“And ye hope to give me the slip in the meantime,” and Captain O’Shea showed no ill-will. “Very well, Charley. One thing at a time. Now take these glasses and have a look at the coast. By my reckoning, we are far enough to the north’ard to begin to haul inshore.”
The Whang Ho was laboring abeam of a monotonous expanse of marshy islands and ragged shoals made by the silt of river floods. The shifting channels were poorly charted, for trade sought the inland water-ways. The fact that the Tai Yan steamer, with McDougal and Jim Eldridge on board, had somehow found a passage leading from the sea convinced Captain O’Shea that he could do likewise with a considerably smaller vessel. Charley Tong Sin had admitted that he knew the way in, and he was no more anxious to be drowned than the rest of the company.
“With good luck we can scrape over the sandbars on the afternoon tide,” said the comprador, “and anchor in deep water for the night. I cannot show you where to go in the dark. There are no lights.”
The Whang Ho edged steadily nearer the coast. Her crew gazed ahead at the frothing breakers that tumbled over the far-extended shoals, and appeared unhappy. By a miracle their steamer was still under them after struggling through rough winds and high seas, and now they were to be wrecked, so all signs indicated, in a God-forsaken region of sand and swamp and mud. However, there was no whimpering. Captain O’Shea, their overlord, had a trick of knocking a man down and then listening to his complaints. And he was as ready with a word of commendation as he was with his disciplinary fists.
“Mr. Kittridge, if we hit bottom, put it to her and jam her over,” he remarked to the chief engineer. “A chum of mine by the name of Johnny Kent that sailed with me and held your berth used to clamp his safety-valves when he had urgent need of steam. Did ye ever try it?”
“God forbid!” fervently ejaculated Mr. Kittridge; “but in this crazy tub a man will do anything. If you find yourself flyin’ to glory with a section of a boiler pokin’ in the small of your back, don’t lay it against me, sir.”
“I like the way ye talk, Mr. Kittridge. Stand by your engines, if ye please, for we will be in the white water before long.”
The Whang Ho sheered to one side and shouldered past the outermost shoals. O’Shea took the wheel, and Charley Tong Sin, cool and quick-witted, told him how to follow the turbid, twisting channel that wound its course between the sea and the wide mouth of the estuary. More than once the steamer scraped the oozy bottom, hung and shivered while the breakers pounded her, and then stubbornly forged ahead, timbers groaning, boilers hissing, propeller kicking up clouds of mud astern. It was evident that the channel had shoaled in places since any other steamer had made the passage, and it was not at all certain that the Whang Ho could stand the strain of forcing her way to sea again.
“I have not been here since two years ago,” said the comprador. “It is worse than I expected, you bet! Ai oh, a man that sails with you dies a dozen deaths, Captain O’Shea.”
“I find it more comfortable than living in the best hotel in Shanghai,” very pointedly returned the shipmaster as he climbed the spokes of the big wooden wheel with hands and feet and wrenched the Whang Ho clear of a hungry sand-spit. By now she was fairly in the midst of the marshy islands that extended from the watery main-land. The violence of the surf was broken and the tide moved in broad, sluggish currents. Mr. Parkinson, who was swinging the sounding lead, shouted that the channel had deepened to five fathoms. The steamer had survived the passage.