He regarded her rather wistfully for an instant, felt unusually hesitant, and told her the truth because he could not bring himself to tell her anything else.
“If it is a Spanish cruiser yonder, as I mistrust, she may make short work of us. But she has to catch us first. And if I was easy to catch I would not be here at all. Sooner than risk a hair of your head, Miss Forbes, I would give up meself and my ship. But a man’s duty comes first.”
“You are not to give me—to give us, one thought,” she warmly assured him, and her head was held high. “Thank you for being honest with me, Captain O’Shea. Do you wish us to stay on deck?”
Perplexed and unhappy, he answered:
“There is no safe place to stow you if the Spaniard gets within shooting range. The hold is full of cartridges and dynamite and such skittish truck.”
The steamer astern was still slowly gaining on the Fearless. Her forward mast was now discernible, and the tiny ring around it was unmistakably a fighting-top. If the vessel belonged to any other navy than that of Spain, she would be jogging along at a cruising gait, instead of crowding in chase with a reckless consumption of coal. Captain O’Shea ran below to see how matters fared in the sooty, stifling kingdom of Johnny Kent. The Fearless could not turn and fight. All hopes of safety were bound up in those clanking, throbbing, shining engines, in the hissing boilers, in the gang of half-naked, grimy men who fed the raging furnaces and wielded the glowing slice-bars and shifted the coal from the cavernous bunkers.
The quivering needles of the gauges already recorded more steam than the law allowed, and they were creeping higher pound by pound. The heat in the fire-room was so intense that the men had to be relieved at brief intervals. There was no forced ventilation, and the wind was following the ship. The deck-hands, unaccustomed to grilling alive, stood to it pluckily until they collapsed and were hauled out by the head and the heels. Back and forth, between the engine-room and this inferno, waddled Johnny Kent, raining perspiration, an oil-can in one hand, a heavy wrench in the other, and with the latter he smote such faint-hearted wights as would falter while there was strength in them.
“Hello, Cap’n Mike,” he roared as the skipper sidled into the engine-room. “Is the other vessel still gainin’ on us, and what does she look like?”
“She looks like trouble, Johnny. We are doing better. How are things with you?”
“I need a couple of husky men. No use sendin’ me those limpsy patriots.”