“They’re a-tearing the bloomin’ ship to pieces,” he confided, and then withdrew as Medway’s step sounded on the ladder.
“How’s she workin’?” he asked briefly.
“All right,” replied Jack; “plenty of steam now.”
“Yes; and we’ll have plenty if we tear everything out of the old hooker and leave nothing but the shell,” ground out Medway fiercely.
“Gracious, Tom,” remarked Jack a few minutes later, before he turned in, “I guess they’re stripping the ship of everything that’ll burn. Hark at that?”
Above the rumble of the engines they could hear plainly through the ventilators the crashing of axes on deck, as the vandals in charge of the yacht hacked down anything that would burn, in their mad desire to reach whatever haven they were aiming for. But if the boys could have been on deck they would have perceived a strong reason for these desperate efforts to keep the yacht moving. Out of the south there was coming toward them a dread harbinger of the terror of those waters.
A sickly-looking yellow halo around the sun, a sullen heaving of the sea, which was of an odd, metallic hue, and a queer odor in the atmosphere, which was still as death,—all these signs, coupled with an alarming drop in the barometer, showed those in charge of this ominous voyage that a tropical hurricane was fast approaching, and that for the second time since the boys had come on board her the Valkyrie was in for a battle for existence.
But of all this, of course, they knew nothing. All they realized was that it was insufferably hot in their oily, murky engine-room. From time to time they were compelled to go to the funnel-shaped bottom of one of the ventilators to get even a breath of air. Medway or Hemming kept dodging up and down all day, and each time they appeared their faces were furrowed more deeply with anxiety.
It was about the middle of Tom’s watch, namely five-thirty in the afternoon, that the boy, without the slightest warning, was lifted almost off his feet by a heavy lurch of the ship. He saved himself from slipping into the revolving machinery only by clutching at an upright stanchion. At the same instant his ears were assailed by a diabolical screeching, as a wind, like the blast from a furnace mouth, was forced down the ventilators. It was an unearthly sound; a bedlam like that which might have been the fitting accompaniment of a witches’ frolic.
Jack, fast asleep on the couch, was rolled violently off it and grabbed by Tom in time to save him from tumbling into the crank-pit.