“Something else—”
Richter got away from Ezra Morgan on a pretense of going below to the boiler-room. Instead of going below, however, he went aft and leaned over the taffrail. Somehow or other, he feared that spare boiler and the consequence of conscience.
Limping, with three-quarters of the necessary steam pressure, the Seriphus reached Mindanao and was forced to return to California without repairs to the port boiler. While repairs, new tubes and tube-sheet were put in place by boilersmiths, Richter saw his daughter, who had come west from music school.
The change in her was pronounced; she spoke not at all of Gathright, whose disappearance she could not understand; and Richter, keen where his daughter was concerned, realized that her thinness and preoccupation was on account of the missing electrician.
“I get you a fine fellow,” he promised Hylda.
He brought several eligible marine engineers to the house. Hylda snubbed them and cried in secret.
An urgent telegram called Richter back to the Seriphus. He made two long voyages, one down Chili-way, the other half around the world, before the tanker’s bow was turned toward California. Much time had elapsed from the night he had thrust Gathright into the spare boiler and turned on the oil-jets beneath its many tubes. Once, in Valparaiso, an under engineer pointed out red rust leaking from the gauge-glass of the spare boiler.
“Looks like blood,” commented this engineer.
Richter scoffed, but that afternoon he drank himself stupid on kummel, obtained from an engineer’s club ashore. Another time, just after the tanker left the port of Aden on her homebound passage, a stowaway crawled out from beneath the cold boiler and gave Richter the fright of his life.
“Why, mon,” said Fergerson, who was present in the boiler-room, “that’s only a poor wisp o’ an Arab.”