"Then get busy," rejoined the Yankee skipper.
The chief went below with his assistant and firemen. Presently volumes of smoke poured from the Bronx's City smoke-stack.
While steam was being raised, Captain Hiram Adams ordered a kedge-anchor to be laid out in the stream, and the stout wire hawser attached to it to be led aft, so that the angle made by the keel of the ship and the wire was roughly forty-five degrees.
As soon as the chief engineer reported that the pressure gauges registered a sufficient head of steam, the skipper telegraphed for full-speed ahead with the port engine.
Completely mystified, the chief obeyed, wondering what possessed the Old Man to go full ahead with one engine that would tend to drive the ship farther into the mud-bank.
Nor was the chief the only one puzzled. In fact, some of the crew wondered whether recent events had not touched the skipper's brain. And their wonderment increased when Captain Hiram Adams, with a huge cigar jutting at an acute angle from the corner of his mouth, descended from the bridge.
"Guess those darned cargo-lifters won't be comin' down before morning, Mr. Kelly," he remarked to his chief officer. "We'll be quit before then. Set an anchor-watch and inform me if anything happens."
"And the engines?" inquired Mr. Kelly.
"Full ahead all the time," replied the skipper, and without offering any explanation, he went to his cabin to snatch a few hours' sleep.
All the rest of that day and throughout the night the port engine kept up its tireless task. The massive propeller in going ahead was constantly throwing aft volumes of water with quantities of mud held in suspension. Slowly but surely the soft slime was being sucked away from the vessel's port bilge, thus making a trench into which, when the time came, the Bronx City would slide sideways.