“Suppose a cruiser overhauled her when we was at work?” said Harman.
“Well, what’s easier to say than that we were sent to mend? We are a sure-enough cable ship, and how’s a cruiser to know whether the cable we are fishing for or tinkering with isn’t broken? Oh, no; you may make your mind easy on that. Our position is sound and safe, on the outside. Inside it’s as rotten as punk.”
The _Penguin_, steering a sou-sou’westerly course, slipped day by day into warmer and bluer seas. Wolff, recovering from his first unpleasantness, appeared on deck, cigar in mouth; and Shiner, with nothing better to do, would be seen lounging on the after gratings with a novel in his hand.
The Captain and Harman worked the ship, and had little to do with the others, meeting them chiefly at table, where, needless to say, the Captain took the head. Wolff had given him a chart of the Pacific whereon was laid down the exact position of the cable they were going to attend to.
“This is the chart,” Wolff had said. “You will see, there is the cable. It is plainly marked. I wish you to bring us to it about here.” He made a pencil mark on the cable line. “And when you have brought us to that point, then I will explain to you the object of this expedition.”
They were steering now for the cable line through days of sapphire and nights wonderful with stars. Now and then they would raise an island, a peak with a turban of clouds, or an atoll, just a green ring of palms and breadfruits surrounded by a white ring of foam, and peak and atoll would heave in sight and sink from sight with nothing to tell of the legerdemain at work but the pounding of the screw and the throb of the engines.
Sometimes a sail would heave in sight, or the far-off smoke of a steamer hold the imagination for an hour or two, and then be painted out, leaving nothing but the sea, the sky, and the pearl-white trace of cloud draping the skirts of the warm trade wind.
There is no place in the world where grievances sprout so well and grow so rapidly as on board ship. The Captain had a grievance. It had come to his knowledge that Wolff had a private stock of Pilsener. Some had come in the cases that the wharf rat had carried after him on board, and there was more stowed away in some hole known only to Wolff and Shiner.