Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/137

 The hose had indeed made a nasty mess. Men were stripping the gear. The engine-room showed a sort of orderly confusion. Mark sighed thankfully that it was the natural perversity of the strap, and no carelessness of his, that had caused the trouble. But there was a cause: one of the pins holding the brass liner to the strap had worked out.

"Well, you can't blame her getting hot over a thing like that," muttered the youngest engineer. "I lost a pin myself, one time—a diamond one, I'll say—and I was hot enough over it."

The chief scowled bitterly in the direction of the youngest engineer, who went to work with a snap.

So the Delphian, presently reassured by the steady drum of her engine, swung on again.

"Fixed up ahead of the storm, anyway," Mark reflected, on deck again, peering against the wind. "But she's coming, all right."

He wondered, yawningly, if it was worth while to go to bed for the third time that night. Something impelled him to keep awake—a tingling sense of adventure incomplete haunted him.