Madden could construe dead tongues, or at least could when he left
college a few months back, but now his life, the life of his crew, the
salving of the dock, and the winning of a possible fortune, depended
upon his answering the riddle of this Twentieth Century Sphinx. It was
like attempting to understand all mathematics, from addition to
celestial mechanics, at a glance.
Nevertheless, Madden's training as a civil engineer gave him a certain
aptitude for his formidable undertaking and he set about it with
rat-like patience.
He picked out the main steam pipe, larger than his body, covered with
painted white canvas, and followed this till he discovered the throttle,
a steel wheel with hand grips with which he could choke the breath out
of the monster engines. Beside this were control levers. On the steam
chest lay a half-smoked cigarette, as if the engineer had been called
suddenly away from his post.
Madden turned the throttle, pushed the levers back and forth, and
listened to clicking sounds high up in the complexity of the engines. He
knew that every lever threw long systems of vents and valves in and out
of play. A wrong combination would easily wreck all this powerful
machinery. He was tackling a delicate job--like juggling a car-load of
dynamite.
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