with oil. All he knew was that he and Binhart were at last under way.
He was filled with a new lightness of spirit as he felt the throb of "full speed ahead" shake the steel hull about which he so contentedly climbed and crawled. He found something fortifying in the thought that this vast hull was swinging out to her appointed sea lanes, that she was now intent on a way from which no caprice could turn her. There seemed something appeasingly ordered and implacable in the mere revolutions of the engines. And as those engines settled down to their labors the intent-eyed men about him fell almost as automatically into the routines of toil as did the steel mechanism itself.
When at the end of the first four-houred watch a gong sounded and the next crew filed cluttering in from the half-lighted between-deck gangways and came sliding down the polished steel stair rails, Blake felt that his greatest danger was over.
There would still be an occasional palm to grease, he told himself, an occasional bit
