Moran shouted, “Back off. Full speed. Get these men to the hospital.”
They were madmen. And the squad on the Hudson, fighting with them to prevent them from jumping overboard, had to carry them below to the engineer’s quarters and wrap them in wet blankets and hold them down.
Not one of them was in a condition to tell how they had escaped. (Indeed few of them ever succeeded in recalling any more of what had happened in the shaft tunnel than a convalescent remembers of the delirium of his fever.) Only Keighley—between the gulps of water that were doled out to him cautiously—explained that he had come to his senses sitting with his back against the door of the shaft tunnel, ankle deep in water, and had realized that they would all be drowned in the tunnel unless they escaped to some higher level. He had forced the steel door back and driven or dragged the men out to the engine room where they climbed to the first tier of gratings, the fire in this part of the boat having burned itself out first, for want of fuel. From there, he had found his way through the stokeholes to an empty coal bunker, where a cooler current of air warned him that there was probably a coal port open up above him. He had come back for the others; they had climbed the bunker ladders, and found the port; an engineer had made the signal with a stoker’s lamp; and the Hudson had seen it. “Gi’ me a drink,” Keighley ended. “Gi’ me a drink.”
He was the least exhausted of all the crew—although the truth is that none of them was more than dangerously blistered and temporarily maddened by pain. They were of the toughness that is characteristic of their profession—chosen men who got themselves injured by the hundreds every year, but who succumbed to their injuries so rarely that the death rate of the department was, at that time, only six men a year—trained men who had the agility of cats and a cat’s tenacity of life.
They were taken to their homes or to the hospitals, in ambulances, “to lay up for repairs.” Captain Keighley refused to do even that. “I’m all right,” he told the ambulance surgeons. “Put some grease on me—somethin’ to take the smart out. If I go home lookin’ sick, I’ll scare the girl to death.” (He was a widower, living with a married daughter whose husband was a police captain.) “Fix up my hands. That’s all I need.”
He had been burned about the head and arms chiefly, and they washed and bandaged him. They put his left arm in a sling—much to his disgust—and would have bound up his right hand, too, if he had not refused to allow them. “Let that alone,” he ordered. “I got use for that.” They warned him that he might have blood poisoning if he did not protect his burns from the air, “Huh!” he grunted. “Blood poisonin’! Put somethin’ on it so’s I can get a night’s sleep. That’s all I need.” And they had to let him have his way.
He went upstairs to his bedroom and lay down in his underclothes—because it would have been too great an effort to remove them—and slept the sleep of exhaustion. He was not disturbed; the Hudson had been reported out of commission and no alarms were rung in.
He slept the sleep of exhaustion, and he wakened next morning to the noises made by an improvised crew at work cleaning up the fire-boat. When he had blinked away the first alarming idea that he had overslept, he sat up painfully and looked at the blisters on his free hand. He looked at them a long time—as if he saw there the whole story of his battle with the “Jiggers”—and then he looked up, under his eyebrows, at the open door and the vacant cots of the crew’s bunkroom, and he almost smiled. He straightened up slowly, like a rheumatic, as he stood; and he went about his toilet with a cripple’s patience, his mind on the “Jiggers” and their discomfiture—considering what they would do next.