He considered that he had “put it up” to Moran. It was Moran’s turn, now, to learn the danger of promoting dissension in the place of discipline. Here was a fire big enough to break him, if it were badly handled; and he was relying on a disaffected crew and a discredited captain to handle it for him.
Keighley smiled as he ran; and he ran until the bitter smell of wet embers, from the burned wood underfoot, was wiped out of his nostrils by a puff of smoke that came warm and dry on his face. It sobered him. He slackened his pace to fill his lungs against the stifle, and proceeded carefully. A few yards farther on, the expected blast scorched him. When it had passed, he yelled, “Hi, there! Moore, there!” He got no reply. He broke into a run, stumbled over the hose, and fell among the burned beams and steaming ashes; and as he sprang to his feet again, the smoke was cut by a quivering current of heat, and he saw his crew crouched in a line behind their pipes, fighting in a wide semi-circle of flames that held back before them but reached out, roaring, on both flanks. “Back out! Back!” he called. “Yuh’re no good here. Get back to the boat! We can’t stop her here. Come along with that two-inch line! Lighten up here, some o’ you men. Chase back an’ shut off, Moore.”
They obeyed him in a suffocated silence, dragging back the smaller hose. But it was impossible to move the larger lines as long as they were filled with the weight of water; and the pipemen who were directing these, blinded by the resinous smoke of yellow pine, remained bent double before the heat that came licking across them like the touch of flame.
Keighley ran to them. “Get back an’ uncouple ’em. We’ll never get out o’ here this way.”
A man at the farthest pipe pitched forward on his face and lay huddled. His fellows left their nozzle in its pipe-stick, caught him under arms and knees, and stumbled back with him. Their undirected stream threshed about like a snake pinned down at the neck; and the fire began to creep stealthily across the drying debris around it.
A smoking pile of half-burned lumber close at hand flared up in a sudden flame. Keighley threw himself on the other men, dragged them from their pipe, and drove them back. “We can’t fool here,” he cried. “We got to get around to them gas tanks.”
They abandoned, reluctantly, the two nozzles that were caught by the lugs in the crotches of the pipe-sticks, and retreated with the smaller line. But, even so, they had to wait until the water had been shut off before they dared break the couplings to save the hose; and every minute was an hour long to the impatient Moran waiting for them to stretch in their lines to protect the threatened gas tanks. He was fresh to his responsibility, and Keighley’s cool insinuation of treachery had put him to the edge of a new fear.
When the men got back to the Hudson with the first lengths of hose, he stormed down on them angrily.
“What’re you doing? Get a move on, will you? What the hell are you fooling round with that hose for, Keighley? Stretch in over there, where I told you! Why the devil—”
Keighley, who had his own sense of dignity, set his thin lips in a tight line and looked back at the factory. “Where’s yer truck comp’ny?” he growled. “D’ yuh expect eight men to stretch in enough o’ this boat’s hose to feed two water towers?”