!"

"What!" Sutton howled. "The _Clara_ sunk? Whatya mean--sunk?"

Bohlmann told him. Sutton wavered. He had driven thousands of rivets
into the frame of the ship, and a little explosive had opened all the
seams and ended her days! When at last he understood the _Clara's_
fate and Nuddle's comments he turned to Jake with baleful calm:

"And you thought it was good business, did you? And these fellers
was thinkin' about lynchin' you, was they? Well, they're all
wrong--they're all wrong: we'd ought to save lynchin' for real
guys. What you need is somethin' like--this!"

His terrific fist lashed out and caught Jake in the right eye. Jake in
a daze of indignation and amazement went over backward; his head
struck the steel deck, and his soul went out. When it came back he lay
still for a while, pretending to be unconscious until the gang had
dispersed, satisfied, and Sutton was making ready to begin riveting
again. Then he picked himself up and edged round Sutton, growling:

"I'll fix you for this, you--"

Sutton did not wait to learn what Jake was going to call him. His big
foot described an upward arc, and Jake a parabola, ending in a drop
that almost took him through an open hatch into the depth of the hold.
He saved himself, peering over the edge, too weak for words--hunched
back, crawled around the steel abyss, and betook himself to a safe
hiding-place under the tank-top till the siren should blow and
disperse his enemies.

CHAPTER VI

The office force left pretty promptly on the hour. When Mamise noted
that desks were being cleared for inaction she began mechanically to
conform. Then she paused.

On other afternoons she had gone home with the crowd of employees, too
weary with office routine to be discontent. But now she thought of
Davidge left alone in his office to brood over his lost ship, the
brutal mockery of such loving toil. It seemed heartless to her as his
friend to desert him in the depths. But as one of his stenographers,
it would look shameless to hang round with the boss. She shifted from
foot to foot and from resolve to resolve.

Their relations were undergoing as many strains and stresses as a
ship's frame in the various waves and weathers that confront it. She
had picked up some knowledge of the amazing twists a ship encounters
at rest and in motion--stresses in still water, with cargo and
without, hogging and sagging stresses, seesaw strains, tensile,
compressive, transverse, racki