in answer Jukes made with his hands deprecatory soothing signs meaning: No wind—can’t be helped—you can see for yourself. But the other wouldn’t hear reason. His teeth flashed angrily in his dirty face. He didn’t mind, he said, the trouble of punching their blanked heads down there, blank his soul, but did the condemned sailors think you could keep steam up in the God-forsaken boilers simply by knocking the blanked stokers about? No, by George! You had to get some draught too—may he be everlastingly blanked for a swabheaded deck-hand if you didn’t! And the chief, too, rampaging before the steam- gauge and carrying on like a lunatic up and down the engine-room ever since noon. What did Jukes think he was stuck up there for, if he couldn’t get one of his decayed, good-for-nothing deck-cripples to turn the ventilators to the wind?

The relations of the ‘engine-room’ and the ‘deck’ of the Nan-Shan were, as is known, of a brotherly nature; therefore Jukes leaned over and begged the other in a restrained tone not to make a disgusting ass of himself; the skipper was on the other side of the bridge. But the second declared mutinously that he didn’t care a rap who was on the other side of the bridge, and Jukes, passing in a flash from lofty disapproval into a state of exaltation, invited him in unflattering terms to come up and twist the beastly things to please himself, and catch such wind as a donkey of his sort could find. The second rushed up to the fray. He flung himself at the port ventilator as though he meant to tear it out bodily and toss it overboard. All the did was to move the cowl round a few inches, with an enormous expenditure of force, and seemed spent in the effort. He leaned against the back of the wheelhouse, and Jukes walked up to him.

‘Oh, Heavens!’ ejaculated the engineer in a feeble voice. He lifted his eyes to the sky, and then let his glassy stare descend to meet the horizon that, tilting up to an angle of forty degrees, seemed to hang on a slant for a while and settled down slowly. ‘Heavens! Phew! What’s up, anyhow?’

Jukes, straddling his long legs like a pair of compasses, put on an air of superiority. ‘We’re going to catch it this time,’ he said. ‘The barometer is tumbling down like anything, Harry. And you trying to kick up that silly row…’

The word ‘barometer’ seemed to revive the second engineer’s mad animosity. Collecting afresh all his energies, he directed Jukes in a low and brutal tone to shove the unmentionable instrument down his gory throat. Who cared for his crimson barometer? It was the steam—the steam—that was going down; and what between the firemen going faint and the chief going silly, it was worse than a dog’s life for him; he didn’t care a tinker’s curse how soon the whole show was blown out of the water. He seemed on the point of having a cry, but after regaining his breath he muttered darkly, ‘I’ll faint them,’ and dashed off. He stopped upon the fiddle long enough to shake his fist at the unnatural daylight, and dropped into the dark hole with a whoop.

When Jukes turned, his eyes fell upon the rounded back and the big red ears of Captain MacWhirr, who had come across. He did not look at his chief officer, but said at once, ‘That’s a very violent man, that second engineer.’

‘Jolly good second, anyhow,’ grunted Jukes. ‘They can’t keep up steam,’ he added rapidly, and made a grab at the rail against the coming lurch.

Captain MacWhirr, unprepared, took a run and brought himself up with a jerk by an awning stanchion.

‘A profane man,’ he said obstinately. ‘If this goes on, I’ll have to get rid of him the first chance.’

‘It’s the heat,’ said Jukes. ‘The weather’s awful. It would make a saint swear. Even up here I feel exactly as if I had my head tied up in a woollen blanket.’

Captain MacWhirr looked up. ‘D’ye mean to say, Mr Jukes, you ever had your head tied up in a blanket? What was that for?’