Then the engineer appeared, backing out of the motor-room, and mopping the blood on his forehead with a silk scarf. Gaining the steering-well he drew himself up and salaamed.
"Why sahib stop engine?" he inquired.
"'Cause the propeller blades are gone," replied Mostyn. "Savvy? Blades—screw—no can do. Like this."
He tried to convey the magnitude of the disaster by means of dumb show. The native failed to understand. Being aground mattered little to him; being slung about like a pea in a box he took more or less as a matter of course. The thing—the thing that counted—was the fact that the sahib had taken unto himself the duty of Abdullah Bux, engineer of the Sahib Captain's launch, and had stopped the motor. Abdullah Bux felt that on that account he had a grievance.
The launch was lying well down by the head in about a couple of inches of water. Her stem had struck a waterlogged tree trunk almost buried in the soft mud. The impact had lifted her bows well clear of the water, the greater portion of the keel passing over the obstruction until, the bows dropping and plunging into the mud, the boat came to a standstill. Then it was that the swiftly moving propeller had fouled the log, with the result that the three blades were shorn off close to the boss.
"Tide still ebbing," remarked Peter. "We're properly on it, Miss Baird."
"Yes, unfortunately," was the rejoinder. "There's no way of getting her off till the tide makes?"
"Might try kedging her off," suggested Mostyn.
"A kedge wouldn't hold in this slime," declared the practical Miss Baird, "even if you were able to lay it out. But you can't. The mud's too soft."
Peter sounded with an oar. The blade sank almost without resistance to a depth of three feet in the noxious slime.