CHAPTER VIII.

In the stoke-hole.

Frank found the chief engineer taking some air.  Merry fell into conversation with the man, who was smoking and seemed quite willing to talk.

Having a pleasant and agreeable way, Frank easily led the engineer on, and it was not long before the man was quite taken with the chatty passenger.

Frank was careful not to seem inquisitive or prying, for he knew it would be easy to arouse the engineer’s suspicions if there should be anything wrong on the steamer.

However, Merry was working for a privilege, and he obtained it.  When he expressed a desire to go below and have a look at the engines and furnaces, the engineer invited him to come along.

They passed through a door, and then began a descent by means of iron ladders.  The clanking roar of the machinery came up to them.  Frank could hear and feel the throbbing heart beats of the great boat.

The engine room was quickly reached, and there the engineer showed him the massive machinery that moved with the regularity of clockwork and the grace and ease that came from great power and perfect adjustment.

All this was interesting, but Frank was anxious to go still deeper.

“Go ahead,” said the engineer, showing him the way.  “Down that ladder there.  You’ll be able to see the furnaces and the stokers at work.  I don’t believe you’ll care to go into the stoke-hole.”

Frank descended.  Great heat came up to him, accompanied by a glow that shifted and changed, dying down suddenly at one moment and glaring out at the next.  He could hear the ring of shovels and the clank of iron doors.

He reached an iron grating, where a fierce heat rolled up and seemed to scorch him.  From that position he could look down into the stoke-hole and see the black, grimy, sweating, half-clad men at work there.

Above him, at the head of the ladder he had just descended, a pair of shining eyes glared down, but he saw them not.  He had not observed a cleaner who was at work on the machinery in the engine-room, and who kept his hat pulled over his eyes till Frank departed.

The blackened stokers looked like grim demons of the fiery pit as they labored at the coal, which they were shoveling into the mouths of the greedy furnaces.

The shifting glow was caused by the opening and closing of the furnace doors, which clanged and rang.

For a moment the pit below would seem shrouded in almost Stygian darkness, save for some bar of light that gleamed out from a crack or draft, and then there would be a rattle of iron and a flare of blood-red light that came with the flinging open of a furnace door.

In the glare of light the bare-armed, dirt-grimed stokers would shovel, shovel, shovel, till it seemed a wonder that the fire was not completely deadened by so much coal.