“Comin’?” he said. “It was you that was comin’.”
They muttered and looked back at the hole in the pier.
“Yuh’ll get killed at some o’ these fires, some o’ these days, if yuh go runnin’ into places full o’ smoke this way, without lookin’ where yuh’re runnin’. The chief ought to know better. How’re yuh feelin’, chief?”
Dolger groaned, “De brewery! Stob her!”
“Help him aboard there!” Keighley ordered. “Cast off an’ run her up the pier further, Moore, an’ get that line in!” The volunteers helped their limping officer aboard. “Y’ ought to know better,” Keighley grumbled. “Runnin’ in blind like that! Hurry up there, boys!”
The guilty Noonan had hidden in the wheelhouse. Keighley saw him watching from the window, and grimly ordered the men to carry Dolger in there, too. While that was being done, the boat was run up past the gap in the pier and made fast again; and for the next half hour Keighley was too busy to think of Noonan or his victim.
The broadside of streams from the Hudson had checked the progress of the fire down the water front, and a single standpipe was sufficient to hold it now; but the roof of the brewery was flaming under a rolling plume of black smoke, and the excitement ashore rose to the confusion of a panic. Keighley, on the bulwarks, gathered together a herd of volunteers, and drove them with shouts to drag lines from the hose-box and stretch them up the pier. They tripped over their own feet, blundered with their hose-spanners, tried to screw the wrong nozzles on the lines, turned on the water before their couplings were tight, got in the way of the trained men, and were bruised and wetted, blinded, cursed and bewildered, like a crew of clumsy stage supers caught in the hurry of a “dark change.” When they got their big line laid and the water turned into it, the force of the stream kicked them back as if they had been trying to hold a cannon; and it was only by virtue of the everlasting luck of the beginner that the plunging nozzle did not thresh the lives out of some of them. Keighley swore disgustedly, and sat down on the side of the boat.
The brewery was doomed in any case. He watched it burn.
While he was sitting there, the crestfallen Noonan came up behind him, perspiring remorsefully, and wiping his red face in the crook of his elbow. “We got th’ ol’ Dutchman into trouble, Dan,” he said.
Keighley snorted his indifference.