As I should have explained, I had filled the boilers with sea water by opening the valves connected with the pumps outside the ship. Careful measurement had shown me that the boilers were all below the water line. After steam was once generated, I knew that the pumps could be utilized to keep the boilers filled.
You can imagine, therefore, with what anxiety I stood in the engine room and watched the slow but sure rising of the steam gauge. I believed a pressure of eighty pounds to the square inch would be required to get under way. The engines were of the most modern triple expansion type. I did not aim at high speed, for I believed that attack would be impossible if I could obtain a headway of ten or twelve miles an hour.
Fidette soon joined me in the engine room. The register now showed twenty-one pounds! I softly rang the bell connecting with the boatswain, and called down through the tube, telling him to redouble the efforts of the men, and acquainting him with the fact that steam was already forming. He replied at once that the men were stuffing the furnaces with wood and pulpy seaweed. But the influence of my words upon him produced immediate results, as shown by the steam gauge. It began slowly to turn upon the disk.
Forty pounds were soon indicated! In another quarter of an hour the pressure had risen to forty-seven! Soon it was fifty, and I felt that in another hour I would be able to make the supreme test.
What would be the result? Would the piston, after having remained for two years stationary in the cylinder, move when the steam pressure was admitted? My life itself depended upon the answer to that question—if not the lives of Fidette and myself, certainly those of the nine men in the bowels of the ship!
CHAPTER XXX.
FAREWELL TO THE FLOATING CONTINENT.
Having sent Fidette back to her cabin—for I did not wish her to witness my mortification in the event of failure—I approached the steam gauge and looked it fairly in the face.
Seventy-five pounds of steam pressure were indicated.
The moment had come!