II.

Lying lazily at anchor off the reeking beach of Adra Bight, the Puncher
looked peaceful and complacent--which is altogether opposite to what she
and her commander were, or had been, for a month. The ship hummed her
shut-in discontent, as a hive does when the bees propose to swarm, and
her commander--who never, be it noted, went to windward of the one word
"damn"--used that one word very frequently.

He sat "abaft the mainmast" at a table that was splotched already with
abundant perspiration, and the acting engineer who stood in front of him
shifted from foot to foot in attitudes expressive of increasing agony
of mind. It grew obvious at last that there was a limit to Mr. Hartley's
store of courteous deference.

There had been news, red hot but wrong, of dhows loaded to the
water-line with guns and ammunition somewhere up the Gulf. India, ever
fretful for her tribes beyond the border, had borrowed Applewaite and
his destroyer by instant cablegram, and jealously held records had been
broken while the Puncher quartered those indecent seas and heated up her
bearings. It was almost too much to have to come back empty-handed. It
was quite too much to have to run for shelter under the lee of Adra's
uninviting coral reef. And to be told by an acting engineer that
he would have to stay a week was utterly beyond the scope of polite
conversation.

"Why a week?" asked Commander Applewaite, with eyebrows raised to the
nth power of incredulity.

"Why a week?" asked Mr. Hartley, breaking down the barrier of
self-restraint at last. "I'll tell you why. Because, although the guts
of her are so much scrap-iron, you've a crew of engineers who could
build machinery of hell-slag--build it, mind--and could get steam out o'
the Sahara, where there isn't any water at all.

"Because--conditional upon the act o' God and your permission--I'm
willing to perform a miracle. Because the whole engine-room complement
is dancing mad for shore leave, and there'll be none this side o'
Bombay; and because, in consequence o' that, creation would be a mild
name for what's about to happen under gratings until the shafts revolve
again. Man, I wish ye'd take one peep at her bearings, though ye
wouldn't understand.

"Because you're lucky; any other engineer in all the navies o' the world
would take a month to tinker with her, even if he didn't have to send to
Bombay for a tow. Because--"

"That'll do!" said Applewaite, his mind wandering already in