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Page 100
"Then I'm thinking," responded the Turkish towel, "that you'll be
needing another Chief Engineer before long!"
Now, as it happened, the Chief had no boy that trip. The previous
one had been adopted after the last trip by a childless couple who
had liked the shape of his nose and the way his eyelashes curled on
his cheek. The Chief looked at the Red Un; it was perfectly clear
that no one would ever adopt him for the shape of his nose, and he
apparently lacked lashes entirely. He rose and took a bathrobe from
a hook on the door.
"Here," he said; "cover your legs wi' that, and say a prayer if ye'
know wan. The Captain's a verra hard man wi' stowaways."
The Captain, however, who was a gentleman and a navigator and had a
sense of humour also, was not hard with the Red Un. It being
impracticable to take the boy to him, the great man made a special
visit to the boy. The Red Un, in the Chief's bathrobe, sat on a
chair, with his feet about four inches from the floor, and returned
the Captain's glare with wide blue eyes.
"Is there any reason, young man, why I shouldn't order you to the
lockup for the balance of this voyage?" the Captain demanded, extra
grim, and trying not to smile.
"Well," said the Red Un, wiggling his legs nervously, "you'd have to
feed me, wouldn't you? And I might as well work for my keep."
This being a fundamental truth on which most economics and all
governments are founded, and the Captain having a boy of his own at
home, he gave a grudging consent, for the sake of discipline, to the
Red Un's working for his keep as the Chief's boy, and left. Outside
the door he paused.
"The little devil's starved," he said. "Put some meat on those
ribs, Chief, and--be a bit easy with him!"
This last was facetious, the Chief being known to have the heart of
a child.
So the Red Un went on the payroll of the line, and requisition was
made on the storekeeper for the short-tailed coat and the long
trousers, and on the barber for a hair-cut. And in some curious way
the Red Un and the Chief hit it off. It might have been a matter of
red blood or of indomitable spirit.
Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un. On the trip out he had
licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip
he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only
three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting
hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his
attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.
He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every
corner of the ship--called the engines by name and the men by
epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior
Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the
eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.
"Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy. "Where'd you and your Old
Man be but for us? In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the
bloomin' sea! What's a ship without insides?"
The Captain's boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a
rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain's razor,
retorted in kind.
"You fellows below think you're the whole bally ship!" he said
loftily. "Insides is all right--we need 'em in our business. But
what'd your steel tank do, with the engines goin', if she
wasn't bein' navigated? Steamin' in circles, like a tinklin'
merry-go-round!"
It was some seconds after this that the Purser, a well-intentioned
but interfering gentleman with a beard, received the kick that put
him in dry dock for two days.
II
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