Yes, Captain Kettle put the patch on that boiler like a workman. He fitted his bolts, and made his joints; then luted the manhole and bolted that back in place; and then stepped down while a couple of negroes sluiced him with water from gourds, and rubbed him clean and dry with handfuls of wild cotton waste. So far, although the incessant hail of bullets had pitted the boiler's skin in a hundred places, no second shot had found a spot sufficiently soft to make a puncture. The range of the bombardment was long, perhaps, and though a bullet at seven hundred yards may, with convenience, kill a man, it will not pierce seven-eighths boiler plate. And so, theoretically, the boiler was safe for the time being. But practically it was otherwise. The boiler was by no means new. It was corroded with years, and incapacity, and neglect, as is the custom with all parts of boats and machinery on the Haut Congo. But it had been brought up to that waterway by carriers at vast expense from Matadi, the highest steamer port on the Lower Congo, probably costing three months and a dozen lives in transit, so that it was debited in the books of the Free State as being worth its weight in silver, and destined to be used on without replacement till it saw fit to burst. So Kettle knew that in places it would be not much thicker than stout brown paper, and was quite aware that if any of the pattering bullets investigated one of these patches, he would have to do his work over again. He had a strong--and, I think, natural--disinclination for this. He had come through terrific risks during the last four hours, and could not expect to do so a second time with equal immunity; his two wounds smarted; and (although it sounds ludicrous that such a thing should have weight) the dirt inseparable from such employment jarred against his neat and cleanly habits, and filled him with unutterable disgust. The moment, he conceived, was one for hurry. He told off four of the negroes as trimmers and stokers, and set Commandant Balliot over them to see that they pressed on with their work; he sent Clay with a huge gang of helpers overboard on the lee side to risk the crocodiles, and dig away the sand; and he himself, with a dozen paddlers, got into the dug-out canoe, which was his only boat, and set to carrying out a kedge and line astern. All of these occupations took time, and when at last steam had mounted to a working pressure in the battered gauge, and they got on board again, two of his canoe-men had been shot, and one of Clay's party had been dragged away into deep water by a prowling crocodile. As no one else was competent, Kettle himself took charge of the engines, and roared his commands with one hand on the throttle, and the other on the reversing gear; Clay, for the moment, was quartermaster, and stood to the wheel on the upper deck; and Balliot, under the tuition of curses and revilings, drove the winch, which heaved and slacked on the line made fast to the kedge.