“The fire flames up to a reddening sky;
On God and the firemen the people cry!
The fire’s put out, and everything’s righted;
God’s forgot and the firemen slighted.”
—Fireman’s Annual.
OLD CLINKERS
I
THE Sachsen was a freighter of the Baltic-American line, plying between New York and Hamburg; she was tied to her pier in the North River, receiving cargo, that afternoon, when fire was discovered among the bales of cotton that were being loaded into her forward hold; and according to the foreman of her forward-hold gang of freight-handlers, the fire started in a longshoreman’s clay pipe, smoked, against orders, while the man was at his work below decks receiving the bales. According to the officials of the Baltic-American line, the fire was “a pure case of spontaneous combustion;” and the newspapers of the day reported it as such. But when New York’s new fire-boat, the Hudson, in answer to the alarm from the pier, came whistling up the river from her berth near the Battery and turned in under the starboard quarter of the big Sachsen, Captain Keighley of the Hudson looked up to see a longshoreman scowling down at him over the steamship’s bulwarks; and the presence of that particular longshoreman was at the moment as ominous of trouble for old Keighley as it subsequently became significant to him in considering the origin of the fire.