It was in this spirit that he received his men as they returned one by one to their work—and relieved the strangers who had been detailed in their places while they were in the hospital—and settled down again to pierhouse routine. “Shine” Conlin was the first to reappear, and he reported to the captain with a sort of hangdog shamefacedness; but Keighley—old, cold and silent—showed no sign of remembering the part the little wharf-rat had played aboard the Sachsen, and “Shine” resumed possession of his locker and his bunk, with the abashed grin of a guilty schoolboy who is allowed to return to his place in his class under suspended sentence. Sturton—“The Turr’ble Turk”—came eagerly, having a clear conscience; and he was a little crestfallen after his reception; whereas the sly and sandy Cripps accepted the captain’s manner as a tribute to his own powers of concealment and winked to himself in secret self-congratulation as he came out of the office, his eyes on his feet. The loyal Farley looked blank. The others behaved according to their natures and their degrees of innocence or guilt. Only Lieutenant Moore—the last to arrive, very pale and shaken—received any intimation that Keighley had not forgotten what had occurred; and he received it in the captain’s refusal to allow him to write the company’s reports, as he had been accustomed.
Life in the pierhouse, between fires, was as dull as imprisonment. There were brasses to be polished, hose to be dried, and a watch to be kept on the “jigger”—the little bell that rang in the alarms; but when the chores for the day had been done, all the rest was idleness. As long as there were strangers in the company, there was some show of sociability in the sitting-room, but when the entire crew had returned to duty, whether they worked or idled, it was in a constrained silence, with side-mouthed whispers and a suspicious aloofness between group and group.
There was little said about the fire on the Sachsen even within the groups. Firemen have no more taste for discussing their day’s work with one another than any other laborers have; and in this case, there was an uneasy feeling that the man who said least, now, would have least to answer for if there were to be an official investigation of the disaster. As for Keighley, he did not ask himself—or anybody else—what was going on in the minds of either faction. He did not ask, from either, anything but obedience; and he got that, now, without perceptible difficulty. They had evidently acquired some sort of unholy respect for him; and if they were plotting against him, they were doing it hypocritically. He was satisfied, if it had not been for the difficulty of making out the daily reports.
It was as if to make that difficulty greater that the engineer of the Hudson came to him to complain of the trouble it was to keep the boat’s low-pressure cylinder warm and ready to start. “I can’t see the sense o’ puttin’ triple-expansion engines into a fire-boat, any way,” he reported. “That third cylinder’s just a drag on the other two. She goes cold here, layin’ in the dock, an’ we’re half way to a fire before she gets hot enough to handle the steam.”
Keighley replied, “Well, send in yer kick to headquarters”—and avoided Dady’s eye as he said it; for it was the captain’s duty to make all such reports.
The engineer looked at him, looked at the floor, and then rubbed his nose with the back of an oily hand. “I guess you better do it, cap’n,” he said meekly. “I ain’t much of an ink-slinger.” And Keighley’s greater sense of dignity compelled him to answer, with an affected indifference, “All right. All right.”
But when he shut the door of his office and took out his pocket Webster from the locked drawer in which he kept it—with as much secrecy as if it were a rhyming dictionary—he sat down before his official letter paper to nurse his jaw with no more dignity than a schoolboy. He began to screw out the tortuous scrawl of his report, breathing hard at the end of every line and muttering curses at the beginning of the next; and when he decided that he had come to the end of his first sentence, he put down his pen to relax the muscles of his mouth and wipe his forehead and swear angrily at Moore for having failed him. The Hudson cuddling up against the pier, purring a little fume of steam from the exhaust pipe, was roused from her rest every now and then by the engineer in charge turning over the engines to get the water out of the low-pressure cylinder. And in the sitting-room Lieutenant Moore was tilted back against the wall in a cane chair, reading a newspaper, looking over his sheet at the closed door of the office with an expression of sulky resentment, and with the same expression glancing aside at the men who were reading, loafing and playing dominoes around him.
There was nothing of the genial atmosphere of an engine house’s leisure hour about the scene.
“Shine” had confided, in a husky undertone, to the freckled Cripps beside him, “I s’pose Moore’s sore ’cause we won’t fight it out to a finish fer ’m. What’d we make by it, supposin’ we got th’ ol’ man trun out of his job, eh?”
Cripps shut his eyes and nodded solemnly. He was still “lying low.”