CHAPTER X
DIVERSIONS OF THE DELPHIAN
NO, the life at Resthaven could not even be enlivened by invented distractions, but aboard the Delphian invention was not needed to supply excitement. It was a stifling night when the stars seemed to have scorched holes through the heavy blanket of the sky. An ominous oily silence held the sea; the running riffle that flees before the storm sometimes wrinkled it momentarily and passed. Mark went on watch with those stars still burning his brain. Mechanically he went about his task, thrusting his hand here and there upon the great shining machinery with the precision that he had gained in these weeks. His long-nosed oil-can probed about like an animate thing, feeding the lubrication-cups.
"If anything's ever going to heat up, now's its time, if it has human feelings," he thought, wiping his forehead with the back of a wet, oily hand.
Suddenly he came awake with a snap, mentally as well as physically. He went to his chief in a few bounds.
"Report a hot eccentric-strap, sir," he said. "Will you look at it?"
The engineer on watch went with him swiftly and with no words till he gave his brief orders. The strap was dosed with oil and sulphur, the water-service was put on, and the engine-room force kept watch over it as one might over a sick child. The engines were slowed, and the Delphian proceeded carefully through the darkness.
When Mark came on deck the great stars had been smothered by cloud. The ship climbed long rollers whose crests hissed with phosphorescent foam. The Pacific seemed to be belying its name, he thought. He leaned beside the boiler-hatch for a time, thinking drowsily of the hot eccentric-strap, rather priding himself on his quickness in recognizing trouble. Then he wondered why he stood there—there were not even those sullen stars to see. He stumbled to bed and slept instantly.
He woke later—broad awake in a flash—with a wild feeling of disaster; the feeling that snatches instinctively at the heart when a ship's engines stop at sea in the night. For the Delphian was rolling to immense waves without steerage way; the thrum of her engines was still. Mark flung himself into his clothes, for only one thought filled him—that somehow this must be his fault; his the blame that the Delphian lay helpless, pitching to the sea's before a gathering storm. "Disgrace—disgrace—disgrace—" the phantom voice of the still engines rebuked him as he went swiftly down the dirty iron ladders.
The youngest engineer greeted him. In grimy dungaree, with the black look of the mid-watch on his face, he could scarcely have been identified with the banjo-twanging wag of the mess-room.
"Hot eccentric-strap," he explained, as though Mark had never heard of such a thing before. "Slowed the engine—no good. Turned the hose on the blame thing—no good, nasty mess. Ready to seize any minute and knock the valve-gear into a cocked hat. Stopped to see what's the matter."
The hose had indeed made a nasty mess. Men were stripping the gear. The engine-room showed a sort of orderly confusion. Mark sighed thankfully that it was the natural perversity of the strap, and no carelessness of his, that had caused the trouble. But there was a cause: one of the pins holding the brass liner to the strap had worked out.
"Well, you can't blame her getting hot over a thing like that," muttered the youngest engineer. "I lost a pin myself, one time—a diamond one, I'll say—and I was hot enough over it."
The chief scowled bitterly in the direction of the youngest engineer, who went to work with a snap.
So the Delphian, presently reassured by the steady drum of her engine, swung on again.
"Fixed up ahead of the storm, anyway," Mark reflected, on deck again, peering against the wind. "But she's coming, all right."
He wondered, yawningly, if it was worth while to go to bed for the third time that night. Something impelled him to keep awake—a tingling sense of adventure incomplete haunted him.
But he was no less surprised when the engine stopped again, with an air of finality this time. He tumbled down the engine-room companionway. It was the youngest engineer who again gave him the information he wanted.
"I. P. valve-stem's busted," he remarked. "Just plain busted, for no reason at all. This is our busy night. The Chief's mad as thunder."
"What's he going to do?" Mark inquired, aghast.
"Take out the I. P. valve and run on the H. P. and L. P. engines, I reckon," said the youngest engineer. "That's a rotten combination. We'll be doing the toddle, my boy. We can't get doctored up till Honolulu, either. Gosh, what a funeral procession we'll be! Wonder what the skipper's doing all this time?"
The skipper was busy. Talking now to the engine-room through the tube, now to the deck-officer beside him, he stood on the bridge watching his ship take sea after sea. It had been necessary to stop the engines so suddenly that she was not hove to, and she kept falling off broadside and rolling in the trough of vast seas that flung themselves upon her out of the dark. But the captain knew his vessel. He let her alone, and, struggling and lifting, she gradually found her own bearings and hove herself to.
Alan sat at his post, ready to fling a swift S. O. S. into the storm if he should hear the order; meanwhile watching the gaunt seas catch and worry the ship, showing sharp fangs of white water about her. Mark, deep in the engine-room never knew quite how wild a night it was; Alan, shut off from the activity of the rest of the ship, seemed alone with the storm. Suddenly, as never before, he felt the stir of the Ingram sea-blood. His grandfather, his great-grandfather, had weathered worse gales than this in ships the Delphian could stow in her cargo-hold. They had mastered great winds with matchless seamanship, challenged them with split canvas, and driven through ice-bound Antarctic seas under bare poles. All at once the Delphian seemed a poor thing, cringing helpless, with nothing to aid her, now that her engine was still. Alan suddenly understood some of Jane's proud disdain for steam and felt a kindling flash of sympathy for her dreams. He cried out aloud, incoherently, for wilder adventure, and the chief wireless man, who knew it to be his first voyage, said:
"Steady, lad! "We're not at all done for."
Alan glared at him pityingly, but said nothing, for he did not, himself, understand his curious sense of exaltation.
At last the engine-room bell tinkled hopefully, there was a shudder and swirl as the screw turned slowly over, and the crippled engine took up its heavier work. Little by little the Delphian swung, till wind and sea were a few points on her bow and she lifted confidently, reassured. Her engines were going just enough to give her steerage way, and so she crawled through the night, now paling to morning, without trying to do more than keep out of harm's way.
Day broke over a sea still vastly shaken by the storm, but growing gradually more calm under a brightening sky. The piling rollers stretched over a limitless waste—astern, ahead, abeam—a huge, silent, swinging sea, with the Delphian all alone in the middle of it. She had settled to her work now, making the best of it, as she plodded along grimly toward Honolulu.
Mark and Alan met in the first dog-watch to discuss the perils of the night and their share in them. If Alan remembered his wild mood in the wireless-room, he kept silence concerning it, for Mark would have scoffed. They leaned idly at the rail, talking now of the engine trouble, now of the eternal topic of their plans on reaching China.
A shadow fell across Mark's shoulder, and they turned to see Chun Lon, in his white duck coat and Chinese shoes, shuffling silently along the deck. He approached them with an ingratiating smile and folded his thin yellow hands demurely before him.
"You like nice cup of tea?" he inquired.
"No, thanks," Mark retorted briefly.
"Pletty ti'ed," Chun Lon continued. "Ship no sleep last night. I make you one nice tiny cup of tea velly soon."
"We don't want any tea, I tell you," Mark said, turning around.
Chun Lon sighed and dropped to a squatting attitude near the boys.
"I like make you tea," he proceeded. "I like be fliends with, you, because you go Shanghai-side. I Shanghai man," he added, with some pride.
He inched himself a little nearer, sitting on his heels.
"I tell you what," he said. "I know all evlyt'ing Shanghai—tiny little piecee boy I know Shanghai—always. You want to know all evlyt'ing Shanghai, you ask Chun Lon, yes?"
"Very kind of you," said Alan, "but we have friends who'll tell us what we want to know."
"Ah, fliends!" Chun Lon cried, shuffling closer. "I say fliends! I say Chineeman you' fliend. Listen! You got maybe Chinee talk in paper no understand? Melican fliend no can tell you what. I velly clev'—can do. Can make all Chinee talk Melican talk, see, yes?"
"What makes you think we have Chinese papers?" Mark asked sharply, wheeling upon him.
Chun Lon merely blinked his narrow eyes slowly.
"Maybe not," he said amiably. "You make pidgin—you make business Shanghai-side, so you maybe have Chinee paper—maybe not. Now I go make nice cup of tea."
"Confound him and his tea!" Mark growled, watching Chun Lon's sliding gait as he departed. "What do you suppose that little play was about?"
"Do you think he was really trying to be friendly?" Alan asked, dubiously.
"I do not," Mark replied. "Not he. I don't like the cut of his jib. But I don't see what he can do to us, exactly. I think he's on the wrong track."
However, Mark diligently inspected his locker that evening and assured himself that the papers in his wallet were undisturbed.
"He's a good little guesser, that's all," Mark decided, as he turned in.