Over the patch of comparative calm oars dipped, and a mate, in charge of the small boat lowered from the Seriphus, succeeded in getting off the survivors who were clinging to the freighter’s taffrail.
The small boat lived in a sea that had foundered big ships. It returned to the tanker’s bow; and the four men, bruised, broken, all half-dead from immersion, were hoisted to the forepeak and taken aft. Two were Japanese sailors and two were Americans—a wireless operator and an engineer. The engineer had a broken leg which required setting, and the wireless operator was in a bad fix; wreckage had stove in his features, and twisted his limbs.
Ezra Morgan was a rough and ready surgeon-doctor; he turned the Seriphus over to the first-mate and made a sick room out of Richter’s cabin. The chief protested.
“Get below to your damn steam!” roared Ezra Morgan. “You hated to see me bring aboard these poor seamen; you said I wasted fuel oil; your breath smells like a gin-mill. Below with you, sir!”
The engine-room and boiler-room of the tanker, she being in water ballast, was not unlike an inferno; the first-mate, acting on Ezra Morgan’s instructions, drove the Seriphus at three-quarter speed into a series of head-on waves; the ship rolled and yawed, tossed, settled down astern, then her screw raced in mingled foam and brine.
Richter’s stomach belched gas; he became sea-sick, climbed into a foul-smelling “ditty-box” of a cabin, aft the engine-room, and attempted to sleep off the effect of the gin. Picture-post-cards, mostly of actresses, a glaring electric over the bunk, oil and water swishing the metal deck below, and the irritating clank of irregular-running engines drove sleep away from him.
Fergerson, the silent second-engineer, came into the “ditty-box” at eight bells, or four o’clock. Fergerson’s thumb jerked forward.
“I’ll have t’ use that spare boiler,” said he.
“What’s th’ matter, now?”
“Feed-pipes clogged in starb’ard one, sir.”