Old Clinkers: A Story of the New York Fire Department

by Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins

For the man was an ex-fireman, of the name of Doherty, whom Captain Keighley had helped to dismiss from the service of the fire-department one week before. The reasons for his dismissal need not concern us here. The important point is that he had been a “Jigger-jumper,” as the members of a certain “benevolent association” of the firemen had been nicknamed; and Captain Keighley’s crew was full of “Jiggers” who were eager to avenge their fellow “Jigger” for the loss of his uniform.

Captain Keighley, when he looked up to see Doherty above him, was standing on the cement roof of the Hudson’s wheelhouse, beside a monitor nozzle that could drive a hole through a brick wall with a stream as stiff as a steel bar; and the fact that he stood in this place of command by virtue of his own cunning, in spite of intrigue in the fire-department and treachery in his own crew, did not show in the look that he lifted to his enemy overhead. At most he showed only a cool reliance on the streams of the Hudson to cope with any mischief that might be in hand; for the Hudson had a battery of four sets of duplex pumps that could force out of her pipes as much water in a minute as twenty shore-engines in a row; and Keighley was eager for a big fire to test her powers on.

The pilot in the wheelhouse brought her sweeping into the narrow slip beside the Sachsen, riding the ridges of her own swell—her keel all but naked amidships—and reversed with a suddenness that shook her to the stack. From the deck of the Sachsen men were bawling down: “Cotton in the forrud hold! Cotton afire! Cotton afire!” Captain Keighley struck at the whistle rope and blew for tugboats. “Moore,” he called to his lieutenant, “get a lighter alongside here and wet down the cotton I hoist out. Couple up two lines. Get the cotton spray.”

In handling such cotton fires, it is the way of the expert to extinguish the worst of the flames in the hold and then to hook out the smoldering bales, hoist them to the open air, lower them to the deck of a lighter and play the hose on them there until they are drenched. To that end, Keighley divided his crew into two squads, one of which he ordered to remain on the Hudson, with Lieutenant Moore, to receive the smoking bales as they came from the Sachsen, and the other he ordered to ascend the high side of the Sachsen, on their scaling ladders with two lines of hose, to attack the flames in the freighter’s hold. But in picking the men for these separate squads, Keighley was careful to gather into one of them all the members of his crew whom he knew to be “Jiggers,” and this squad he himself led up the scaling ladders to the deck of the Sachsen; the other men, who were not “Jiggers,” he left on the Hudson in charge of Lieutenant Moore, who was the “financial secretary” of the association and the leader of the conspiracy against Keighley in the company. By so doing, Keighley aimed, of course, to keep all the disaffected men under his own eye and to leave Moore behind with the loyal men where he could do no harm.

Lieutenant Moore understood these tactics and smiled to himself sourly. There was another man who smiled—but with a more triumphant expression of malice; and that was the ex-fireman Doherty, who had been scowling at Captain Keighley over the rail. And Keighley had not been more than ten minutes in the hold of the Sachsen when another blaze—independently, unexpectedly, and from no known cause whatever—burst out among the bales of cotton that were waiting to be loaded, in the pierhouse, whither Doherty had retreated.

The pierhouse was a wooden structure—though it was covered on the outside with a corrugated sheet-iron. Its beams were sifted over with the fine dust of innumerable cargoes; and its whole length was unprotected by a single hose hydrant or fire extinguisher. The result was a spread of flames so sudden that before the freight handlers had ceased running and shouting for buckets, the fire had leaped to the timbers of the shed and begun to sing there busily; and Doherty, still smiling to himself, only escaped from the burning end of the wharf by jumping into the slip.

At first, Lieutenant Moore did not see his opportunity; he remained stubbornly aboard the Hudson waiting for further orders. But when the shouts on the burning pier drew him to the deck of the Sachsen, he found that Captain Keighley and his men were still deep in the Sachsen’s hold with the steamship’s crew; and then he understood, foresaw, and made ready.

“Damn fine management,” he grumbled, “to go down there and leave a blaze like this behind him! Get another line up here!”

The men obeyed with alacrity, but by the time they got water through their hose, they had only a squirt-gun stream to use against the fire that was developing inside the pierhouse’s corrugated sheet-iron shell. They could not see the extent of that fire; and Lieutenant Moore, grumbling and complaining, did not appreciate the fact that in the flames which began to strike out from the windows of the pierhouse through the smoke, there was more than the disgrace of Captain Keighley for blundering in his conduct of the attack.

“Hell of a captain!” he cried. “If it wasn’t for the shore companies now, this end of the water-front’d get good and singed!”