The Kanaka said Longarm was sure smart.
To which Longarm could only reply, “Not hardly. This fuel gauge is the snake in the grass I can only guess at. I have it on authority of the Union Pacific that you burn around five pounds of coal an hour for each and every horsepower of your steam engine. This here’s a forty-horsepower engine. But it’s burning oil, which weighs a quarter as much as coal for the same amount of heat. so let’s see, a pint is a pound the world around, so a gallon of oil ought to give off the heat of sixty-four pounds of coal and … Kee-rist!”
The big Sandwich Islander swore as loud in his own odd lingo as gallons of seawater poured down the ladder to slosh ankle-deep or deeper across the duckboards. The dimly lit chamber filled with brine-scented mist as some seawater sloshed against the hot metal of the firebox, and Monakai sobbed, “Tangaroa and Tiki Jesus, we are sinking!”
Longarm told him not to blubber up about it, and added, “We’d best go topside just in case you’re right. I told that gal she was setting full sail at a mighty awkward time!”
Monakai wasn’t listening. He was already halfway up the ladder.
Then all the water sloshed into one corner and stayed there as the hull stayed on her starboard side at an ominous angle. So Longarm set the throttle at dead slow and went topside after the big Kanaka.
He wasn’t certain he should have, as his face got lashed and his duds got soaked through by horizontal wind and rain. He groped his way aft through the howling darkness to find Irena Dandolo singing, or screaming, at the wheel as she steered them over rolling ranges of foaming brine with one rail under. Longarm had to almost shove his nose up her ear for her to hear him as he shouted, “You’re fixing to capsize us! You can’t leave all your canvas up in a full gale!”
She cackled like a pretty witch jerking off with her broom and insisted, “Of course I can. You call this a gale? Wait until you ride out a hurricane with us! Foul weather is the friend of pirates and smugglers. We must be making eighteen knots in this squall, but alas, it is already letting up!”
Longarm shouted, “You call this a letup?” as green water came over the taffrail to soak them both to the thighs. But he had to allow they weren’t heeled over quite as far now, and the wind had died from actually painful to just frightening.
Irena asked him why he’d throttled back the engine. He made note of the fact that she knew what she was doing after all, and told her, “We were wasting fuel stirring foam with the screw out of the water that often. I left her turning over fast enough to keep from dragging against the sails, and it’s best to be using some steam with fire under the boiler than it is to let it just build up with nobody manning the relief valve.”
She swung the wheel to catch more wind as they crested a sea. Then she said, “Maybe I should sign you on as my engineer. For why did you break Bajo’s face like so? Were you jealous? Listen, is not true I have been sleeping with Bajo. He just likes to talk. I never sleep with anyone who works for me. Is very bad for business for to do that. How do you fire a lazy worker after you have let him pick your flowers, eh?”
Longarm nodded gravely and allowed he followed her drift as she steered a course a New England skipper might have found too rich for his blood.
Longarm told her he’d pistol-whipped Bajo for getting in the way while he was trying to make sure they weren’t fixing to blow up. He added, “It ain’t that I’m an infernal steam engineer, Miss Irena. But I’ve seen a steam boiler blow a time or more and it ain’t a pretty sight.” She asked if he had any idea how much steam they could count on between where they were and the Colorado Delta.
He answered truthfully, “I can’t say. If we can coax eight or ten miles an hour out of this tub, we ought to have enough. If we can’t, we don’t. Where were you figuring on refilling your fuel tanks, up Arizona way?”
She laughed and asked what made him think the storm-lashed cutter would be coming back from Arizona. Then they crested a whopper of a wave and the wind-filled sails laid El Tiberon Blanco on her beam ends.
Longarm was sure they were fixing to turn turtle. Someone else was too. For the vessel began to slowly right herself as the wild gal at the wheel shouted, “Condenado! Who reefed the mainsail without my permiso?”
Longarm could just make out the bare mast whipping back and forth against the rain-lashed overcast as the big Sandwich Islander, Monakai, joined them in the half flooded cockpit to shout, above the gale-force wind, “You were driving her under! The hero Maui with all his mana could not ride out a blow like this with two hulls if he had those damned sails set!”
Irena yelled, “Eso es una mierda! I know what I am doing, and I ought to send you back to your cannibal island for to be sucking on your mother’s chupa like the big baby you are!”
Before the impassive Kanaka could answer, the wind died as if some monstrous door had slammed shut in the sky behind them, and while the waves rolled on as high, the surface was now smooth and black as India ink.
Then the full moon was smiling down on them through the thinning cloud cover, and Irena laughed and said, “Our Inspector Gomez knew what he was talking about. If we had survived that squall line in our smaller schooner, this bigger tub and its Gatling would be leaving port at this moment for to hunt us down as we sat becalmed with no engine! Take the helm, Monakai. El Brazo Largo and I must go below and see how far we can push this hull with no help from the wind!”
She didn’t have to tell Longarm to follow her. He wanted to know as much as she did. Down in the engine room the water they’d taken through the hatch had drained away into the bilge, but the lamp had gone out and the only light came from the blue flames of the firebox under the boiler. It worked something like a glorified oil stove. An inventor back East had patented an air-blower to fan such flames far hotter. But the notion hadn’t caught on as yet. Modern machinery was complicated enough without having to gussy it up with fancier gingerbread.
As Longarm relit the lamp, he asked what she’d meant about having no serious plans about a return trip. He asked if she and her crew planned on settling down north of the border.
She shook her curly head and replied, “Someday, after we rid poor Mexico of that Chingado Diaz, I may be the first woman admiral of the marina federate. El Gato told me you were most serious about the laws of your own country and that I should not let you catch me breaking any Yanqui laws before I got you locura de amor. I fear I do not see why this should be so. To betray a lover for La Causa is considered muy romantics where I come from.”
Longarm laughed as he got out his notebook and pencil stub to calculate their fuel reserves, observing, “It’s my own fault I told El Gato that much about our courts of law as we were killing a long night around a campfire. That boy sure has a wicked sense of humor. He thought it was mighty funny that I wasn’t supposed to mess with a female suspect, lest her lawyer use that against us at her trial.”
He jotted down some dial figures, calculated roughly, and assured her there was no way in hell they were ever going to steam all that way north to Yuma. Then he said, “I figure you got enough oil to carry us a tad over a hundred miles, depending on how you nurse your steam. So that leaves us forty to sixty miles short of the mouth of the Colorado, and Gomez will have wired San Luis Rio Colorado that we’re on our way.”