Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,121

was not Plon Plon’s “war-chest,” I was mightily mistaken.

There was no means of calling attention. This was as far as I should get—or wished to get. I would go back, explain the situation, and suggest that Lieutenant Cabell should come down with me. He, at least, could try to make a formal request. I had nothing but my steamer ticket, no credentials whatever. No one would unlock that steel grille just to please me.

As I passed the dials of the engine-room again, the pistons had settled to a crossing speed of thirty-three revolutions per minute, still driving us “Full Ahead.” The gleaming brass of the overhead telegraph dial, connecting the engine-room with the navigating-bridge, confirmed this. The engineers saw nothing of the outside world while on duty. A link that appeared like a bicycle chain connected the handle of the telegraph on the bridge with the hand on the repeater dial of the engine-room as the captain’s orders jangled down here. The engineers themselves had now found their perches, one with a pipe, another with a newspaper, glancing up at the dials from time to time as if the ship would drive herself.

I put my hand on the steel wall to one side of this open view and snatched it off again. The heat would almost raise a blister. This was the partition of the passageway from the stokehold and the boilers. The crack of a metal door between the stokers and the engineers reflected an intermittent yellow flame-light.

Just then, the donkey-man was attending to the machinery with his oil-can and wad of cotton waste. The second engineer was reading his paper by the reversing gear, as they call it. The door of the stokehold opened. A man like a tall hobgoblin was standing in the alleyway that leads to the furnace. The engineer turned and shouted at him. I knew enough French to understand “Allez-vous en!” as the soot-faced scallywag was ordered back to his work. He was a tall rather bent fellow in vest and overalls, with a cap worn back to front. Truly he looked like something from the underworld. Soot covered his face until nothing was visible but the pink of his lips and the whites of his eyes. Very likely he had come aboard more than a little drunk. The engineer swore at him again and scouted him back to his duties, just at the moment all the stokers were needed to shovel up coal from the bunkers and toss it into the furnaces. I guessed that this malingering lout might be dismissed next day.

For a moment the man continued to defy the engineer, as if for the pure fun of the thing. It seemed he was demanding a “proper” drink, not the enamel jugs of water provided in the stokehold. He had presumably shovelled several hundredweights of coal into the furnaces since Ostend. But he was wasting his words. At length, having made his point, he shambled back down the narrow passage to the boilers, where reflected flames flickered on the white-painted iron. I thought after all that if I was condemned to work in such conditions—and for such wages—I might well take to the bottle.

I was so far away in my thoughts that I almost jumped like a cat at a sudden voice behind me.

“Dr.Vastson?”

I turned and found myself staring into the spectacled face of the man who had rowed his boat from Ostend harbour pier to collect our heavy mooring rope. He had carried it back to the jetty, looped it over a bollard, and waved us farewell as the winch in the stern of the steamer turned our bows seawards and the rope was cast off again. He still wore his greasy cap, bulky donkey jacket, and moleskin trousers with worn-out knees. But I had watched him wave us off from the harbour pier, across a hundred yards of open sea, as we steamed away. He could never row after us at the speed of the ship’s engines! How was he here? The face with its eyes vastly magnified by his lenses was one I did not know—or so it seemed, until a slight change in his glance and the removal of the spectacles betrayed him by his smile as Sherlock Holmes!

He turned his head away.

“Listen carefully, Watson, and do not appear to notice me.”

Fortunately, we were leaning on the safety rail where the vibration of the engines made our words inaudible more than a few inches distant. I turned aside