ey are
hardly making enough steam to give her steerage way."

"If you let your old beast of a tramp stop and drift about here like a
potato-chip in a frying-pan it won't improve matters. Those of us who
don't peg out with cholera will start murdering one another. The niggers
will begin."

"Yes, I know. I wanted some of them to serve as firemen for good pay.
But they will not listen to me. I do not think they understood. Will you
come and translate?"

We took revolvers, holding them ostentatiously in our pockets. I crossed
the dizzy sunshine of the lower main deck. The negroes on the forecastle
head were chattering together like a fair of monkeys, but they ceased
when we came up, and stared at us with faces working with excitement.

"Which be head-man?" I asked.

A big fellow stood forward, hat in hand. "I fit for head-man, sar."

I told him hands were wanted for the stoke-hold, and that the gorgeous
pay of four shillings English per diem was offered.

"We no fit for stoke, sar," said he. "We gentlemen wid money, sar. We
passenger-boys, sar."

"Very well, daddy," said I. "But stoke you've got to. And if you won't
do it civilly you'll do it the other way. Now my frien', pick me out
twelve good strong boys. If you don't do it, I'll shoot you dead
one-time; if they won't work, I'll shoot them. You quite savvy?"

We got the men and they went off to the stokehold, frightened and
raging. Poor wretches, eight of them toppled over in the next
twenty-four hours, and half-a-day later the engines stopped for the last
time. I was smoking industriously under the alley-way, and Tordoff came
and loafed near me.

"I'm a bally fine chief-engineer, aren't I?" said he.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I'm the best man that's left of all our crowd, that's all.
They're every sinner of them dead, black men, white men, and Portuguese.
Where are we now?"

"Slap bang under the equator. That mountain-top sticking out of the
water is San Thome."

"Then I'm off there," said Tordoff. "This bloomin' steamer's played out.
She can't steam, and she wouldn't sail if there was any wind, which
there isn't. I shall take one of the boats and skip. You'd better come
too."

"No."

"What for? Why not?"

"Because there are only two boats and they aren't enough for all hands."

"The boats will hold all the white men, or them that call themselves
white. But if you are one of the missionary crowd that hold niggers as
good----"

"I'm not. I kn