hook like a rat in a terrier's mouth.

An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big
throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a
kind of soda water--half sea and half air--going much faster than was
right, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank
again, the engines--and they were triple-expansion, three cylinders in
a row--snorted through all their three pistons: "Was that a joke, you
fellow outside? It's an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do _our_
work if you fly off the handle that way?"

"I didn't fly off the handle," said the screw, twirling huskily at
the end of the screw shaft. "If I had, _you'd_ have been scrap iron
by this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to
catch on to. That's all."

"That's all, d'you call it?" said the thrust-block, whose business it
is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold
it back it would crawl right into the engine room. (It is the holding
back of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) "I know
I do my work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect
justice. All _I_ ask is justice. Why can't you push steadily and
evenly, instead of whizzing like a whirligig and making me hot under
all my collars?" The thrust-block had six collars, each faced with
brass, and he did not want to get them heated.

All the bearings that supported the fifty feet of screw shaft as it
ran to the stern whispered: "Justice--give us justice."

"I can only give you what I get," the screw answered. "Look out! It's
coming again!"

He rose with a roar as the "Dimbula" plunged; and
"whack--whack--whack--whack" went the engines furiously, for they had
little to check them.

"I'm the noblest outcome of human ingenuity--Mr. Buchanan says so,"
squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous." The
piston went up savagely and choked, for half the steam behind it
was mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help! I'm
choking," it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has
such a calamity overtaken one so young and strong. And if I go, who's
to drive the ship?"

"Hush! oh, hush!" whispered the steam, who, of course, had been to sea
many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore, in a cloud, or
a gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunder storm, or anywhere else where
water was needed. "That's only a little priming, as they call