e was a _dungaree_-clad greaser in an
engine-room, and he was promptly ordered back with the rest of his
crew. He was not even allowed to talk.

When his watch came round he went on duty again. He saw the futility
of revolt, until the time was ripe. He went through his appointed
tasks with the solemn precision of an apprentice. He did what he was
commanded to do. Yet sometimes the heat would grow so intense that the
great sweating body would have to shamble to a ventilator and there
drink in long drafts of the cooler air. The pressure of invisible
hoops about the great heaving chest would then release itself, the
haggard face would regain some touch of color, and the new greaser
would go back to his work again. One or two of the more observant
toilers about him, experienced in engine-room life, marveled at the
newcomer and the sense of mystery which hung over him. One or two of
them fell to wondering what inner spirit could stay him through those
four-houred ordeals of heat and labor.

Yet they looked after him with even more inquisitive eyes when, on the
second day out, he was peremptorily summoned to the Captain's room.
What took place in that room no one in the ship ever actually knew.

But the large-bodied stowaway returned below-decks, white of face and
grim of jaw. He went back to his work in silence, in dogged and
unbroken silence which those about him knew enough to respect.

It was whispered about, it is true, that among other things a large and
ugly-looking revolver had been taken from his clothing, and that he had
been denied the use of the ship's wireless service. A steward outside
the Captain's door, it was also whispered, had overheard the
shipmaster's angry threat to put the stowaway in irons for the rest of
the voyage and return him to the Ecuadorean authorities. It was
rumored, too, that late in the afternoon of the same day, when the new
greaser had complained of faintness and was seeking a breath of fresh
air at the foot of a midships deck-ladder, he had chanced to turn and
look up at a man standing on the promenade deck above him.

The two men stood staring at each other for several moments, and for
all the balmy air about him the great body of the stranger just up from
the engine-room had shivered and shaken, as though with a malarial
chill.

What it meant, no one quite knew. Nor could anything be added to that
rumor, beyond the fact that the first-class passenger, who was known to