Now there was that in the ghostly voice that brought Richter’s gin-swollen brain to the realization of the thing he had done in disposing of Gathright by bolting him in the spare boiler.
No good luck had followed that action; Hylda was still disconsolate; trade and smuggling was at a low ebb; there was talk, aboard and ashore, of reducing engineers’ and skippers’ wage to the bone.
Richter had a Teutonic stubbornness; Ezra Morgan had certainly turned against his chief engineer; the thing to do was to lay the ghostly voice, make what repairs were necessary in the boiler-room, and give the tanker’s engines the steam they needed in order to make a quick return passage to San Francisco and please the Henningays.
An insane rage mastered Richter—the same red-vision he had experienced when he threw Gathright out of his daughter’s house. He lowered his bullet head, brushed the curling vapors from his eyes, and plunged through the bulkhead door, bringing up in scalding steam before the after end of the midship, or spare boiler.
Grotesquely loomed all three boilers. They resembled humped-camels kneeling in a narrow shed by some misty river. Steam in quantity came hissing from the central camel; out of the furnace-doors, from a feed-pipe’s packing, around a flange where the gauge-glass was riveted.
The Seriphus climbed a long Pacific roller, steadied, then rocked in the trough between seas; iron plates, gratings, flue-cleaners, scrapers, clattered around Richter who felt the flesh on neck and wrist rising into water blisters.
No one had thought to close the globe-valve in the oil supply line, or to extinguish the fires beneath the spare and leaking boiler. Richter groped through a steam cloud, searching for the hand-wheel on the pipe line. All the metal he touched was simmering hot.
A breath of sea air came down a ventilator; Richter gulped this air and tried to locate the globe-valve with the iron wheel. Vision cleared, he saw the red and open mouth of the central camel—the flannel-like flames and he heard through toothed-bars a voice calling, “Hylda!”
Fergerson and a water tender dragged their chief from the boiler room by the heels; blistered, with the skin peeled from his features, Richter’s eyes resembled hot coals in their madness. Blabbering nonsense, the engineer gave one understandable order:
“Put out th’ fire, draw th’ water, search inside th’ spare boiler—there’s something there, damit!”