
“Plenty much you learn by and by,” he said softly—too softly. “Plenty much——”
Mike picked up a rusty spanner. He had drawn this back when there sounded the raucous clang of an ancient gong in the engine-room. Micky McMasters, wasting no time, had rung for quarter-speed forward before the Russian crew were well aboard.
Two men came down the engine-room ladder in awkward fashion. They blinked at Mike. They stared at the engine as if it were an idol in a temple. They stroked their whiskers.