"Get busy!" shouted the second above the steady draft of the furnaces. "Pressure's down ten pounds!"
At once the men jerked into action. Tony the Wop, lean flanked and powerful of shoulder, closed the forced draft checks on number three furnace, swung open the door with a clang, and thrust a long slice bar into the glowing clinker. Blackie Judson opened the door of number five, which emitted a leaping tongue of flame. Instinctively, Tod stepped back against the bulkhead. His hand went to his eyes to shield them from those fiery throats which spat forth scorching heat. The draft roared. Shovels scraped the steel flooring. Coal shot quickly into the yawning mouths.
Tony the Wop swung shut his door, opened the forced draft checks, and swung about to lean exhausted on his shovel. He wiped his tortured eyes with a sweat rag, breathing deeply the faint breath of air that drifted down the ventilator openings. Tod gazed at him, fascinated. Tony's profile, as beautifully modelled as a Tuscan urn, shone clear in the firelight. Turning, he gave Tod a wry smile and an eloquent gesture that embodied centuries of vanished splendour.
"This way." The second waved his hand forward.
Tod crossed to a black doorway behind the fiddley ladder and stumbled up the dark incline of a tunnel into the bowels of the ship. He knocked against an iron wheelbarrow. Moving slowly thereafter, he cautiously circled the open mouth of a chute in the deck plates and gazed up at the dim region of the bunkers. An electric light gleamed feebly overhead; the bunkers, rising about him, faded away into deep obscurity.
"Here, Shorty," called the second, "show the kid what to do."
The second departed with a word of warning about keeping the stokers well supplied, and then Shorty the Greek, a black statue of a man, told Tod his duties. The bunkers just forward of the stokehole were empty; the ones on the port side were now being drawn. He was to fill the barrow—long easy sweeps, not too quick—wheel the barrow back to the chute, and dump the coal down to the stokehole.
"By golly, it's hot here!"
"Hot?" Shorty the Greek snarled sharply. "You wait. It's hundred-eighteen now; at noon it be over twenty. ... So long, kid."
Left alone, Tod Moran set to work almost with eagerness. In the dark and soot he soon lost count of the hours as he hurriedly shovelled coal into the iron barrow, wheeled it jerkily down the plates, and tipped the contents into the chute. His thighs and biceps ached; his breath choked on the dust that enveloped his little world like a fog. Remembering a bucket of water which he had seen near the stokehole tunnel, he rushed for it and plunged his caked lips into the tepid liquid. He drank it down in eager gulps. Suddenly he stopped. His mind had envisioned the pitiful figure of the Portuguese fireman on deck. After that, he dared not take more than a mouthful, even though his head swam and his lips grew dry and brittle.
"Say, keed," called Tony once from the tunnel incline, "you work too fas'. You never las' four hours. You crazy."
Tod soon learned to throw the coal in steady, even movements; but by ten o'clock his side was beginning to make itself felt. He wiped the film of dust from his face with a damp sweat cloth which came away black, set his teeth grimly, and stooped again over the coal.
All thoughts of fatigue vanished, however, when he turned his flaming eyes into the darkness at the end of his narrow alley. Dimly he had been aware of a watertight door in the steel bulkhead aft; but immersed in the toil of the first hours, he had not given it a thought. Now, through the swimming heat, a thought had floated to the surface of his consciousness. Beyond that door lay number three hold.
In the days of his convalescence, in his days of chipping paint on deck, he had often glanced at the covered hatches and vaguely wondered what lay below in the holds of the Araby. Here, in the 'tween-decks, he had stumbled upon a doorway. Could he open it and peer within?
He dropped his shovel and crept aft. The door was probably three feet high and half as much across; it was set a foot or more above the plates of the 'tween-decks. An iron handle was screwed fast behind a cleat; and, tug as he would, he could not dislodge it. He was weak yet; that was the trouble. He needed a hammer.
A step sounded behind him. "Hey, you snipe," admonished the second; "the steam's going down and you ain't got no coal below." He punctuated his words with a stream of oaths.
Tod fled back to his barrow. As the man came swiftly toward him through the murky gloom, flinging out an arm in an angry gesture of command, Tod perceived that the second possessed the soul of a junior officer, bullying yet servile.
"Get busy, you scum!" he cried. "The mate'll be complainin' to the chief, and you'll have him down on our heads."
Tod picked up his shovel, slid the blade beneath the coal, and threw it into the barrow. The second vanished toward the throbbing heart of the Araby. Tod lifted the handles and pushed the load along the plates. With a rolling clatter and a rising smoke of black dust the coal disappeared down the chute.
Furnace doors clanged below. Water hissed on fiery clinkers. Above the muffled beat of the engines, voices raised in altercation drifted up the incline. Tod bent his weary head, listening. Surely something was wrong. He dragged his legs over to the tunnel leading to the stokehole.
Oaths ripped across the heavy air. The second was in a tantrum. "Can't keep 'em going?" he shrieked. "I'll make yuh!"
Wide-eyed, Tod Moran stared into the stokehole. The second, with his back to Tod, faced the wrathful figures of Tony the Wop and Blackie Judson, demoniac with their film of grit.
"You keep way. You keep way." Tony backed toward the boilers as the second advanced with a vicious hammer in his upraised hand.
Blackie Judson swung up his shovel. "Blast yer hide ! If you touch me I'll kill yuh, so help me God!"
"Will you git back t' work, you two?" cried the second in a voice of venomous passion. "I'll have the chief put you both in irons—see?" He brandished the hammer threateningly.
Tod Moran, crouching in the darkness of the tunnel entrance, saw Tony the Wop suddenly fling up his heavy slice bar in a fury of rage. "Treat us like pigs! No food—worms, maggots—then keeck us at work. I care no more. I keel you—I keel you!"
The Italian leaped forward. His uplifted slice bar cut toward the second's head.
Tod shivered. A scream bored into his ears. The second went down in a heap, a great bloody gash in his cheek.
A whistle sounded from the engine room. Blackie Judson cringed, wild-eyed, in the opposite corner. "I didn't do it," he whined. "It was the Dago—not me." He cowered there near the third stoker, who watched the scene impassively.
Tony the Wop leaned limply against the bulkhead. He stared, apparently amazed, at his work. His deep chest rose and fell in panting breaths. The second rose to an elbow and struggled to his feet. "You'll pay for this," he snarled, clasping a hand to his bleeding face. "It's the brig for you both."
"It wasn't me, sir," quavered the big form of Blackie Judson. "I can stoke all right."
At that moment the chief engineer appeared in the passageway near the port boiler. His face grew grim. "Attacked you, did he? Get the irons."
Tony the Wop stood wringing his hands; his dark eyes swept round the stokehole, desperate with frantic fear. There was no place to go, no place to hide—unless overboard.
The chief motioned to Blackie Judson. "Get to work, you swine!"
"Yes, sir." Blackie swung open a furnace door. The leaping flames splashed on the plates like spilled blood.
Tod Moran backed up the incline of the tunnel. He saw Mr. Hawkes stride quickly from the engine room. He saw the metallic gleam of handcuffs as the chief engineer stepped forward. In a flash, he had locked them about the wrists of Tony the Wop. Moaning, staring about him with the desperate eyes of a trapped animal, Tony was led away.