The sparks began to blow over on the Sachsen from the pier, and Moore ran back to order up another line of hose from the Hudson. He called to the men on the fire-boat to train a stream from the monitor nozzle, over the deck of the Sachsen, to the roof of the pier building; and he was promptly obeyed; but the stream was so strong that when it was raised to clear the bulwarks of the Sachsen it shot over the pier, and there was nothing to be done but to train it still higher, to let the water drop on the buildings, sprinkling them instead of tearing them to pieces. Fire caught the awnings of the Sachsen; the firemen drenched them. A puff of blaze reached her house-work; they fought it off. Moore ordered here, cursed and complained there, and ran around futilely; and, at last, realizing with what a fire he was at such close quarters, he cried out frantically to cast off the hawsers and tow the Sachsen to midstream.
There was no one left to cast off. The firemen had to get their axes from the Hudson and chop through the wire ropes. The steel strands resisted long enough to complete the disaster, and when the last thread parted under the axeblades, the current still held the Sachsen hard against the wharf.
A stewardess ran out from the cabins, screaming that the after house-work was afire.
The whole catastrophe had developed so quickly that the thought uppermost in Lieutenant Moore’s mind was still his first one of Captain Keighley’s disgrace; and when he lost his head and began to shout at the men—like an officer in the panic of a retreat—it was abuse of Captain Keighley that he shouted.
“What the hell did he want to go down in the hold for, with a fire like this up here? He’s a hell of a captain, he is! He’s a hell of a captain!”
One of the pipemen, (whose name was Farley), without turning his head, growled under his helmet, “Why didn’t yuh haul her out o’ here long ago?”
“Why don’t she come out now?” Moore cried. “That’s why I didn’t. Because she won’t! That’s why! Because she can’t!”
The tugs, whistling and panting around her, got their lines on the after bitts and pulled and shouldered and struggled noisily. But by the time they got her under way, the crew of the Sachsen, alarmed by the screams of the stewardess, were already diving overboard, and Lieutenant Moore’s men were retiring from a blaze that seemed to spit back their streams on them in spurts of steam.
Moore ordered Farley to go below decks and warn Captain Keighley and the squad in the hold. Farley glanced at his fellows; they were all partisans of the captain; they had been chafing under Moore’s attacks on him, and they were contemptuous of the lieutenant for the way in which he had mishandled the pierhouse blaze. Moreover, there were only four of them to two lines of hose; and the one unnecessary man there, as they saw the situation, was Moore. Let him go himself.
The lieutenant repeated his orders. Farley sulkily remained where he was. And—what with “Jiggers” and “Anti-Jiggers,” the influence of the fire commissioner who was a “Jigger” and the influence of the chief who was not, the party of Captain Keighley and the followers of Lieutenant Moore—discipline on the Hudson had come to such a pass that Moore had no redress against a subordinate who refused to obey his orders.