"Look there!" he gasped, pointing.

"Yon bit cloud, ye mean?" said the cautious Angus.

"No, no, man--the Orinoco!" cried the frantic skipper.

"Oh--the shup! Aye, aye!" replied Mr. Angus, rather pleased than otherwise.

"There's a crew on board her," continued Kingdom shakily. "And she's got steam on her, too!"

"Aye," said Mr. Angus. "I doot somebody will have closed yon sea-c.o.c.k again."

"Who can it be?" demanded the captain feverishly. "Surely we left no one on board. I told Dingle to take that fellow Marrable in his boat."

"Perhaps," suggested Mr. Angus, "yin of the other boats cam' back."

Kingdom pointed impatiently to two small specks upon the horizon.

"They're there," he said.

"Maybe some liner has come across her and left a bit crew on board her,"

continued the fertile Mr. Angus.

"If so, we'd have seen the liner," replied Kingdom irritably.

He took up his binoculars and began to scrutinise the Orinoco, which had altered her course a few points in their direction.

Mr. Angus had a fresh inspiration.

"Did ye mind tae wauken Walsh?" he whispered. "If not, ye ken he micht weel--"

The captain lowered his gla.s.ses, and nodded.

"He might be one," he agreed; "but there are four men on deck." He raised his binoculars again. "Yes, there they are. Well, whoever they are and whatever the game is, we must get on board again and do the job properly this time.--Hallo, one of them is running below!--Here he is again!--He's carrying something--flags, I reckon. They're going to signal us."

He was right. Up to the topmost summit of the Orinoco's grimy foremast travelled a signal--a banner with a strange device indeed, but conveying a perfectly intelligible message for all that. It consisted of the nether or unmentionable portion of a ragged suit of orange-and-red striped pyjamas.

Having reached its destination, it inflated itself in the freshening breeze and streamed out, defiant and derisive, in the rays of the setting sun; flinging to the fermenting couple in the whale-boat the simple but comprehensive intimation--"Sold!"

Then, with one single joyous toot from her siren, the Orinoco altered her course a couple of points and wallowed off in a north-easterly direction, leaving the crew of the whale-boat to listen in admiring silence to a sulphurous antistrophe in two dialects proceeding from the stern-sheets.

CHAPTER X

THE END OF AN ODYSSEY

Hughie reckoned that they might have to steam eastward for quite three or four days before they sighted land.

This was an underestimate.

The history of the Orinoco's last voyage will never be written. In the first place, those who took part in it were none of them men who were addicted to the composition of travellers' tales; and in the second, their recollections of the course of events when all was over, were hopelessly and rather mercifully blurred. Not that they minded. One derives no pleasure or profit from reconstructing a nightmare--especially when it has lasted for sixteen days and nights.

Some events, of course, were focussed more sharply in their memories than others. There was that eternity of thirty-six hours during which the Orinoco, with every vulnerable orifice sealed up or battened down, her asthmatic engines pulsing just vigorously enough to keep her head before the wind, rode out a north-easterly gale which blew her many miles out of her reckoning. ("Not that that matters much," said her philosophic commander. "We don't know where we are now, it's true; but then we didn't know where we were before, so what's the odds? We'll keep on steering away about north-east, and as we are aiming at a target eight hundred miles wide we ought to hit it somewhere.") Then there was a palpitating night when the faithful engines, having wheezily but unceasingly performed their allotted task for a period long enough to lull all who depended upon them into an optimistic frame of mind, broke down utterly and absolutely; and the fires had to be banked and the Orinoco allowed to wallow unrestrainedly in the trough of the sea while the entire ship's company, with cracking muscles and heart-breaking gasps, released a jammed crosshead from the guides and took down a leaky cylinder.

They were evidently out of the ordinary sea-lanes, for they sighted only one steamer in ten days, and her they allowed to go by.

"None of us understand proper signalling," said Hughie, "so we can't attract her attention without doing something absurdly theatrical, like running up the ensign upside down; and I'm hanged if we'll do that--yet.

After all, we only want to know where we _are_. We may be just off the coast of Ireland for all I can say, and it does seem feeble to bring a liner out of her course to ask her footling questions. It would be like stopping the Flying Scotsman to get a light for one's pipe."

"Or asking a policeman in Piccadilly Circus the nearest way to the Criterion bar," added Allerton. "I'm with you all the time, captain."

And so these four mendicants allowed a potential Good Samaritan to pa.s.s by and sink behind the horizon. It was an action typical of their race: they had no particular objection to death, but they drew the line at being smiled at. Still, there were moments during the next ten days when they rather regretted their diffidence.

But events like these were mere excrescences in a plane of dead monotony. The day's work was made up of endless hours in a Gehenna-like stokehold, where with aching backs and bleeding hands they laboured to feed the insatiable fires, or crawled along tunnel-like bunkers in search of the gradually receding coal; spells at the wheel--sometimes lashed to it--in biting wind or blinding fog; the whole sustained on a diet of ship's biscuit, salt pork, and lukewarm coffee, tempered by brief but merciful intervals of the slumber of utter exhaustion.

Still, one can get used to anything. They even enjoyed themselves after a fashion. High endeavour counts for something, whether you have a wife and family dependent upon you, like Walsh, or can extract _la joie de vivre_ out of an eighteen-hour day and a workhouse diet, like Hughie.

And they got to know each other, thoroughly,--a privilege denied to most in these days of restless activity and multifarious acquaintance.

It was a lasting wonder to Hughie how Allerton could ever have fallen to his present estate; for he displayed an amount of energy, endurance, and initiative during this manhood-testing voyage that was amazing. He himself ascribed his virtue to want of opportunity to practise anything else, but this was obviously too modest an explanation. Perhaps blood always tells. At any rate, Allerton took unquestioned rank as second in command over the heads of two men whose technical knowledge and physical strength far exceeded his own. But in his hours of ease--few enough now--he was as easy-going and flippant and casual as ever.

Walsh in a sense was the weakest of the quartet. He was a capable engineer and an honest man, but he lacked the devil-may-care nonchalance of the other three; for he had a wife and eight children waiting for him in distant Limehouse, and a fact like that gives a man a distaste for adventure. He was a disappointed man, too. He had held a chief engineer's "ticket" for seven years, but he had never held a chief engineer's billet. He could never afford to knock off work and wait until the right berth should come his way: he must always take the first that offered, for fear that the tale of boots and bread in Limehouse should diminish. As a crowning stroke of ill-luck, he had been paid off from his last job because his ship had collided with a New York lighter and been compelled to go into dry dock for three months; and by shipping in the Orinoco he was barely doing more than work his pa.s.sage home. His ten-year-old dream of delivering Mrs. Walsh from her wash-tub for all time, and exalting her from the _res angustae_ of Teak Street, Limehouse, to a social environment reserved exclusively for the wives of chief engineers, seemed as far from fulfilment as ever. Still, he maintained a stiff upper lip and kept his watch like a man, which is more than most of us would have done under the circ.u.mstances.

But it was Goble who interested Hughie most. In the long night-watches, as they swung the heavy fire-shovels in the stokehold, or heaved the ever-acc.u.mulating clinkers over the side, or took turn and turn about to gulp tepid water out of a sooty bucket, or met over a collation of coffee and ship's biscuit--the supper of one and the breakfast of the other--in the galley, Goble would let fall dry pawky reflections on life in general, with autobiographical ill.u.s.trations, which enabled Hughie to piece together a fairly comprehensive idea of his companion's previous existence.

John Alexander Goble had played many parts in his time, like most vagrants. He had been born a gamekeeper's son in Renfrewshire, and had lost his father early, that devoted upholder of proprietary rights having been shot through the head in a poaching affray. After this catastrophe the widow, who had openly pined for her native Glasgow during the whole of her husband's lifetime, had returned to that munic.i.p.al paradise; and the ripening youth of John Alexander Goble had been pa.s.sed in a delectable locality, known as "The Coocaddens," to which he could never refer without a gleam of tender reminiscence in his eyes.

Why John Alexander had ever deserted this Eden Hughie could never rightly ascertain. His references to that particular epoch in his career were invariably obscure; but since he darkly observed on one occasion that "weemen can mak' a gowk o' the best man leevin'," Hughie gathered that Mr. Goble's present course of life owed its origin to a tender but unsatisfactory episode in the dim and distant days of his hot youth.

"After that," John would continue elliptically, "I went tae Motherwell.

D'ye ken Motherwell? A grand place! Miles and miles of blast-furnaces, and the sky lit up day and nicht, like the Last Judgment. I did a wheen odd jobs there. Whiles I would hurl a trolley wi' c.o.ke, whiles I would sort coal wi' some la.s.sies, and at last I got a job as a moulder."

"What's that?" inquired the ever-receptive Hughie.

"What else but a body that makes moulds?"

"Yes, but how does he do it?"

"Weel, there's a sort o' sandy place at the fit o' each smelting-furnace--like a bit sea-sh.o.r.e, ye'll understand--and every four-and-twenty hours they cast the furnace. They let oot the melted ore, that is, and it rins doon intil moulds that hae been made in the sand. (Ye dae it by just buryin' baulks o' timber in rows and then pickin' them oot again, and the stuff rins intil the hollows that have been left. When it's cauld they ca' it pig-iron.) Well, I stuck tae that job for a matter o' sax months. But it was drouthy work, besides bein'

haird on the feet,--you go scratch-scratching in the sand wi' your bare soles makin' the moulds,--and presently I gave it up and took tae daen'

odd jobs among the trucks and engines in the yairds. I liked that fine, for machinery is the yin thing that really excites me. First I was a coupler, then I was a fireman, then I got tae drivin' a wee shunting engine, dunting trucks about the yaird. And at last I was set in charge o' a winding-engine at a pit-heid. That was a grand job; but it didna last long. I was drinkin' haird by this time--I'd stairt.i.t after I left the Coocaddens--and yin' day I was that fou' I let the cage gang doon wi' a run tae the bottom o' the shaft."

"Was there anybody in the cage?" inquired Hughie, as Goble paused, as if to contemplate some mental picture.

"There was not, thank G.o.d! But there _was_ a bit laddie doon ablow in the pit, that was sittin' on his hutch--his truck, that is--at the fit o' the shaft, waitin' on the cage. He wasna expectin' the thing tae fall doon like a daud o' putty, so he was no' sittin' quite clear; and the cage cam' doon and took off baith his feet. Man, I hae never forgotten his mither's face when they brought him up. I lost ma job, and I hae never touched a drop since. For seven-and-twenty years have I been on the teetotal--seven-and-twenty years! It'll shorten ma life, I doot," he added gloomily; "but I'll bide by it!"

"What became of the boy?" inquired Hughie.