And we are running an eighteen-second mile.
I peer from the fore end of the engine-room over the
hatch-coamings into the coach. The mail-clerks are sorting the
Winnipeg, Calgary, and Medicine Hat bags; but there is a pack of
cards ready on the table.
Suddenly a bell thrills; the engineers run to the turbine-valves
and stand by; but the spectacled slave of the Ray in the U-tube
never lifts his head. He must watch where he is. We are
hard-braked and going astern; there is language from the Control
Platform.
"Tim's sparking badly about something," says the unruffled
Captain Hodgson. "Let's look."
Captain Purnall is not the suave man we left half an hour since,
but the embodied authority of the G.P.O. Ahead of us floats an
ancient, aluminum-patched, twin-screw tramp of the dingiest, with
no more right to the 5000-foot lane than has a horse-cart to a
modern road. She carries an obsolete "barbette" conning tower--a
six-foot affair with railed platform forward--and our warning
beam plays on the top of it as a policeman's lantern flashes on
the area sneak.
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