Chapter II
Reading edition
THE FURNACE-ROOM.
Had Frank lain awake he would have seen a curious sight; for there are few more picturesque scenes than the "forecastle interior" of an ocean steamer at night, lit by the fitful gleam of its swinging lamp. This grim-looking man, fumbling in his breast as if for the ever-ready knife or pistol, must be dreaming of some desperate struggle by his set teeth and hard breathing. That huge scar on the face of the gaunt, sallow figure beside him, whose soiled red shirt and matted beard would just suit the foreground of a Nevada gully, might tell a strange tale. That handsome, statuesque countenance yonder, again, faultless but for the sinister gleam of its restless eyes—what can it be doing among these coarse, uncultivated men, not one of whom can tell why they should all shrink from it as they do? What a study for a pirate any artist might make out of this shaggy, black-haired giant, whose lion-like head is hanging over the side of his bunk! His weather-beaten face looks hard as a pine knot; but a child would run to him at once, recognizing, with its own unerring instinct, the tender heart hidden beneath that rough outside. Next to him lies a trim, slender lad, who looks as if he knew more of Latin and Greek than of reefing and splicing, and whose curly brown head some fond mother has doubtless caressed many a time; yet here he is, an unknown sailor before the mast, with all his gifts wasted, and doomed perhaps to sink lower still.
But these are the exceptions; the majority are sailors of the ordinary type, careless, light-hearted, improvident, never looking beyond the present moment—content to accept the first job that "turns up," and quite satisfied with a day's food and a shirt to their backs. Some are coiled up on lockers and spare sails, others sleeping off their last night's "spree" on the bare planks, and rolling over and over with every plunge of the vessel.
Whew! what a stream of cold air comes rushing down the hatchway, as it opens to let in the deck watch, glad enough to get below again out of the cold and wet! Their shouts, as they dash the brine from their beards and jackets, and chaff the comrades who are unwillingly turning out to relieve them, arouse Frank, who for a moment can hardly make out where he is. Then it all flashes upon him, and he "tumbles up," and goes on deck.
Certainly, if any one ever could feel dismal at sea, it would be during the hour before dawn, the most cheerless and uncomfortable of the whole twenty-four. After spending the night in a lively game of cup and ball, with yourself for the ball, and an amazingly hard wooden bunk for the cup, you crawl on deck, bruised and aching from top to toe. While gazing upon the inspiring landscape of gray fog and slaty blue sea, you suddenly feel a stream of cold water splashing into your boots, while an unfeeling sailor gruffly asks "why in thunder you can't git out o' the way?" Springing hastily aside, you break your shins over a spar which seems to have been put there on purpose, and get up only to be instantly thrown down again by a lee lurch of the ship, amid the derisive laughter of the deck watch. Meanwhile a shower of half-melted snow insinuates itself into your eyes, and up your sleeves, and down the back of your neck; and all this, joined to the agonizing thought that it will be at least two hours before you can get any breakfast, speedily fills you with a rooted hatred of everything and everybody on board the ship.
Well might poor Frank, contrasting his dismal surroundings with the comfortable rooms and piping-hot breakfasts of his forsaken home, begin to think that he had made a fool of himself. But he choked down the feeling as unworthy of a man, and tried to turn his thoughts by watching the two quartermasters at the wheel, who were straining every muscle to keep the ship's head to the mountain waves that burst over the bow every moment with the shock of a battering-ram.
Breakfast came at last, but was not very satisfactory when it did. The old saying of "salt-horse and hard-tack" exactly described the food; and Frank, eating with one hand while clinging desperately to the long narrow table with the other, had quite enough to do in keeping his knife from running into his eye, and himself from going head over heels on the floor. At every plunge below the water-line the mess-room, already dim enough, became almost dark, while the faces of the men looked as green and ghastly as a band of demons in a pantomime. And, to crown all, one of Frank's neighbors suddenly sent a tremendous splash of grease right over him, coolly remarking,
"Now, Greeny, you won't get hurt if you fall overboard—ile calms the water, you know."
At which all the rest laughed, and Frank felt worse than a murderer.
Breakfast over, our hero was "told off" to go below with the firemen. Down he went, through one narrow hole after another, past deck after deck of iron grating—down, down, down—till at last, as he emerged from a dark passageway, a very startling scene burst upon him.
Along either side of a long narrow passage (the iron walls of which sloped inward overhead) gaped a row of huge furnace mouths, sending out a quivering glare of intense heat, increased by the mounds of red-hot coals that heaped the iron floor. Amid this chaos, several huge black figures, stripped to the waist, and with wet cloths around their sooty faces, were flinging coal into the furnaces, or stirring the fires with long iron rakes—now standing out gaunt and grim in the red blaze, now vanishing into the eddies of hissing steam tossed about by the stream of cold air from the funnel-like "wind-sail" serving as a ventilator.
A shovel was thrust into Frank Austin's hand, and he was set to keep the doorway clear of the coal that came tumbling into it from the bunkers where the coal-heavers were at work. In this way he labored till noon, and then, with blistered hands and aching back, crawled up the iron ladder, worn out, grimy, and half dazed, to his dinner.
But what a dinner for Christmas-day! No appetizing turkey and plum-pudding, eaten in the midst of loving faces and merry talk and laughter; nothing but coarse salt-junk and hard ship-biscuit, hastily snatched among rough, unsympathetic men, who neither knew nor cared anything about him. And as soon as the meal was over, back again to his weary toil in the coal bunker, which was fated, however, to be cut short in a way that he little expected.
For a time he worked away manfully; but the heat of the room and the monotony of his occupation combined to make him careless. Little by little his thoughts wandered away to his pleasant home beside the Hudson, and the little garden patch where he used to work, and the cozy fire, in the ashes of which he and his brothers roasted their chestnuts, and—
"Look out there!"
The warning cry came too late. There was a sudden shock—a deafening crash—and poor Frank was seen lying on his back senseless and half buried beneath the huge heap of coal that blocked the doorway.