“Can’t make it,” they heard the captain call at last. “Back down, men! Back down!”
They went down without a word.
“We got to wait here till they get that blaze out,” he said curtly. “She’s afire up there from end to end. I’ve shut the ventilator cover to keep out the smoke. We’ll be better down below here till they get some water on her.”
They were in the shaft tunnel—a corridor of steel plates, seven feet high, five feet wide, and more than thirty feet long. From end to end of it, the big shaft that spins the starboard propeller lay shining like a steel python, stretched and bound in its bearings. At one end was the wall through which the shaft passed to the after peak and the screw; at the other was the entrance from the engine room, already blue with smoke; above them was the throat of the closed ventilator. They were in a metal vault, far below the surface of the river, with every avenue of escape cut off by the fire above them.
Captain Keighley leaned back against the shaft and took off his helmet.
The men stood waiting. They had depended on him to show them the way out of the danger into which he had led them. One of the “Jiggers”—it was “Shine” Conlin—demanded, “How are we goin’ to get up?”
“Well,” Keighley rounded on him, “I’m not keepin’ yuh, am I? Get up any way yuh like!”