“Coal dust,” he told Archie. “Let’s go visit the black gang.”

BLOCK, THE SWINDLER, SWORE up and down, again, that he had not seen the face of the black gang crewman who had taken the silver trunk from the baggage room, but Isaac Bell brought him along anyway, intending to watch his face for signs of lying as they scrutinized the men who stoked the furnaces. He brought the saloon steward, too, on the theory that the man who knocked him down could not know beyond a doubt that the steward hadn’t seen his face. The sight of two witnesses might set off a case of nerves. Or so he thought until he clapped eyes on the stokers and the hellish place where they worked.

“THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY passers, trimmers and firemen, mostly Irish from Liverpool,” said the Mauretania’s chief engineer, a compact, no-nonsense Scot with a walrus mustache and four gold stripes on his sleeve. “Plus your odd foreigner.” Captain Turner had ordered him to escort Bell and Archie and their witnesses down to the stokehold.

He pressed an electric switch, and a massive watertight steel door ground open on a sulfurous scene of heat and thunder. Men stripped to the waist and hunched double were shoveling coal and wheeling barrows in near darkness.

The chief engineer had to shout for Bell to hear him warn, “Doubt you’ll get much out of ’em. The black gang are a hard lot.”

“I’d be amazed if they weren’t.”

“You should see ’em brawl. We dog the hatches till the fightin’s over. Mind, it’s no picnic. Our Maury wants a thousand tons a day to make her knots.”

The devil, thought Isaac Bell, would feel right at home deep in the ship. It was one thing to envision the principle that fire heated water into steam that spun the blades of Mauretania’s turbines that turned the propellers that drove her through the sea. It was another to peer through air thick with eye-stinging coal dust at scores of men sweating to feed her.

Timing gongs clanged. Furnace doors flew open. In the leaping light of flames, firemen with wet rags tied over their faces for protection from the heat thrust ten-foot steel-slicing bars into seething beds of yellow embers. They stabbed white-hot clinkers of fused impurities loose from the fire grates, smashed the clinkers, and raked away the pieces. They dug their shovels into coal heaped on the deck. They straightened up and scattered a scoopful into the furnaces, bent over and dug up another. Scoop after scoop after scoop after scoop they scattered onto the fires. They worked fast, endeavoring to open the furnace doors for the shortest possible time to keep the heat up. For seven minutes the firemen sliced and raked and shoveled, skillfully spreading even layers of fresh fuel on the incandescent coals. The searing heat dried their face rags stiff.