The blaze, caught at close range, seemed to snuff out as suddenly as if it had been no more than the flame of a candle; and when Keighley looked back over his shoulder in the darkness, he saw the spark of a belated lantern which Lieutenant Moore was lowering through the hole that his squad had cut in the floor. “There’s the loot’nt,” “Shine” sang out impudently. “If he ain’t careful with that lamp he’ll set fire to somethin’.” And the laugh that followed came heartily from the men.
Keighley made his way back to the lantern and called to Moore to put a ladder down. “Fire’s out here,” he shouted. “Go in up there an’ help wet down.”
He waited at the foot of the ladder until he was sure that the last glimmer of flame had been extinguished below; then, calling to his own squad to leave their lines and “back out,” he climbed the ladder to the floor of the pier.
There was no one there to laugh at his ridiculous appearance, except the wharf watchman, who had returned to the scene of the fire from the safety of a car-float in a neighboring slip. Keighley strode over to him. “Got any ripe bananas yuh don’t want?”
“Sure,” the man replied. “Take all youse can ate.”
“Shine” came up the ladder, panting from a race with Sturton. Keighley touched him on the bare shoulder. “Take a bunch o’ those bananas aboard with yuh,” he ordered, “an’ be damn quick about it.”
VIII
TWENTY minutes later, the last of the fire had been drowned out; the Hudson’s lines had all been picked up; and the crew sat along the bulwarks, eating bananas and waiting for the order to start back to their house. Cripps and Sturton, “Shine” and Farley were perched in a row along the edge of the engine-room skylight, “in their birthday clo’s,” each with a banana in his hand and a bulge in his cheek, fraternizing while they dried.