Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/276

264 “The one we’ve just been playing. You see we’ve all been taking a hand in it, and there’s a kind of feeling aboard this ship that there might be something a little delicate about it, which might bring us into trouble before we’ve done. And no man likes to take a risk—for nothing.”

“I see. That’s it. You know me, and you know that I’m as good as my word. You may tell the men from me that if the venture is brought safely into port, and turns out what I expect, it will be twenty-five pounds in the pockets of every man on board this ship, and a hundred for each officer.”

“And what for the first engineer?” With that confounded oil rag of his he wiped his scrubby chin. “I’m thinking that, under the circumstances, I shouldn’t like to guarantee that the engines ’ll last out for a hundred pounds. They’re just a lot of bits of iron tied together with scraps of string. To keep them going will mean sleepless nights.”

I laughed.

“Are they so bad as that? I’m sorry to hear it, Mr. Rudd. Rudd, you’re a blackguard. You want to rob your captain—and the owners.”

“Damn the owners!”

“That’s against Scripture. An owner’s always blessed.”

“He’ll never be upon the other side if he sends a ship to sea with such engines as we have.”

“They are a trial, aren’t they, Rudd?”

“They’re that.”

“So I think we may say that, under the circumstances, if the engines do last out, it will mean five hundred pounds in the pocket of the chief engineer.”

“Five hundred pounds? I’m not denying it’s an agreeable sum. I’d like to handle it. And it’ll be no fault of mine if the machine blows up before it’s just convenient. There’s just one other question I’d like to put to you. Is it the devil that we’ve took aboard?”