When the meal was ended, they went direct to the fireroom, descending by iron steps into the very bowels of the ship. The farther down they went, the hotter it became, and Henry wondered how men could ever endure it to work in such heat. In front of the furnaces the heat was simply unbearable, and when the firemen threw open the furnace doors, Henry backed as far away as he could. It seemed as though the awful rush of heat would roast him. Yet the stokers stood directly before the open doors and worked at the glowing fires. Henry was surprised to see that they wore thick flannel shirts. Later he learned that without those shirts they could hardly have endured the heat, either. The wool shut out the terrible heat. These stokers were on duty only two hours or so at a time. Even such short watches were exhausting. And when Henry and his guide later came up from the fireroom, they noticed firemen, black with coal dust, stretched out here and there in the passages, sleeping soundly on the hard floors, where they had dropped when they came out of the fireroom.
The great boilers and the huge engines interested Henry greatly. How smoothly the pistons shot back and forth, how the various wheels turned endlessly, how the great shaft revolved ceaselessly. Henry saw the oilers passing from part to part of the engine-room, watching, oiling, tightening or loosening nuts, wiping this or that with oily rags, always alert, watching their engines as a mother watches her child. When Henry thought of the grimy coal passers he had just seen, conveying the fuel for the furnaces, and the men keeping the fires at red heat, and the engineers watching the great machines that drove the ship, and the sailors standing watch forward in the dark, and the helmsman at the wheel, with his eye directed steadfastly at the compass, he saw how necessary every part of the ship was to the other parts, and how especially necessary it was that the man in charge be ever vigilant, and that instant and unquestioning obedience be rendered to him. Henry began to see why it was a good thing for the captain to live in state, alone.
It occurred to him that there must be quantities of explosives aboard a ship like this cutter. Indeed, some of them had just been used, and Henry knew how powerful they were. He wondered if these were also watched. He put the question to the quartermaster.
“You can bet your life the explosives are watched. They are examined every day. You know there’s a lot of guncotton among them, and if that stuff deteriorates, it’s likely to make trouble.”
“But how can they tell if it does deteriorate?”
“Oh, that’s easy. There’s litmus paper packed in each jar of the stuff. That will change color if the guncotton begins to go bad. Haven’t you noticed that heavy, peculiar-shaped flash-light in the captain’s cabin? That’s the light they use in examining the explosives in the magazine.”
“I should think it wouldn’t be safe to store explosives so near those hot furnaces.”
“It wouldn’t be. The magazine is in the very stern of the ship, right under the captain’s cabin. You eat and sleep right over the explosives.”
Henry could almost feel his hair rise on end. “Jumping Jupiter!” he exclaimed. “I do?”
The quartermaster laughed. “If the things in the magazine ever let go,” he said, “I guess the folks in the cabin wouldn’t be much worse off than the rest of us. The explosives there would tear this old boat all to pieces.” After what Henry had seen so lately, he could believe it.