nd the vaster machinery above him was coerced
into a motion that seemed languid yet relentless.

He could see the slow rise and fall of the great cranks. He could hear
the renewed signals and bells tinkles, the more insistent clack of
pumps, the more resolute rise and fall of the ponderous cranks. And he
knew that they were at last under way. He gave no thought to the heat
of the oil-dripping pit in which he stood. He was oblivious of the
perilous steel that whirred and throbbed about him. He was unconscious
of the hot hand rails and the greasy foot-ways and the mingling odor of
steam and parching lubricant and ammonia-gas from a leaking "beef
engine." He quite forgot the fact that his dungaree jumper was wet
with sweat, that his cap was already fouled with oil. All he knew was
that he and Binhart were at last under way.

He was filled with a new lightness of spirit as he felt the throb of
"full speed ahead" shake the steel hull about which he so contentedly
climbed and crawled. He found something fortifying in the thought that
this vast hull was swinging out to her appointed sea lanes, that she
was now intent on a way from which no caprice could turn her. There
seemed something appeasingly ordered and implacable in the mere
revolutions of the engines. And as those engines settled down to their
labors the intent-eyed men about him fell almost as automatically into
the routines of toil as did the steel mechanism itself.

When at the end of the first four-houred watch a gong sounded and the
next crew filed cluttering in from the half-lighted between-deck
gangways and came sliding down the polished steel stair rails, Blake
felt that his greatest danger was over.

There would still be an occasional palm to grease, he told himself, an
occasional bit of pad money to be paid out. But he could meet those
emergencies with the fortitude of a man already inured to the exactions
of venal accomplices.

Then a new discovery came to him. It came as he approached the chief
engineer, with the object in view of throwing a little light on his
presence there. And as he looked into that officer's coldly indignant
eye he awakened to the fact that he was no longer on land, but afloat
on a tiny world with an autocracy and an authority of its own. He was
in a tiny world, he saw, where his career and his traditions were not
to be reckoned with, where he ranked no higher than conch-niggers and
beach-combers and _cargadores_. H