king about. Go and look at the glass."

When Jukes came out of the chart-room, the cast of his countenance had
changed to thoughtfulness and concern. He caught hold of the bridge-rail
and stared ahead.

The temperature in the engine-room had gone up to a hundred and
seventeen degrees. Irritated voices were ascending through the skylight
and through the fiddle of the stokehold in a harsh and resonant uproar,
mingled with angry clangs and scrapes of metal, as if men with limbs of
iron and throats of bronze had been quarrelling down there. The second
engineer was falling foul of the stokers for letting the steam go down.
He was a man with arms like a blacksmith, and generally feared; but that
afternoon the stokers were answering him back recklessly, and slammed
the furnace doors with the fury of despair. Then the noise ceased
suddenly, and the second engineer appeared, emerging out of the
stokehold streaked with grime and soaking wet like a chimney-sweep
coming out of a well. As soon as his head was clear of the fiddle he
began to scold Jukes for not trimming properly the stokehold
ventilators; and 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 swab-headed
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