When he had unscrewed the brass plate over his head he replaced it with the lid of the cigar-box.  So long as the pumps in the engine room kept the air moving, the lid stayed up by suction.

When the air stopped the lid fell down on his head; he roused enough to press a signal button and, as the air started viciously, to replace the lid.  Then, off to the sleep of the just and the crafty again.  And so on ad infinitum.

Of course the game was not over because it was discovered and the lid gone.  There would be other lids.  But the snap, the joy, was gone out of it.  It would never again be the same, and the worst of all was the manner of the betrayal.

He slept but little the remainder of the night; and, because unrest travels best from soul to soul at night, when the crowding emotions of the day give it place, the woman slept little also.  She was thinking of the entrance to the stokehole, where one crouched under the bellies of furnaces, and where the engineer on duty stood on a pile of hot cinders.  Toward morning her room grew very close:  the air from the ventilator seemed to have ceased.

Far down in the ship, in a breathless little cabin far aft, the Red Un kicked the Purser’s boy and cried himself to sleep.

V

The old ship made a record the next night that lifted the day’s run to four hundred and twenty.  She was not a greyhound, you see.  Generally speaking, she was a nine-day boat.  She averaged well under four hundred miles.  The fast boats went by her and slid over the edge of the sea, throwing her bits of news by wireless over a shoulder, so to speak.

The little girl’s mother was not a good sailor.  She sat almost all day in a steamer chair, reading or looking out over the rail.  Each day she tore off the postal from the top of her menu and sent it to the girl’s father.  She missed him more than she had expected.  He had become a habit; he was solid, dependable, loyal.  He had never heard of the Chief.

“Dear Daddy,” she would write:  “Having a splendid voyage so far, but wish you were here.  The baby is having such a good time—­so popular; and won two prizes to-day at the sports!  With love, Lily.”

They were all rather like that.  She would drop them in the mailbox, with a tug of tenderness for the man who worked at home.  Then she would go back to her chair and watch the sea, and recall the heat of the engine room below, and wonder, wonder——­

It had turned warm again; the edges of the horizon were grey and at night a low mist lay over the water.  Rooms were stifling, humid.  The Red Un discarded pajamas and slept in his skin.  The engine-room watch came up white round the lips and sprawled over the boat deck without speech.  Things were going wrong in the Red Un’s small world.  The Chief hardly spoke to him—­was grave and quiet, and ate almost nothing.  The Red Un hated himself unspeakably and gave his share of the sovereign to the Purser’s boy.