Farley, from behind, tied one line under his arms. Captain Keighley gave him the end of another. “That’s fer signalin’,” he explained. “Jerk it three times if yuh want us to haul y’ out. Jerk it twice if yuh’re all right an’ ready to take in the house. We’ll tie this other one to the pipe. Jerk once to start the water. Over yuh go now!... Strip!” he said to Cripps.
“Shine” sprang upon the bulwarks, took the signaling-line between his teeth, and dived. He struck the water and went in as clean as a fish. A few bubbles rose and burst in the streak of light from the wheelhouse window. The lines paid out smoothly through Keighley’s hand.
They stopped—and he began to gather in the slack, stealthily. They jerked forward, and ran out with a rush. There was the pause of a crisis. Then the signal-line jumped twice, and Keighley cried, “He’s in! Give him the pipe! Light up there!” Cripps tossed the nozzle overboard, and the others ran aft to lighten up the hose.
VII
“SHINE” had wriggled through the opening in the timbers and risen under the floor of the pier in a dense smoke that was lit with flames. He had swum to a slimy cross-beam and straddled it to draw a deep breath through a crack in the cribbing. And now he was hauling in the line, hand over hand, choking and sputtering. The nozzle rose between his knees. He jerked once on the signal rope, heard Keighley’s muffled cry of “Start yer water!” and threw himself on his belly on the nozzle and the beam. The air gushed in a mighty sough from the pipe. The hose bucked and kicked up under him. The stream spurted from it and broke, hissing, on the blaze.
“Go it!” he said, through his teeth, riding the hose and clinging to the slippery timbers. “Go it yuh son of a mut!”
He had left the weight of discipline on the deck behind him with his uniform, and he had returned to the naked audacity of the days when he had obeyed no rules but those of the “club.” He was no longer a fireman; he was a young hoodlum enjoying an adventure, and he looked up at the blaze before him with a grin. He heard Lieutenant Moore’s squad chopping at the planks above him, and he listened contemptuously. He thought of Captain Keighley, and it was with the admiring thought of a younger “Shine” for the leader of his gang.
He was still clinging to his beam when Cripps rose blowing behind him, having followed up the trail of the hose. But the flame and smoke had already been driven back sufficiently to clear the air; and “Shine” greeted the freckled “Jigger” with jubilant curses. “Come on here, Cripsey!” he cried. “We got her beat to a stan’ still. Take a hold o’ the spout. We’ll slush it around.” And when Cripps swam up beside him and threw his weight on the pipe, “Shine” shouted in the generous exultation of the moment, “Listen to Moore up there, tappin’ on them planks like a footy woodpecker.... Slush her over in the corner there.... The cap’s too wise fer him. He’s too damn hard-headed an ol’ clinker fer Moore.”