“Can’t we go down there, too?” asked Molly, taking a step forward.
“No, indeed, not you girls! You’d spoil your dresses. Why, the furnaces are a deck below the boilers.”
“And halfway down the stairs give out and you have to go the rest of the way on a ladder,” added Kirke.
“It’s a droll place, though, when you get there,” resumed Paul. “Coal-bins all around,—they call ’em bunkers,—and stokers black as soot wheeling the coal to the furnaces in barrows.”
“Stokers?” repeated Weezy. “Kirke, did I ever see a stoker? Is it a donkey?”
“Not always, little Miss Quiz,” replied Kirke with a giggle; and they all laughed, as if she had said something very foolish.
“Now, I know you’re making fun. I think you’re as unpolite as you can be!”
Her head drooped; but before the tears could fall, Captain Bradstreet soothed her wounded feelings by whispering in her ear that little girls who had never been to sea couldn’t be expected to know about stokers. He would tell her in confidence that stokers are the men who tend the fires on a steamboat.
“The poor souls weren’t more than half dressed,” said Paul, when peace had been restored. “But still they looked ready to melt. You never saw such a fire as they keep up in those furnaces, girls.”
“Threw coal into the fire-boxes every minute or two,” interposed Kirke.