The German said resignedly, “T’ey haf gone.”
But they had not gone. There was an answering tap from the other side of the metal; a bolt squeaked and grated; and then the bulkhead door swung back on the empty coal bunker and the faint glow of a furnace in the stoke hole.
Through this narrow opening the firemen crawled into an atmosphere that was cool by comparison with the one they had been breathing in the burning cargo room; and they drew long breaths of relief there, looking around the well of steel at the bottom of which they stood. The German officer took a little tin lamp—the shape of a miniature watering pot with a flame in the spout—and held it to give light to the two stokers, who were screwing the bolts of the door in place again; and one of the stokers looked back over his shoulder, surprised at this condescension. The officer said nothing until both doors were fast. Then he growled at the stokers gutturally—and on the word they dropped their tools and ran, with the whole party at their heels, between hot boilers, through dark furnace rooms, between more boilers, through the doors of other bulkheads, and finally into the grated galleries of the engine room, where they found two engineers still standing before their levers, waiting for further orders from the bridge.
Captain Keighley, thus far, had moved with a certain swift calmness, speaking in a low voice, and using his eyes, as he used his hands, deliberately, without any darting glances or quick turns. But when he looked up the railed ladders that rose from tier to tier of machinery in the engine room, he heard a sound above him that he had not expected; and he started up those ladders at the double quick.
The crackle of the fire grew louder as he climbed. He heard cries and shouting in the cabins. He smelt scorch again. A puff of heat swirled down on him in a fierce blast. And when he reached the sliding door that gave on the deck, the passageway was filled with smoke.
Here the four firemen who had refused to obey Lieutenant Moore and who were caught in the burning house-work, came running down on their captain. “It’s no go—that way—Cap’n,” Farley cried.
Keighley grasped the greasy railing of the ladder and slid down on the “Jiggers” who had been following him up. “Get further aft!” he ordered.
They dropped into the engine room as lightly as they would have dropped down the sliding poles of their “house,” and they called to the German officer to show them another stairway further aft. That officer did not need to be told what they had found above them. He jumped down among the dynamos, stumbled past the ice engine, dived through the open door of the shaft tunnel, and swinging himself to the ladder that went up the inside of a ventilator shaft, he led them up that narrow flue hand over hand.
They were not half way up it before they met what they had met above the engine room—a suffocating heat and smother. The firemen heard the German growling and coughing above them, as big and clumsy as a bear that is being smoked out of a hollow tree. Captain Keighley caught up to him and shouted to him go on. He answered nothing that was intelligible, and tried to back down. Keighley ordered him to hold fast, and went up over him like a cat.
The others waited, head to heels.