"None of us understand proper signalling," said Hughie, "so we can't attract her attention without doing something absurdly theatrical, like running up the ensign upside down; and I'm hanged if we'll do that--yet. After all, we only want to know where we _are_. We may be just off the coast of Ireland for all I can say, and it does seem feeble to bring a liner out of her course to ask her footling questions. It would be like stopping the Flying Scotsman to get a light for one's pipe." "Or asking a policeman in Piccadilly Circus the nearest way to the Criterion bar," added Allerton. "I'm with you all the time, captain." And so these four mendicants allowed a potential Good Samaritan to pass by and sink behind the horizon. It was an action typical of their race: they had no particular objection to death, but they drew the line at being smiled at. Still, there were moments during the next ten days when they rather regretted their diffidence. But events like these were mere excrescences in a plane of dead monotony. The day's work was made up of endless hours in a Gehenna-like stokehold, where with aching backs and bleeding hands they laboured to feed the insatiable fires, or crawled along tunnel-like bunkers in search of the gradually receding coal; spells at the wheel--sometimes lashed to it--in biting wind or blinding fog; the whole sustained on a diet of ship's biscuit, salt pork, and lukewarm coffee, tempered by brief but merciful intervals of the slumber of utter exhaustion. Still, one can get used to anything. They even enjoyed themselves after a fashion. High endeavour counts for something, whether you have a wife and family dependent upon you, like Walsh, or can extract _la joie de vivre_ out of an eighteen-hour day and a workhouse diet, like Hughie. And they got to know each other, thoroughly,--a privilege denied to most in these days of restless activity and multifarious acquaintance. It was a lasting wonder to Hughie how Allerton could ever have fallen to his present estate; for he displayed an amount of energy, endurance, and initiative during this manhood-testing voyage that was amazing. He himself ascribed his virtue to want of opportunity to practise anything else, but this was obviously too modest an explanation. Perhaps blood always tells. At any rate, Allerton took unquestioned rank as second in command over the heads of two men whose technical knowledge and physical strength far exceeded his own. But in his hours of ease--few enough now--he was as easy-going and flippant and casual as ever.