At the first sight of them Keighley’s indolence of mind disappeared with the quick blink of an alert eye. “Aha!” he said to himself. “There’s work for Moran.” He shouted to the men, “Get out ev’ry line we got, boys.”
He laid the Hudson broadside on, at the head of the slip, between two wharves, under the dark wall of the furniture factory; and he led up three lines of his largest hose to take the fire in the rear. He left the boat empty except for the pilot, standing black in the door of the lighted wheelhouse, and quiet except when Dady, the engineer, came up from the engine room, looked across the darkness towards the struggle which he could not see, and called out to the pilot, “How’s she goin’, Pete?”
The pilot answered several times, indifferently, that she was “going her own gait all right,” that she was “chasing the boys all round the lot,” that she had “the bit in her teeth.” But at length he reported that the wind had fallen. Then, the next time, he said, “She’s puffing in from the southeast.” And at last he leaned his shoulder against the door-jamb and replied, “You better get your pumps well greased. The wind’s come round strong from the south.”
“South!” Dady sniffed the air. “That’ll bring her back this way!”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
The engineer popped into the hatch like a frightened rabbit into its burrow; and the silhouette in the doorway raised the shadow of a pair of night glasses to the black profile of a nose and stood watching.
The scene of the fire on the piers
In a moment, out of the darkness at the head of the slip, two figures in long rubber coats came striding into the light of the incandescent lamp at the stern of the Hudson and sprang aboard. They were Captain Keighley and Acting-Chief Moran; and they came forward rapidly towards the wheelhouse, Moran waving his arm with an excited gesture of authority.
“She’s working back over there,” he was saying of the fire. “You’ll have to hold her, here, at the factory, and keep her from jumping that street to those gas tanks. If they blow up, it’ll smash half the ward.”