ghteen
inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the stringers in four
places. "We think you will have a certain amount of trouble in that";
and thousands and thousands of the little rivets that held everything
together whispered: "You Will! You will! Stop quivering and be quiet.
Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot Punches! What's that?"

Rivets have no teeth, so they cannot chatter with fright; but they did
their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow,
and she shook like a rat in a terrier's mouth.

An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big
throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a
kind of soda-water--half sea and half air--going much faster than was
proper, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank
again, the engines--and they were triple expansion, three cylinders in
a row--snorted through all their three pistons. "Was that a joke, you
fellow outside? It's an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do our work
if you fly off the handle that way?"

"I didn't fly off the handle," said the screw, twirling huskily at the
end of the screw-shaft. "If I had, you'd have been scrap-iron by this
time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to catch on
to. That's all."

"That's all, d'you call it?" said the thrust-block, whose business it
is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold it
back it would crawl right into the engine-room. (It is the holding back
of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) "I know I do my
work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect justice. All I
ask for is bare justice. Why can't you push steadily and evenly, instead
of whizzing like a whirligig, and making me hot under all my collars?"
The thrust-block had six collars, each faced with brass, and he did not
wish to get them heated.

All the bearings that supported the fifty feet of screw-shaft as it ran
to the stern whispered: "Justice--give us justice."

"I can only give you what I can get," the screw answered. "Look out!
It's coming again!"

He rose with a roar as the Dimbula plunged, and "whack--flack--whack--
whack" went the engines, furiously, for they had little to check them.

"I'm the noblest outcome of human ingenuity--Mr. Buchanan says so,"
squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous!" The
piston went up savagely, and choked, for half the steam behind