orm. On the next parallel road, the one that ran through the
village, I could see others. I noticed, too, that several figures
appeared to be beating the intervening fields.

Stumm's cordon had got busy at last, and I thanked my stars that not
one of the villagers had seen me. I had not got away much too soon,
for in another half-hour he would have had me.

CHAPTER NINE

The Return of the Straggler

Before I turned in that evening I had done some good hours' work in the
engine-room. The boat was oil-fired, and in very fair order, so my
duties did not look as if they would be heavy. There was nobody who
could be properly called an engineer; only, besides the furnace-men, a
couple of lads from Hamburg who had been a year ago apprentices in a
ship-building yard. They were civil fellows, both of them consumptive,
who did what I told them and said little. By bedtime, if you had seen
me in my blue jumper, a pair of carpet slippers, and a flat cap--all
the property of the deceased Walter--you would have sworn I had been
bred to the firing of river-boats, whereas I had acquired most of my
knowledge on one run down the Zambesi, when the proper engineer got
drunk and fell overboard among the crocodiles.

The captain--they called him Schenk--was out of his bearings in the
job. He was a Frisian and a first-class deep-water seaman, but, since
he knew the Rhine delta, and because the German mercantile marine was
laid on the ice till the end of war, they had turned him on to this
show. He was bored by the business, and didn't understand it very
well. The river charts puzzled him, and though it was pretty plain
going for hundreds of miles, yet he was in a perpetual fidget about the
pilotage. You could see that he would have been far more in his
element smelling his way through the shoals of the Ems mouth, or
beating against a northeaster in the shallow Baltic. He had six barges
in tow, but the heavy flood of the Danube made it an easy job except
when it came to going slow. There were two men on each barge, who came
aboard every morning to draw rations. That was a funny business, for
we never lay to if we could help it. There was a dinghy belonging to
each barge, and the men used to row to the next and get a lift in that
barge's dinghy, and so forth. Six men would appear in the dinghy of
the barge nearest us and carry off supplies for the rest. The men were
mostly Frisians, slow-spoken, sandy-haired lads, very l