"I can't do it, Chief!" he said. "I'll stick it out with you." But the Chief drove him up, with the name of his wife and child. Far up the shaft he turned and looked down. The lantern glowed faintly below.
The Chief sat alone on his grating. He was faint with pain. The blistering cylinders were growing cold; the steel floor beneath was awash. More ominous still, as the ship's head sank, came crackings and groanings from the engines below. They would fall through at the last, ripping out the bulkheads and carrying her down bow first.
Pain had made the Chief rather dull. "'I ha' lived and I ha' worked!'" he said several times—and waited for the end. Into his stupor came the thought of the woman—and another thought of the Red Un. Both of them had sold him out, so to speak; but the woman had grown up with his heart and the boy was his by right of salvage—only he thought of the woman as he dreamed of her, not as he had seen her on the deck. He grew rather confused, after a time, and said: "I ha' loved and I ha' worked!"
Just between life and death there comes a time when the fight seems a draw, or as if each side, exhausted, had called a truce. There is no more struggle, but it is not yet death. The ship lay so. The upreaching sea had not conquered. The result was inevitable, but not yet. And in the pause the Red Un came back, came crawling down the ladder, his indomitable spirit driving his craven little body.
He had got as far as the boat and safety. The gripping devils of fear that had followed him up from the engine room still hung to his throat; but once on deck, with the silent men who were working against time and eternity, he found he could not do it. He was the Chief's boy—and the Chief was below and hurt!
The truce still held. As the ship rolled, water washed about the foot of the ladder and lapped against the cylinders. The Chief tried desperately to drive him up to the deck and failed.
"It's no place for you alone," said the Red Un. His voice had lost its occasional soprano note; the Red Un was a grown man. "I'm staying!" And after a hesitating moment he put his small, frightened paw on the Chief's arm.
It was that, perhaps, that roused the Chief—not love of life, but love of the boy. To be drowned like a rat in a hole—that was not so bad when one had lived and worked. A man may not die better than where he has laboured; but this child, who would die with him rather than live alone! The Chief got up on his usable knee.
"I'm thinking, laddie," he said, "we'll go fighting anyhow."
The boy went first, with the lantern. And, painful rung by painful rung, the Chief did the impossible, suffering hells as he moved. For each foot he gained the Red Un gained a foot—no more. What he would not have endured for himself, the Chief suffered for the boy. Halfway up, he clung, exhausted.