"What do you think has happened ashore, Rube?" asked Sallie very anxiously as he reappeared from below.
"I wish I knew, lass," he answered, no less concerned. "I'll go and find out what Brasse—"
"I must see Mr. Brasse too," she told him. "He's promised—" She turned to the stranger.
"The stokehold's the only place on board where you will be safe," she said, somewhat uncertainly. "Will you mind very much—"
"I'll shovel coal most contentedly," he assured her at once, in a tone that was still very tremulous. "And—how to show my gratitude to both of you, for the chance, I—I can't—"
His voice broke. He could say no more. His silent self-control had been too sorely tried.
"Come on, then," said Reuben Yoxall uncomfortably. And Sallie clutched at the big, stolid Englishman's arm again and clung to it as they went forward, along the dark empty decks.
On the bridge, in the dim, vaporous light at one side of the white hood within which the carbon was burning, they caught sight of the chief engineer, a raggedly disreputable-looking individual, with features haggard, refined to the pitch of foolishness, rendered still more fatuous by the single eye-glass he always affected and which he had worn even while, when he had first joined the ship, he himself had worked in the stokehold as one of the black gang who feed the furnaces. Brasse was one of a number of human enigmas who had followed Captain Dove's flag and fortunes for uncounted years, and Sallie had long ago heard the common report that there was a hangman's rope waiting for him somewhere ashore.
He looked round as she approached, and his perspiring face expressed heartfelt relief.
"Just a moment," he begged, and once more applied an eye to the telescope trained parallel with the light.