A BUSHMAN AFLOAT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8445, 18 May 1907, Page 7

A BUSHMAN AFLOAT.

By ALBERT DORRINGTON. (Author of "Along the Castlereagh," "Children of the Gully," ttc.) lr i —Copyright reserved.) VI. We left Fremantle at 8 o'clock on Monday night, and began our climb north to Colombo. The journey across the Indian Ocean is apt to become monotonous. The endless stretches of sea and sky, the absence of bird, life, has a numbing effect on eye and brain. ( We spent an hour looking at the ship's freezing chambers, and met a small procession of stewards carrying ice on their backs up to the saloon pantry. Last trip the ship's cat got locked in one of the freezing chambers and remained there for nine days surrounded by frozen poultry and meat. It is a mystery how she kept herself alive in such an Arctic temperature. When released she bounded upstairs into the hot air and fell asleep on the saloon couch. She t was ad lively as a kitten the next "'day. The English stewards and decfc hands appear to suffer from the heat already, and we are five or six days south of the Line. They are mostly fat, over-fed fellows, who believe in a good beef-steak and a bottle of stout before going to bunk every night. No wonder they lie awake during the tropic nights wearing a pale bloated expression on their . 'faces. We have discovered that quite a number of New Zealand boys are working their passages to London. Ono took on a job in the stokehole, but gave it up before we had been three days out of Fremantle. The ship's surgeon is busy this morning inside his little deck dispensary. A small procession of patients wait outside on the form. A fireman crawls alorg the port alley-way exhibiting a badly-scalded foot to his comrades. A white-faced greaser with consumption in his luminous eyes enters the dispensary and is examined by the genial surgeon. • The Cockney fireman is a born tough. He does not mix with the rest of the ship's company. His work unfite hiro for polite society. The Sydney larrikin would not be seen dead in his company. Down in the throbbing spaces under the engine-room he slams things and rake: with slicebar and shove! feeding the fire-hungry boilers that gasp and sigh for coal and yet more coal. His boots are limbic shod to protect his feet; from the burning plates. Hi 3 hands and body are scarred and livid where lie has been, flung atone time or another against the boiler dojrs. When ashore he finds much relief in fighting policemen. If he has been stoking for ten years his brain is more or less affeced by the terrible heat and the violent changes to which he is subjected. They come up from below dripping from head to shoe, with coalblackened bodies, slack-jawed and limp as fever patients. The Red Sea is the horror of all white firemen,.and black ones for the matter of that." In the majority of cases the rum served out in J,cold latitudes is saved until Colombo and Aden are reached. "Rum is our mother and father," said one of them to me. "It feeds us when we can't eat, an' it makes us sing when the heat is crawlin' down our throats." "But the after-effects?" "There ain't none. The fires sweat us dry. It shrivels us up an' biles us, an' there ain't no room left for aftereffects. I've tried oatmeal water an' cold tea, but neither of 'em keeps off the heat like rum. Rum 'as got hands an' feet, an' it nurses yer when yer dyin' below." "Do men die below?" "Die! Some of us was never properly alive. I've seen white-faced corpses of men shovellin' beside me. Yer can't get 'em to speak. Yer never hear 'em complain neither until they lie down, while the second engineer gives 'em ice poultice." "How do Australians face the music below?" "They're quiters when the clinkers are out. Most of 'em would sooner 'fight the chief than stay through the Red Sea." "Make the game good enough," broke in Bi'l," and we'll fill your stoke-holes with Australian firemen. Why, Btokin's a fool's game compared with sewor work and rock blastin'. I've seen a gang of Aus-tralian-born men face choke damp an' dynamite year in an' out when the wages was all right. But you ain't goin' to get our live men to sweat in your stoke-holes for four pounds a month not while there's a rabbit in the country." The discussion ended abruptly. Increased ventilation has made the stoke-hole of the average mail-boat a more comfortable hell than formerly. But, so long as London can supply legions of the damned at three to four pounds a month, the steamship companies will allow poor Jack just enough air to keep him from dying with a shovel in his hands. We have onboard about fifty affluent farmers from New Zealand and Australia. Hard work and strict attention to the butter industry has brought its reward to the majority. It must be admitted that the New Zealanders as a whole swear by the land which gives so bountifully and requires so little in return. The nights, especially while crossing the Indian Ocean, are delightful beyond compare. In the smoke-room and on deck these well-to-do farmers compare notes and methods of conducting an up-to-date dairy farm. This cow-talk, as it is often referred to by the sailors, is often amusing and full of human interest. "I'd sooner have women and children to look after my cows than men," said an Otago passenger at dinner. "If a cow kicks \ woman she doesn't rise and belt it with an axe or paling. She simply wipes her face and tells the animal that it is a wicked creature, and if she isn't badly hurt, will go on milking again. When a man gets kicked he stands up and belts Gehenna out of poor Strawberry, especially if she is not his own property. Result is that Strawberry gets to hate him, and his milk returns will fall off wonderfully throughout the year." "I don't know about women not hitting back," put in Bill suddenly. "Dropped a maul on my wife s toe one morning, and she kept me running round the paddock for 13 min-

utes by the clock. Still," said Bill genially, "1 don't, remember ever seeing a woman iay violent hands on a cow, although I know a lady out West who hit a bull camel in the nose with a flat-iron when it poked its upper lip through the kitchen window one afternoon. She had great presence of mind, that woman. But she told me afterwards that she mistook the camel's face for a sewing-machine canvasser. Some of these machine agents have wonderful upper lips," concluded Bill. (To be continued.)