V
WHEN he came down stairs to the “office,” he found Deputy-Chief Moran waiting to see him, and he received Moran as if nothing unusual had been happening, despite the fact that his left arm was still in its support. Moran had a morning newspaper on the desk, spread at a page that held a portrait of Captain Keighley and an account of the fire on the Sachsen. He greeted Keighley with congratulations, as pugilists shake hands before they come to blows.
Keighley glanced at the paper, indifferently. “We didn’t stay in the engine room,” he corrected the account. “We were in the shaft tunnel.”
Moran was full-blooded and dark-haired. His mouth was harsh under a wiry black mustache that looked as if it had been bitten off at the teeth. He asked, curtly, “How did you get into that mess?”
Keighley dropped the paper in the waste basket before he replied, “I didn’t get into it. I got out of it.” He confronted Moran with a defiant eye. “There was some funny work at the bottom of it. The men in the tunnel seemed to think it was Moore an’ his gang.”
Moore’s gang, of course, was also Moran’s. And Moran demanded, “Did they say so?”
“No.”
“Then what do you say so for?”
“Yuh asked me, didn’t yuh?” Keighley replied, unperturbed.
“I asked you for facts!”