“I have no sympathy with them; none whatever. Lacking intelligence, fitness, they must labor for those who have earned or won the right to rule them.”
“’Tis your opinion that might makes right?” spoke up O’Shea.
“Always, everywhere!” declared the scientist. “The mind is the man. The founders of your government proclaimed the fallacy that all men are equal, but your strong men know better, and they ride and exploit your masses.”
“It’s the best country God ever made,” cried Johnny Kent with some heat.
“I beg your pardon”; and the chemist bowed. “It was a rudeness for me to speak so.”
As they left the table he gave them his card with a touch of formality, and they discovered that his name was Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz.
Three hours later the passengers were notified that the Alsatian would be ready to sail next morning. It was learned that the company had been able to recruit an unexpectedly large number of unemployed firemen among the boarding-houses and taverns of the Liverpool water-front. They were willing to take the places of the strikers, and it was hoped that the liner could be sent to sea with a fairly complete complement of men. Apparently the strikers had been poorly advised and led, for they were beaten with no great inconvenience to the management of the company.
As soon as the Alsatian had lifted anchor and was steaming out of the Mersey the passengers ceased grumbling, and settled into the comfortable, somnolent routine of a modern transatlantic voyage. A party of poker-players mobilized in the smoking-room. The ladies reclined all in a row in their steamer-chairs on the lee side of the deck, like so many shawl-wrapped mummies. The spoiled American child whanged the life out of the long-suffering piano in the music-room. A few conscientious persons undertook to walk so many miles around the deck each day. There was much random conversation, a spice of flirtation, and a vast deal of eating and sleeping. That hectoring gentleman Jenkins P. Chase spent most of the time in his own rooms, where he was ministered to by his physician, his secretary, and his valet.
Captain O’Shea and Johnny Kent enjoyed the luxury of such a voyage as this. There was no responsibility to burden them on the bridge or in the engine-room. No one guessed that they were uncommonly capable mariners, accustomed to command. Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz seemed to find their company congenial, and tried to make them talk about themselves. His curiosity was politely dissembled, but O’Shea took note of it and built up an elaborate fiction to the effect that he was a pavement contractor in New York with friends at Tammany Hall, while Johnny Kent found genuine satisfaction in posing as a retired farmer from the State of Maine. It occurred to O’Shea to remark to his comrade as they were undressing in their room on the second night at sea:
“The chemical professor suspects we are not what we seem. And he is anxious to fathom us.”