At a round table in the center of the room, Farley, of the curled mustache, was playing dominoes with Sturton, “The Turr’ble Turk;” and Farley, being an expert, could loll back in his chair and play absent-mindedly; while Sturton, to whom the game was an almost violent mental exercise, bent over his dominoes, with his big-boned face set in a worried scowl, playing deliberately, with slow movements of his hairy paws.
Farley had been watching Lieutenant Moore. “That loot’nt looks like a bullpup shut out on a door-step,” he summed it up to Sturton. But “Turk” merely grunted, without letting his attention be drawn from the game; and they continued to play in silence—waiting, as the whole department was waiting, for the retirement of Chief Borden and its consequences.
VI
THEY were waiting so, one night, when the next water-front blaze came to relieve the monotony of their inaction. At the first stroke of the jigger Keighley laid down his pen and brightened with the hope that there was a fire in his district to release him from his desk. Lieutenant Moore dropped his newspaper and looked up to count the strokes of the bell with an expression of relief. The men straightened back from their dominoes; and when the little bell started to ring the third number of a station in their district, they rose with a smile. With the first stroke of the larger gong, the sitting-room was empty—Captain Keighley was shouting to the pilot, “All right there! Pier ——, North River!”—and the Hudson was under way.
They found the river as crowded with a summer evening’s traffic as Broadway with street-cars and hansoms on a theatre night; and the Hudson had no shore engine’s right of way under the law. She went whistling up the stream, dodging and spurting, throbbing, grunting and checking speed. Blazing excursion boats, bedecked with colored lights, answered her impatient signals with cheerful impudence and held their courses. Squat ferries paddled serenely across her path. A tug cut in ahead of her to race with her for salvage, and worried her like a cur at a horse’s head. The pilot twirled his wheel, worked his engine room signals, and swore despairingly. And Captain Keighley, staring at the shore lights in the distance, revolved the first sentence of his report in memory, and vainly tried to forget it.
When the river opened into a free stretch of water, the tug fell behind; and Keighley saw the pier-end lamp—towards which they were heading—blinking like the intermittent flash of a lighthouse. It disappeared, and he guessed that it had been blotted out by the drift of smoke.
“Wind from the south?” he asked. The pilot answered, “Yes’r.” Keighley said, “Take us in on this side o’ the pier.”
He stepped out of the wheelhouse to go aft to the crew. “Get out two two-inch lines from the port gates,” he ordered Lieutenant Moore.