Then he felt a hand extended over him; and a sense of blessedness, of divine love, soothed all his fears, gave him to rest, to sleep.
VIII
In the fore cabin Bill sat up dazed, haunted, terrified by the sense of something awful. He shoved the hatch aside, letting the starlight into the dark forecastle of the barge, then pulled on his boots, and scrambled up upon the white, dimly glittering frost of the deck. Stiff with cold, he flogged his arms about his body until his fingers tingled with pain, and stamped until he felt the blood returning into his numb feet. Then he went aft, and opened the cabin hatch. He took the flint and steel from his pocket, struck a brisk shower of sparks into the tinder, kindled a sulphur match, and held the blue light down. His mother lay in the bunk, stone dead. His father's body lay stretched on the deck, a bloody sheath knife clutched in the stiff right hand.
Now, of a sudden, the whole memory of the dream glowed in his brain, and ghastly pale, sweating at the palms of the hands, and at his neck, he realized the truth. He dared not go down into that place. Even as Rain had warned him, he knew that his mother was dead. Shuddering even at the touch of the woodwork which enclosed the tomb, he closed the hatchway, then found the dinghy's painter, hauled in, and dropped into the boat.
The flood tide swept him up the estuary, and the faint shadow of the barge melted away in the mist under the frosty starlight.
IX
Mr. James Watt, a canny Scots body, ye ken, was the man who changed the steam engine from a capricious plaything into a working servant of mankind. He did not believe in railway locomotives, but his marine engines were the pride and glory of Messrs. Boulton & Watt, of Birmingham. Mr. Fulton, of New York, bought one of them, you may remember, and used it to run a barge on Hudson River, the first to ply with passengers, they say. Mr. Watt did not live to see the little brigantine Beaver engined at Blackwall yard in 1835, but that was as good a job as any done by the famous firm. The boiler had a steam pressure of seven pounds, and when in later years it rusted through, the engineer would plug the holes with a pointed stick and a rag. And yet that engine lasted and worked well for fifty-two years, until the warship became a neglected tug and in 1889 was cast away in the cliffs of Stanley Park within the city limits of Vancouver in British Columbia.
The Beaver's registered tonnage was 110, so her size was that of a second-rate wooden steam trawler in our modern fishing. She carried four brass six-pounder guns, each small enough for a man to lift by the trunnions. When she had business with savage tribes, to trade with them or bombard their villages, she set out boarding nettings, so she could not be rushed. The crew numbered thirty, sufficient for the methods of lick, spit, and polish to which her lickspittle bully of a Captain, Mr. David Home, devoted his whole soul.
A real live duchess christened the Beaver, and if I remember rightly Mr. Brunel, the engineer, left his work, hard by in the Thames Tunnel, to witness the cracking of the bottle. The owners attended in force, the Governor and Company of Merchant Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay, all in top hats, white chokers, and swallow-tails. Most likely they cracked quite a lot of bottles.
The engine was in position, but the sponsons, paddle boxes, and paddles were stored in the forehold for the voyage under sail round Cape Horn.