Page:Cruise of the Dry Dock.djvu/208

 Although he had seen hundreds of steam engines, never before had Madden realized their complication until he faced the problem of running this difficult fabric. His proposed task made him realize that the engineer's apprentice, who serves four years amid oil and iron black, learning all the details of these mechanical monsters, is probably just as well educated, just as capable of exact and sustained thought, as the lad who spends four years in college construing dead tongues.

Madden could construe dead tongues, or at least could when he left college a few months back, but now his life, the life of his crew, the salving of the dock, and the winning of a possible fortune, depended upon his answering the riddle of this Twentieth Century Sphinx. It was like attempting to understand all mathematics, from addition to celestial mechanics, at a glance.

Nevertheless, Madden's training as a civil engineer gave him a certain aptitude for his formidable undertaking and he set about it with rat-like patience.

He picked out the main steam pipe, larger