OLD CLINKERS

“We can’t fool here,” he cried. “We got to get around to them gas-tanks”

See page 114

OLD CLINKERS

A STORY OF THE NEW
YORK FIRE DEPARTMENT

BY
HARVEY J. O’HIGGINS
AUTHOR OF “THE SMOKE EATERS,” “DON-A-DREAMS,” ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
MARTIN JUSTICE

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1909, by
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)

TO THE FORGOTTEN HEROES
OF THE F. D. N. Y.

ILLUSTRATIONS

“The fire flames up to a reddening sky;

On God and the firemen the people cry!

The fire’s put out, and everything’s righted;

God’s forgot and the firemen slighted.”

—Fireman’s Annual.

OLD CLINKERS

I

THE Sachsen was a freighter of the Baltic-American line, plying between New York and Hamburg; she was tied to her pier in the North River, receiving cargo, that afternoon, when fire was discovered among the bales of cotton that were being loaded into her forward hold; and according to the foreman of her forward-hold gang of freight-handlers, the fire started in a longshoreman’s clay pipe, smoked, against orders, while the man was at his work below decks receiving the bales. According to the officials of the Baltic-American line, the fire was “a pure case of spontaneous combustion;” and the newspapers of the day reported it as such. But when New York’s new fire-boat, the Hudson, in answer to the alarm from the pier, came whistling up the river from her berth near the Battery and turned in under the starboard quarter of the big Sachsen, Captain Keighley of the Hudson looked up to see a longshoreman scowling down at him over the steamship’s bulwarks; and the presence of that particular longshoreman was at the moment as ominous of trouble for old Keighley as it subsequently became significant to him in considering the origin of the fire.

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!”

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.

“All right,” he threatened. “I’ll see to you, too!” and turned to run for the hatch.

The men grinned. The Hudson, trying to bring its monitor to bear on the burning woodwork of the Sachsen, shot a terrific stream, roaring and threshing, close to their heads. Farley said: “That darn fool’ll be sweepin’ us off here in a minute. We’d better get inside out o’ this an’ help in there.”

They retreated aft for shelter, dragging their hose; and by doing so they left the forward deck to the flames that were blown over the Sachsen by a steady breeze.

“All right,” he threatened. “I’ll see to you, too!”

See page 18

II

MEANWHILE, Lieutenant Moore had found Captain Keighley and the “Jiggers,” with their two lines, working busily in the choke of cotton smoke in the deep hold, playing one pipe on the heart of the fire and with the other sprinkling the bales around it. And Captain Keighley, with his helmet awry on his head and a smile of contempt slanting his mouth, feeling the Hudson’s eight pumps behind him, was playing a game with that fire, happily. The screeches of the stewardess and the flight of the ship’s crew had not alarmed him. He was used to the sight of blind fright; he saw the flames before him confined and beaten back; and he knew that for any fire that might develop behind him, the Hudson was a park of cannon drawn up in reserve.

It did not occur to him that the Hudson, drawn up under the high side of the Sachsen, was a park of cannon in a hole in the ground.

Lieutenant Moore, explaining in the manner of a man with a grievance, took a valuable minute to make the situation plain. He made it plainer than he knew. Keighley narrowed his old eyes and nodded. “Back out, boys!” he called. “Leave yer lines. We’ll pick ’em up from the deck.”

The men dropped their hose and climbed up the ladders; and as soon as they had passed the orlop deck it was evident to them that they were in a trap. Flames were blowing across the hatch above them, as if the very air had suddenly become inflammable and taken fire from the fierce heat of the July sun. Captain Keighley led up the ladders until he was almost at the top—and then dropped down again. There was no escape by that way.

“We’ll have to go aft between decks,” he said.

An officer of the Sachsen, who had remained with the firemen fighting the fire, replied in broken English that this forward hold was shut off from the rest of the boat by two bulkheads and a cross-bunker.

Captain Keighley said, “Here! You know yer own boat. Take us out o’ here.”

The German shook his big, blond head, thought a moment, shook it again, and then made a pass with his hand and nodded.

He dropped down the ladder, and they followed him, choking, back to the deep hold. He groped his way aft in the smoke to the partition of steel plates that makes the after wall of the cargo room, and there he stopped. They heard him beating on the plates with the dull blows of a fat fist. One of the firemen passed him a belt hatchet. He rang it on the bulkhead.

There was no answer.

Captain Keighley seized it and rapped like a miner signalling for aid.

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.

“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!”

III

THE words were given like a challenge—a challenge to one of those trials of authority in which the trained leader, turning on his rebellious followers, seems to use the hand of chance and circumstance to whip them into line—a challenge that struck the men before him with a little start of surprise that passed over the group like a shudder.

They stared at him. Some of them were pale, with lips parted. One of the captain’s own faction had an odd expression of hurt amazement and reproach. Another was frowning.

“Shine” said angrily, “You brought us down here. Why the hell don’t yuh take us up?”

The captain smiled. He was clean-shaven, lean-cheeked, thin-lipped; and his smile was not sweet—for he knew that he had been beaten by the fire, and he knew that he could have been so beaten only because of the treachery of his lieutenant and the “Jiggers.”

“Moore,” he said, “take yer gang back to the Hudson. It’s goin’ to be cooler out there.”

The lieutenant blinked at him. It was the first time that Keighley had openly shown his quiet understanding of the intrigues among the crew, and the change in his manner was a sufficient menace without the sarcastic implication of his words. What that implication was, Moore was trying not to let himself consider. Fires had been to him what battles are to the general who has political ambitions. That the issue of any one of them might endanger his career had been possible; that it might end his life had never seriously occurred to him. And the Adam’s apple in his throat worked like a feed-pump gone dry as he swallowed and swallowed that fear.

The men looked at him; and it was evident that he was in no condition to think for them. They looked at the captain; and Keighley’s hard eyes were glittering hostilely as they shifted down the line from face to face.

“I saw yer frien’ Doherty on deck,” he said. “I guess yer benev’lent association o’ Jigger-jumpers had something to do with this bus’ness, eh?”

They did not answer.

“Well,” he said, “I hope it’s good fer it. It’s goin’ to be a heavy call on the treasurer—five o’ yuh—in a bunch.”

“Shine” turned with an oath and ran out to the engine room. The others broke and followed him. Keighley, alone with his lieutenant, regarded him grimly.

“It’s going to be a heavy call on the treasurer—five o’ yuh—in a bunch”

See page 32

The old captain had been a fireman since the days when the Sunday fights between the volunteer hose companies in Philadelphia had been the “only mode of public worship on the Sabbath” there. When those fights had culminated in riot, bloodshed, and the burning of churches, he had come to New York, and run with the “goose-necks” and defied the “leather-heads” until the paid brigade was formed and he took service with it. He had been living among men and politicians ever since; and to the natural cunning of the north of Ireland “sharp-nose” he had added a cynical experience that filled him to the full with the sort of wisdom that comes of such a life. Lieutenant Moore had been so simple to him that the “boy’s” attempts to supplant him, with the aid of the Fire Commissioner and the “Jiggers,” had amused him like a game. He looked at Moore, now, with a bitter contempt.

“You youngsters in the department,” he said, “yuh’re great politicians. But what yuh don’t know about a fire’s enough to keep yuh from tryin’ to do tricks with one—er it ought to be.”

Moore shook his head, dazedly.

“Yuh’re goin’ to get yer fingers burnt now. An’ it serves yuh damn well right.”

Moore turned away in silence and stumbled out to the engine room. Captain Keighley, having watched him go, proceeded to examine the shaft tunnel at his leisure. He found nothing but a ball of cotton waste, which he stuffed into his pocket. Then he leaned back calmly and waited for his crew to return.

They were in the engine room, standing in the thickening smoke, waiting for nothing, with the quietness of disgusted despair. Sparks were beginning to fall down through the gratings. Little splashes of hot water sprinkled on them from above. They looked up at the reflection of the flames that were purring overhead, speaking in low voices to one another; and every now and then a man who had gone forward toward the stoke holes, or been down on his face crawling below the machinery, came back to them from a vain attempt to find a safer spot, and made the gesture of failure. A young German stoker was biting his lips and whining like a frightened dog.

The last slow pulse of the engines stopped; the electric lights died out, and the glare of the fire reddened the shining metal of columns, cylinders and piston rods. No one moved. They watched, as if fascinated, the approach of a burning horror that seemed to be fighting its way down to them through the bars of the gratings, snarling.

At last an engineer joined them with a lamp from the stoke hole, and, after consulting with the German officer, he led them all back to the dark shaft tunnel. He passed them through, and slid over the steel door until there was only a narrow aperture left unclosed. He squeezed himself through that slit, and then with hammer and cold-chisel drove the door home until the opening was merely a crack wide enough to admit the finger ends. The men plugged this crack with their coats. He put his lamp on top of a shaft-bearing.

It showed Captain Keighley still standing there.

“Don’t do that,” he said to one of the firemen who had begun to strip to the skin. “Yuh’ll want all yuh can get between yuh an’ the metal, as soon’s that after cargo gets goin’.”

The man grumbled, “We’ll be sittin’ on top of a redhot stove in a minute.”

Captain Keighley replied, “Yuh can go outside an’ sit in one, if yuh want to.”

Lieutenant Moore took a quivering breath through dry nostrils and shut his teeth on the trembling of his jaws. He could hear a low murmur from the fire that was roaring above decks. The little lamp flared dully on the bearings. Beyond that, there was nothing but darkness and silence and the heat that choked.

“Well?” Captain Keighley challenged them.

No one replied.

“I guess yuh got what yuh been workin’ fer, ain’t yuh? Yuh got me into trouble. Yuh been tryin’ hard enough to push me into a hole ever since I broke Doherty.”

“Look here, sir,” a fireman named Cripps spoke up. “We’re all in this together. There’s no use jawin’.”

“That’s right,” another added plaintively.

Captain Keighley nodded. “If yuh’d been all together from the first, we wouldn’t be here, d’ yuh see?”

Several of the men answered, “Twasn’t our fault.” They looked at the lieutenant, who had dropped his head and was gazing, empty-eyed, at his feet.

“No?” Keighley asked suavely. “Well, it wasn’t mine, was it?”

No one spoke again until Cripps asked weakly, “Can yuh get us out, sir?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. If yuh live long enough, an’ I do, I’ll get y’ all out.... I’ll get out ev’ry man o’ yuh that’s breathin’, any way.... We got to wait here till that fire burns down; that’s all.”

The young stoker had begun to sob. Lieutenant Moore opened his parched lips to speak, but his tongue, swollen and dry, like a piece of flannel in his mouth, was too thick to turn a word. The sound of flames rose suddenly to a muffled grumble.

Captain Keighley said, “Here’s some cotton waste I hunted up. Pull a wad off to plug yer noses, an’ tie somethin’ over yer mouths. We’ll be breathin’ scorch before we’re through.”

He tore off a ball of waste and passed the roll to Moore. It travelled down the line from hand to hand—as if for a sign of union and peace among them—like a “pax.”

“Now,” he ordered, “get away from the sides o’ that cargo room, an’ lay yerselves out ’s flat ’s yuh can.”

The majority of the men obeyed him meekly.

“That’s right,” he said. “Stay there now. It’s goin’ to be so hot in here that some o’ yuh’ll be goin’ off yer heads. Yuh don’t want to do that. Yuh want to hang on, see? Keep still an’ hang on. An’ if yuh feel yerself goin’ loose, get a hold o’ the floor, anyway, an’ don’t let go.”

He took up the engineer’s hammer, stepped down to the door, and put his back against it. “I’ll brain any man that tries to open this door before I give the word,” he said.

They were a mixed lot—Keighley’s crew—picked from all the battalions in the city to serve on the new Hudson. There was “Shine” Conlin, a blue-jowled Bowery type, who had been newsboy, boot-black, (whence the “Shine”) wharf-rat, deck-hand, plug-ugly and leader of his gang; he had come into the department from the ranks of the “Con Scully Association” to earn a regular salary for the support of “th’ ol’ crow,” his mother; and he was the most aggressive “Jigger” in the company. Even now, he did not obey Keighley’s orders. Instead of lying down, he sat up against a shaft bearing; and instead of covering his mouth, he filled it with “fine-cut” from a package in his hip pocket and tried to chew it nonchalantly. His mouth was so dry that he felt as if he were trying to chew excelsior; it was tasteless. He turned it over and over in his jaw, until it was pulverized, like chaff. Then he blew it out, with an oath.

At his feet lay a huge truck driver named Nicholas Sturton and nicknamed “The Tur’ble Turk.” He was of the captain’s faction, because he was by nature loyal to appointed authority and solemnly conscientious in the fulfilment of all his duties. He had tied the red rags of a bandana handkerchief over his mouth and plugged his hairy nostrils with the cotton waste; and his eyes stared and his great chest heaved in his efforts to breathe through his gag. When he looked at Keighley, it was with the mute and patient appeal of a big boy, in pain, looking at the doctor who is watching over his suffering.

Lieutenant Moore, like “Shine,” was sitting, but with his head in his hands, the cotton waste forgotten in them, his mouth fallen open. He had had a good education in the public schools; he was cursed with the imagination of the trained mind; and he suffered all the horrors of death every time he gasped. He was ready to weep with pity for himself, but his tears dried up before they reached his scorched eyelids. He was the pride of his parents, and the dominant note of his self pity was a sympathy for them in their disappointment in his end. “A hell of a finish,” he was saying to himself. “Here’s a hell of a finish.”

Cripps, a sly youth, freckled and sandy, had lain down carefully on his side, in silence, with the instinct of a trapped animal to “lie low” and wait. He had joined the “Jiggers” because the Fire Commissioner was of their party and he looked for promotion to come when the old chief, Borden, should be deposed and his successor named from the faction which the Commissioner favored. He refused to consider his present situation as more than a temporary interruption of his plans. He kept his mind off the thought of death, and busied himself trying to make his mouth “water” with the thought of cool lager beer in foaming schooners. He even achieved a secret smile.

The other men lay quiet—some flat on their backs, staring glassily at the steel beams overhead; some panting with convulsive chests as the heat increased; some on their faces with their heads on their arms, gagged and stifling; some drawn up in strained and twisted attitudes, as if in pain. In their swollen eyeballs sudden lights darted and burst. Above the noise of the blood in their ears, they heard a sound of moaning. A choked voice began to struggle in the first wanderings of delirium.

“Steady, there! Steady!” Captain Keighley called out. He was standing up, his arms crossed, his face drenched with perspiration—in absolute and unquestioned command at last.

He was still standing there when the lamp burned low, flickered and went out.

The darkness was soon unbearable with heat; and Keighley put down his hammer and began to strip himself to his underclothes and rubber boots. He could hear the men tearing at their woolen underwear as they ripped it off. Someone was singing a German ballad in a shrill nasal whine.

Suddenly there was an outbreak of oaths. “Shine” had begun to curse. Having arrived at an insane notion that Keighley had penned them all in there, he was promising himself an indescribable revenge if he ever escaped. He kicked out at Cripps—who had torn the bandage from his mouth to get more imaginary beer, and was gurgling to himself over it—and that started a confusion of crazy voices and weak complaints. A man crawled over Sturton and screamed when “Turk” seized him by the throat, struggling, with an uproar that set all bedlam loose. The men began to fight, clutching at one another, rolling about with feeble blows, writhing like eels baked alive in an oven, like the lost souls in old pictures of hell. “Shine” leaped on Keighley and went down under a blow that almost split his forehead. The place was a pandemonium—awful—indescribable....

Fifteen minutes later the silence of exhaustion had settled down on hoarse breathings and low groans. And Captain Keighley, sitting with his back to the door—his knees drawn up, his head resting on them, nauseated—was struggling against a whirling lapse of consciousness.

IV

THE fire on the Sachsen had been discovered when the freight-handlers returned to work after their midday meal. All that afternoon the boat burned and drifted; and by nightfall she was beached, on the Jersey mudflats, with her paint peeled off her sides, her funnels blackened, her upper works a skeleton of blistered metal, lying, grey and hot, like a smoking fire-log, and steaming where the streams from the tugs and fire-boats struck her.

The Hudson had followed her, with Deputy-Chief Moran in charge, the remnants of Keighley’s crew working desperately to drown out the fire. They had given up all hope of saving Keighley and the men who were with him, but they did not give up the appearance or the efforts of hope, although there had not been a sound or a sight of life on the Sachsen for eight hours, now, and she was slowly settling with the tons of water that were being poured into her cargo holds.

“It’s no use,” Moran said, with the coming of darkness—and relinquished even the pretence of the possibility of a rescue.

He went to shelter himself, behind the Hudson’s wheelhouse, from the radiated heat of the smoldering hulk, his mind busy with the affairs of the department. He heard a noise of hammering that seemed to come from the Sachsen, and he thought it was the sound of a pump set going by some crazy accident of the fire. At a shout from a fireman on the other side of the Hudson, he came out again to the bows wearily.

“I saw a light,” the man cried. “There!”

The spark of a lantern was swinging from side to side on the Sachsen high up, amidships.

They howled, “Hi! Hi! Hullo! All right! All right, boys! Hol’ on!”

“Turn the spray on the deck here,” Moran ordered. “Half speed ahead. There’s someone alive on her.... Good God!”

The heat, as the Hudson crept in, dried their eyes till they were half blinded by a blur of tears. Seen through these, the light swung big in the darkness. “Who is it? Who is it?” they called.

A weak hail answered them. The dripping fender of hemp on the nose of the Hudson touched the side of the Sachsen and steamed on the hot metal. Erect in the bows, drenched with the spray of the hose, Moran cried in a voice of suffocation, “Jump!”

Dotted line shows passage of Keighley’s men from forward cargo room to shaft tunnel
They finally escaped through bunkers amidships beside the boilers and stoke holes

From the coal port above him a naked figure squirmed out, hung kicking and fell into his arms. Another and another followed—Moran and his men catching them as they came, and shouting encouragement through the steam that rose on all sides with the smell of blistered paint. One man in the struggle at the narrow opening, was thrown into the water and had to be dragged out with a boat hook. Others fell on their feet, and, throwing themselves on the deck with hoarse cries, began to roll around in the spray. Lieutenant Moore came down unconscious, as if baked stiff, and lay crouched. Captain Keighley, falling beside him, crawled with his mouth open, to the nozzle of the spray. “All off!” he gasped. “Start—yer water.... Water!”

Moran shouted, “Back off. Full speed. Get these men to the hospital.”

They were madmen. And the squad on the Hudson, fighting with them to prevent them from jumping overboard, had to carry them below to the engineer’s quarters and wrap them in wet blankets and hold them down.

Not one of them was in a condition to tell how they had escaped. (Indeed few of them ever succeeded in recalling any more of what had happened in the shaft tunnel than a convalescent remembers of the delirium of his fever.) Only Keighley—between the gulps of water that were doled out to him cautiously—explained that he had come to his senses sitting with his back against the door of the shaft tunnel, ankle deep in water, and had realized that they would all be drowned in the tunnel unless they escaped to some higher level. He had forced the steel door back and driven or dragged the men out to the engine room where they climbed to the first tier of gratings, the fire in this part of the boat having burned itself out first, for want of fuel. From there, he had found his way through the stokeholes to an empty coal bunker, where a cooler current of air warned him that there was probably a coal port open up above him. He had come back for the others; they had climbed the bunker ladders, and found the port; an engineer had made the signal with a stoker’s lamp; and the Hudson had seen it. “Gi’ me a drink,” Keighley ended. “Gi’ me a drink.”

He was the least exhausted of all the crew—although the truth is that none of them was more than dangerously blistered and temporarily maddened by pain. They were of the toughness that is characteristic of their profession—chosen men who got themselves injured by the hundreds every year, but who succumbed to their injuries so rarely that the death rate of the department was, at that time, only six men a year—trained men who had the agility of cats and a cat’s tenacity of life.

They were taken to their homes or to the hospitals, in ambulances, “to lay up for repairs.” Captain Keighley refused to do even that. “I’m all right,” he told the ambulance surgeons. “Put some grease on me—somethin’ to take the smart out. If I go home lookin’ sick, I’ll scare the girl to death.” (He was a widower, living with a married daughter whose husband was a police captain.) “Fix up my hands. That’s all I need.”

He had been burned about the head and arms chiefly, and they washed and bandaged him. They put his left arm in a sling—much to his disgust—and would have bound up his right hand, too, if he had not refused to allow them. “Let that alone,” he ordered. “I got use for that.” They warned him that he might have blood poisoning if he did not protect his burns from the air, “Huh!” he grunted. “Blood poisonin’! Put somethin’ on it so’s I can get a night’s sleep. That’s all I need.” And they had to let him have his way.

He went upstairs to his bedroom and lay down in his underclothes—because it would have been too great an effort to remove them—and slept the sleep of exhaustion. He was not disturbed; the Hudson had been reported out of commission and no alarms were rung in.

He slept the sleep of exhaustion, and he wakened next morning to the noises made by an improvised crew at work cleaning up the fire-boat. When he had blinked away the first alarming idea that he had overslept, he sat up painfully and looked at the blisters on his free hand. He looked at them a long time—as if he saw there the whole story of his battle with the “Jiggers”—and then he looked up, under his eyebrows, at the open door and the vacant cots of the crew’s bunkroom, and he almost smiled. He straightened up slowly, like a rheumatic, as he stood; and he went about his toilet with a cripple’s patience, his mind on the “Jiggers” and their discomfiture—considering what they would do next.

V

WHEN he came down stairs to the “office,” he found Deputy-Chief Moran waiting to see him, and he received Moran as if nothing unusual had been happening, despite the fact that his left arm was still in its support. Moran had a morning newspaper on the desk, spread at a page that held a portrait of Captain Keighley and an account of the fire on the Sachsen. He greeted Keighley with congratulations, as pugilists shake hands before they come to blows.

Keighley glanced at the paper, indifferently. “We didn’t stay in the engine room,” he corrected the account. “We were in the shaft tunnel.”

Moran was full-blooded and dark-haired. His mouth was harsh under a wiry black mustache that looked as if it had been bitten off at the teeth. He asked, curtly, “How did you get into that mess?”

Keighley dropped the paper in the waste basket before he replied, “I didn’t get into it. I got out of it.” He confronted Moran with a defiant eye. “There was some funny work at the bottom of it. The men in the tunnel seemed to think it was Moore an’ his gang.”

Moore’s gang, of course, was also Moran’s. And Moran demanded, “Did they say so?”

“No.”

“Then what do you say so for?”

“Yuh asked me, didn’t yuh?” Keighley replied, unperturbed.

“I asked you for facts!”

“Well, that’s what yuh’re goin’ to get—if yuh want to hear them. Those men know. They can tell. I’m not int’rested—unless someone wants to make trouble fer me.”

“Who wants to make trouble for you?” Moran blustered.

Keighley replied, with meaning, “That’s what I’m waitin’ to find out.”

The Deputy-Chief had come there intending to hold over Keighley the threat of an investigation. He found, now, that Keighley had the butt end of that whip in his hand. He said roughly, “Look here, Keighley, you might as well understand first as last, the order for Chief Borden’s retirement’s coming. You know which side your bread’s buttered on, don’t you?”

Without an instant’s hesitation, Keighley put his hand down flat on his desk-top and answered, “I stand pat. I don’t owe youse nothin’. Yuh can do what yuh like, but yuh can’t scare me. See?”

He knew that he was safe for the time, for he had the prestige of the morning’s newspaper notoriety behind him, and the Commissioner would not dare to remove him without cause, and any attempt to make a case against him out of the fire on the Sachsen would prove—in the language of politics—“a boomerang.” The charges against Chief Borden had been held proven by the Commissioner, but they had yet to be defended before a court of appeal under the Civil Service laws. Public sentiment had been aroused in the chief’s favor by the arbitrary and insolent conduct of the Commissioner sitting in judgment at the trial. And Keighley calculated that if the order were issued for the chief’s retirement, the “Jiggers,” to obtain that order, would have to fling themselves into a blow that would take, for the moment, all their strength.

Moran took up his cap from the desk and put it on. “All right, Keighley,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do for you.”

Keighley turned his back to reach his coat that hung on a hook beside the window. When he looked around, Moran had gone. He resumed possession of his office with a frowning glance about him, and then went out to the pier to inspect the work that had been done on the Hudson.

The quarrel in the fire-department was less political than personal; for, of course, both “Jiggers” and “Anti-Jiggers” were adherents of Tammany Hall. It was a quarrel between the old chief, Borden, and the new Fire Commissioner, who was in some degree indebted to the “Jiggers” for his appointment; they had used their “voice and influence” for him with “the Boss”; Chief Borden had objected to their doing so, and had used his position to make life uneasy for their leaders, among whom was Deputy-Chief Moran. The quarrel had passed down from the officers to the men; Captain Keighley had undertaken to stop it in his company by preferring charges against the malcontent Doherty and having him “broken” by the chief; and this unexpected action had uncovered a whole conspiracy against him with Lieutenant Moore at its head.

Now, if Chief Borden were retired by order of the Commissioner, Keighley would be left without a friend in power; Moran would be made chief; and the full revenge of Keighley’s enemies would fall upon him. He had no hope of avoiding it. He had no intention of trying to conciliate it. He was resolved merely to fight—after the manner of his kind—and to attend to his duties on the Hudson as thoroughly as possible, meanwhile, so that there might be no valid excuse for removing him from his command.

It was in this spirit that he received his men as they returned one by one to their work—and relieved the strangers who had been detailed in their places while they were in the hospital—and settled down again to pierhouse routine. “Shine” Conlin was the first to reappear, and he reported to the captain with a sort of hangdog shamefacedness; but Keighley—old, cold and silent—showed no sign of remembering the part the little wharf-rat had played aboard the Sachsen, and “Shine” resumed possession of his locker and his bunk, with the abashed grin of a guilty schoolboy who is allowed to return to his place in his class under suspended sentence. Sturton—“The Turr’ble Turk”—came eagerly, having a clear conscience; and he was a little crestfallen after his reception; whereas the sly and sandy Cripps accepted the captain’s manner as a tribute to his own powers of concealment and winked to himself in secret self-congratulation as he came out of the office, his eyes on his feet. The loyal Farley looked blank. The others behaved according to their natures and their degrees of innocence or guilt. Only Lieutenant Moore—the last to arrive, very pale and shaken—received any intimation that Keighley had not forgotten what had occurred; and he received it in the captain’s refusal to allow him to write the company’s reports, as he had been accustomed.

Life in the pierhouse, between fires, was as dull as imprisonment. There were brasses to be polished, hose to be dried, and a watch to be kept on the “jigger”—the little bell that rang in the alarms; but when the chores for the day had been done, all the rest was idleness. As long as there were strangers in the company, there was some show of sociability in the sitting-room, but when the entire crew had returned to duty, whether they worked or idled, it was in a constrained silence, with side-mouthed whispers and a suspicious aloofness between group and group.

There was little said about the fire on the Sachsen even within the groups. Firemen have no more taste for discussing their day’s work with one another than any other laborers have; and in this case, there was an uneasy feeling that the man who said least, now, would have least to answer for if there were to be an official investigation of the disaster. As for Keighley, he did not ask himself—or anybody else—what was going on in the minds of either faction. He did not ask, from either, anything but obedience; and he got that, now, without perceptible difficulty. They had evidently acquired some sort of unholy respect for him; and if they were plotting against him, they were doing it hypocritically. He was satisfied, if it had not been for the difficulty of making out the daily reports.

It was as if to make that difficulty greater that the engineer of the Hudson came to him to complain of the trouble it was to keep the boat’s low-pressure cylinder warm and ready to start. “I can’t see the sense o’ puttin’ triple-expansion engines into a fire-boat, any way,” he reported. “That third cylinder’s just a drag on the other two. She goes cold here, layin’ in the dock, an’ we’re half way to a fire before she gets hot enough to handle the steam.”

Keighley replied, “Well, send in yer kick to headquarters”—and avoided Dady’s eye as he said it; for it was the captain’s duty to make all such reports.

The engineer looked at him, looked at the floor, and then rubbed his nose with the back of an oily hand. “I guess you better do it, cap’n,” he said meekly. “I ain’t much of an ink-slinger.” And Keighley’s greater sense of dignity compelled him to answer, with an affected indifference, “All right. All right.”

But when he shut the door of his office and took out his pocket Webster from the locked drawer in which he kept it—with as much secrecy as if it were a rhyming dictionary—he sat down before his official letter paper to nurse his jaw with no more dignity than a schoolboy. He began to screw out the tortuous scrawl of his report, breathing hard at the end of every line and muttering curses at the beginning of the next; and when he decided that he had come to the end of his first sentence, he put down his pen to relax the muscles of his mouth and wipe his forehead and swear angrily at Moore for having failed him. The Hudson cuddling up against the pier, purring a little fume of steam from the exhaust pipe, was roused from her rest every now and then by the engineer in charge turning over the engines to get the water out of the low-pressure cylinder. And in the sitting-room Lieutenant Moore was tilted back against the wall in a cane chair, reading a newspaper, looking over his sheet at the closed door of the office with an expression of sulky resentment, and with the same expression glancing aside at the men who were reading, loafing and playing dominoes around him.

There was nothing of the genial atmosphere of an engine house’s leisure hour about the scene.

“Shine” had confided, in a husky undertone, to the freckled Cripps beside him, “I s’pose Moore’s sore ’cause we won’t fight it out to a finish fer ’m. What’d we make by it, supposin’ we got th’ ol’ man trun out of his job, eh?”

Cripps shut his eyes and nodded solemnly. He was still “lying low.”

At a round table in the center of the room, Farley, of the curled mustache, was playing dominoes with Sturton, “The Turr’ble Turk;” and Farley, being an expert, could loll back in his chair and play absent-mindedly; while Sturton, to whom the game was an almost violent mental exercise, bent over his dominoes, with his big-boned face set in a worried scowl, playing deliberately, with slow movements of his hairy paws.

Farley had been watching Lieutenant Moore. “That loot’nt looks like a bullpup shut out on a door-step,” he summed it up to Sturton. But “Turk” merely grunted, without letting his attention be drawn from the game; and they continued to play in silence—waiting, as the whole department was waiting, for the retirement of Chief Borden and its consequences.

VI

THEY were waiting so, one night, when the next water-front blaze came to relieve the monotony of their inaction. At the first stroke of the jigger Keighley laid down his pen and brightened with the hope that there was a fire in his district to release him from his desk. Lieutenant Moore dropped his newspaper and looked up to count the strokes of the bell with an expression of relief. The men straightened back from their dominoes; and when the little bell started to ring the third number of a station in their district, they rose with a smile. With the first stroke of the larger gong, the sitting-room was empty—Captain Keighley was shouting to the pilot, “All right there! Pier ——, North River!”—and the Hudson was under way.

They found the river as crowded with a summer evening’s traffic as Broadway with street-cars and hansoms on a theatre night; and the Hudson had no shore engine’s right of way under the law. She went whistling up the stream, dodging and spurting, throbbing, grunting and checking speed. Blazing excursion boats, bedecked with colored lights, answered her impatient signals with cheerful impudence and held their courses. Squat ferries paddled serenely across her path. A tug cut in ahead of her to race with her for salvage, and worried her like a cur at a horse’s head. The pilot twirled his wheel, worked his engine room signals, and swore despairingly. And Captain Keighley, staring at the shore lights in the distance, revolved the first sentence of his report in memory, and vainly tried to forget it.

When the river opened into a free stretch of water, the tug fell behind; and Keighley saw the pier-end lamp—towards which they were heading—blinking like the intermittent flash of a lighthouse. It disappeared, and he guessed that it had been blotted out by the drift of smoke.

“Wind from the south?” he asked. The pilot answered, “Yes’r.” Keighley said, “Take us in on this side o’ the pier.”

He stepped out of the wheelhouse to go aft to the crew. “Get out two two-inch lines from the port gates,” he ordered Lieutenant Moore.

“Shine” came running back from the bows and joined the men who were taking the hose from its metal-sheathed box. “Banana fritters fer ours,” he said. “It’s the fruit pier!” And Keighley observed that some of the men laughed, that the others at least smiled, and that Lieutenant Moore was the only one who remained out of reach of the invitation to good humor. The captain returned forward again, frowning thoughtfully.

The pier shed, as they swung in towards it, was fuming at every door with puffs of a heavy smoke from the burning grasses in which the fruit was packed; and Keighley saw that the fire was going to be—in department slang—a “worker.” He could see the “steamers” of two shore companies drawing water from the end of the slip. He understood that their crews were in the shed, trying to drive the fire forward; and he knew that it would be his duty to enter from the other end of the pier and catch the flames between the two attacks.

He shouted to the pilot, “Hol’ us up to the door there!” He ran back to Lieutenant Moore. “Stay aboard here,” he ordered. “If the blaze shows in the roof, take the top off her with the monitor. Go slow, though. Don’t bring it down onto us.” He called to the men, “Throw out yer lines! Make fast, now! Hang on to that line aft! Hol’ it! Hol’ it.... All right. Stretch in. In through the door here! Come on!”

He jumped up on the bulwarks as the engines reversed with a frantic churning astern. And then he saw a flicker of flame glimmer and grow between the timbers of the cribwork, just above the water line, half way up the dock.

“Hol’ on!” he cried to the four men who had leaped to the pier. “Drop one o’ those lines. Take yer axes. Chop a hole in the floor planks inside. The fire’s ’n underneath.”

The men who were aboard the Hudson tossed the axes out to the others, and these rushed into the smoke, dragging the single line of hose. Keighley said to the Lieutenant, “Go in an’ take charge there. See ’at no one gets lost in that smoke.” Moore scrambled to the pier, and the captain ran forward along the bulwarks, peering down for an opening between the stringers of the cribbing.

He knew that the crew on the pier would take at least ten minutes to cut a hole through the three-inch planks, in the blind suffocation of that shed; and meanwhile, the fire would travel from end to end of the pier. He could see no opening larger than an inch slit between the foot timbers beside the bow of the boat. He started aft again.

“Shine,” behind him, said, “It’s covered at high water, cap.”

Keighley spun around. “What is?”

“The hole. I t’ought—”

Keighley jumped down at him. “Where is it? Will it take a line o’ hose in?”

“Sure,” “Shine” said. “It’ll take a bunch o’ bananas in.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s—it’s about there.” He pointed down the pier. “It’s ’n under water at high tide.”

Keighley ran his fingers up the buttons of his rubber coat, and it fell off him like sleight-of-hand. His helmet dropped beside it. “Get me a heavin’-line,” he said. And “Shine” gasped excitedly, “Say, cap, you can’t find it. Yuh have to dive. It’s where the ‘club’ ust to hide the stuff we swiped—till the cop got next t’ it. I c’u’d make it in the dark. We fixed up a reg’lar joint in there.”

The captain said, “Peel off, then. Hi, there! Bring us a heavin’-line”—and ran back to get it.

“Shine” dropped to the deck with a chuckle and began a race for “first in,” gurgling an excited profanity as he kicked off his rubber boots. Diving on the water-front, on a midsummer night, was a way of earning a living that appealed to him.

“Beat y’ in, Turk,” he challenged. “Come on. Saturday’s wash-day.”

“Turk” asked cautiously, “What’s on?” He had an instinctive distrust of “Shine” as a type, as well as an acquired distrust of him as a “Jigger.”

“Nuthin’ ’s on,” “Shine” said as he came out of his blue flannel shirt and stood up, grinning, naked. “Where’s the rope?”

Farley, from behind, tied one line under his arms. Captain Keighley gave him the end of another. “That’s fer signalin’,” he explained. “Jerk it three times if yuh want us to haul y’ out. Jerk it twice if yuh’re all right an’ ready to take in the house. We’ll tie this other one to the pipe. Jerk once to start the water. Over yuh go now!... Strip!” he said to Cripps.

“Shine” sprang upon the bulwarks, took the signaling-line between his teeth, and dived. He struck the water and went in as clean as a fish. A few bubbles rose and burst in the streak of light from the wheelhouse window. The lines paid out smoothly through Keighley’s hand.

They stopped—and he began to gather in the slack, stealthily. They jerked forward, and ran out with a rush. There was the pause of a crisis. Then the signal-line jumped twice, and Keighley cried, “He’s in! Give him the pipe! Light up there!” Cripps tossed the nozzle overboard, and the others ran aft to lighten up the hose.

VII

“SHINE” had wriggled through the opening in the timbers and risen under the floor of the pier in a dense smoke that was lit with flames. He had swum to a slimy cross-beam and straddled it to draw a deep breath through a crack in the cribbing. And now he was hauling in the line, hand over hand, choking and sputtering. The nozzle rose between his knees. He jerked once on the signal rope, heard Keighley’s muffled cry of “Start yer water!” and threw himself on his belly on the nozzle and the beam. The air gushed in a mighty sough from the pipe. The hose bucked and kicked up under him. The stream spurted from it and broke, hissing, on the blaze.

“Go it!” he said, through his teeth, riding the hose and clinging to the slippery timbers. “Go it yuh son of a mut!”

He had left the weight of discipline on the deck behind him with his uniform, and he had returned to the naked audacity of the days when he had obeyed no rules but those of the “club.” He was no longer a fireman; he was a young hoodlum enjoying an adventure, and he looked up at the blaze before him with a grin. He heard Lieutenant Moore’s squad chopping at the planks above him, and he listened contemptuously. He thought of Captain Keighley, and it was with the admiring thought of a younger “Shine” for the leader of his gang.

He was still clinging to his beam when Cripps rose blowing behind him, having followed up the trail of the hose. But the flame and smoke had already been driven back sufficiently to clear the air; and “Shine” greeted the freckled “Jigger” with jubilant curses. “Come on here, Cripsey!” he cried. “We got her beat to a stan’ still. Take a hold o’ the spout. We’ll slush it around.” And when Cripps swam up beside him and threw his weight on the pipe, “Shine” shouted in the generous exultation of the moment, “Listen to Moore up there, tappin’ on them planks like a footy woodpecker.... Slush her over in the corner there.... The cap’s too wise fer him. He’s too damn hard-headed an ol’ clinker fer Moore.”

Cripps blinked the water out of his eyes and replied guardedly, “There’s nuthin’ in it fer us, any how.”

“He’s a better man’n Moore, all right, all right,” “Shine” repeated. “We’d been all burned to blisters in the bottom o’ that Dutch cotton-tub if it hadn’t been fer him.”

“Well, that’s where Moore fell down,” Cripps answered at the top of his voice. “He was scared stiff.”

“The damn ol’ clinker!” “Shine” said-referring to the captain. “That’s a good name fer him, eh? ‘Ol’ Clinkers,’ eh?” And they were laughing together in a sort of cowed respect and admiration for Keighley when they heard him say gruffly, behind them, “Play that stream lower, along the cribwork. Them timbers is afire outside.”

“Shine” ducked his head, and then looked over his shoulder. The old man reached an arm to the pipe and growled, “To yer right. To yer right.”

They applied themselves to their work like a pair of schoolboys caught idling.

“Good enough,” Keighley said at last. “Keep that stream off me, now.” And climbing over the beam, he swam forward into the fading glow of the fire.

“Hully gee!” “Shine” said. “I wonder if he caught on.”

He had “caught on.” He understood that those two men had been the leaders, under Moore, of the attempt to drive him from the company; and he understood from their talk that Moore’s followers had deserted him. He snorted the salt water from his nose; Mister Moore’s claws were cut, then, sure enough. Well—

At the next cross-beam he saw that the fire was blazing far ahead of him in a sort of flooring of loose planks; and he could make out what seemed to be two carpenter’s horses covered with boards for a table, some boxes for stools, and a pile of burning straw that had been bedding. He swam back to bring the men, and found Farley and “Turk” Sturton splashing up with a second line of hose. He ordered them in with it as impassively as though he were in full uniform on the deck of the Hudson instead of straddling a sunken beam, the water trickling into his eyes from his grey hair, dressed in dripping underclothes and commanding four nude firemen who grinned at one another when he turned his head.

“Shut off that pipe,” he said to “Shine,” “an’ light up on this other line.”

He led them—splashing and laughing and tugging on their hose—into the drip of hot water from the lines of the shore companies above them. The stream from one of the Hudson’s standpipes, dashing against the burning timbers outside, blew stinging sheets of spray through the slits of the cribbing on them. The warm smoke puffed back at them in stifling clouds. “Turk-ish b-bath,” “Shine” gasped. “Ouch! Gee! That about parboiled me lef’ lug! Gi’ me air! Gi’ me air!”

“I’ll brain any man that tries to open this door before I give the word”

See page 40

“Come on!” Keighley ordered.

“Turk” Sturton followed the voice of authority. “Shine” followed the voice of the man. Cripps obeyed where obedience had been proved the wiser policy. Farley went to do the work for which he was paid. Their obedience drew them together like a yoke; they helped one another, rubbed shoulders facing a common enemy, and touched hands in an almost friendly sympathy, sharing one task and one danger.

They stopped when the hose would come no farther, and Sturton sent back the signal for water. “Some Guinny had a roost in there,” Farley said, peering through his fingers at the flames.

“Shine” replied, “’Tust to be the gang’s club-house. There she goes!” He shouted, above the noise of the stream, “She ain’t insured, at that!”

Keighley rested his elbows on a beam, rubbed his smarting eyes, and grunted half-disgustedly. To him “Shine’s” playfulness was the ingratiating gamboling of a dog that had tried to bite him. He felt no inclination to pat the treacherous cur; but neither did he purpose to kick him. To Farley “Shine” seemed to show a spirit of good-fellowship that let bygones be bygones and reduced their relations to the merely human intercourse of man and man. To Sturton, absorbed in his duties, it was the encouragement of a kindred spirit who took the joy of battle more noisily than he.

The blaze, caught at close range, seemed to snuff out as suddenly as if it had been no more than the flame of a candle; and when Keighley looked back over his shoulder in the darkness, he saw the spark of a belated lantern which Lieutenant Moore was lowering through the hole that his squad had cut in the floor. “There’s the loot’nt,” “Shine” sang out impudently. “If he ain’t careful with that lamp he’ll set fire to somethin’.” And the laugh that followed came heartily from the men.

Keighley made his way back to the lantern and called to Moore to put a ladder down. “Fire’s out here,” he shouted. “Go in up there an’ help wet down.”

He waited at the foot of the ladder until he was sure that the last glimmer of flame had been extinguished below; then, calling to his own squad to leave their lines and “back out,” he climbed the ladder to the floor of the pier.

There was no one there to laugh at his ridiculous appearance, except the wharf watchman, who had returned to the scene of the fire from the safety of a car-float in a neighboring slip. Keighley strode over to him. “Got any ripe bananas yuh don’t want?”

“Sure,” the man replied. “Take all youse can ate.”

“Shine” came up the ladder, panting from a race with Sturton. Keighley touched him on the bare shoulder. “Take a bunch o’ those bananas aboard with yuh,” he ordered, “an’ be damn quick about it.”

VIII

TWENTY minutes later, the last of the fire had been drowned out; the Hudson’s lines had all been picked up; and the crew sat along the bulwarks, eating bananas and waiting for the order to start back to their house. Cripps and Sturton, “Shine” and Farley were perched in a row along the edge of the engine-room skylight, “in their birthday clo’s,” each with a banana in his hand and a bulge in his cheek, fraternizing while they dried.

Sturton was saying, with an air of ownership, “She’s a peach of a boat, jus’ the same. We c’u’d’ve swamped out that blaze ourselves, if there hadn’t been a steamer on the island.”

“Shine,” blinking watery-eyed, condemned the fire in resentful anathemas and bit savagely on the banana. “Damn scorch burned my pipes so I can’t taste nuthin’,” he complained.

Farley, with the tears still running down his cheeks, swung his heels blissfully, chewed, and regarded the lights of the city. “It’s hot work,” he said. “It’s hot work, all right. But how’d yuh like to be pushin’ a pen in one o’ them little furnaces, fer instance?” He nodded at the late lights in the upper windows of a distant office building. “One o’ them newspaper touts was tryin’ to pump me th’other day about that fire in the cotton. ‘Say,’ he says, ‘what takes you men into the fire department?’ ‘Oh, the pay,’ I says. ‘The pay.’ ‘Hell!’ he says, ‘the money’s no good to a dead man. Look at Bresnan.’”

“The damn mut!” “Shine” put in. “’T’wasn’t Bresnan’s fault he got nipped.”

“He didn’t mean it that way,” Cripps said.

“Well, how did he mean it?” “Shine” demanded.

Farley waved his banana skin at the high building. “He meant ’at when it comes to this sort o’ bus’ness he’d sooner be settin’ up in one o’ them hen-coops peckin’ at an ink bottle an’ scratchin’ at a desk.” He gave a grotesque imitation of a clerk humped over his work, dipping his pen frantically, and writing, with his nose to the paper.

Cripps laughed and threw his banana at the pier. “To the woods with him!” he said. “Gi’me a banana that’s ripe. That last one tasted like a varnish shop.”

Captain Keighley rose, in his uniform, from the ladder of the engine room behind them, and caught the general smile. He heard Cripps say, “This suits me all right.” There were satisfied grunts of assent from the others. At the stern, Lieutenant Moore sat somewhat apart, spitting over the rail.

“Get yer clothes on,” Keighley ordered gruffly. “Cast off there, Moore!”

And when the Hudson was spinning back leisurely to her quarters with a trail of banana skins in her wake, he said to his lieutenant in the wheel house, “I want yuh to see th’ engineer to-morrah an’ write a report to headquarters on that low pressure cylinder bus’ness.”

Moore looked up to find the cool grey eyes fixed on him in a calculation of how much enmity there was left in him. He flushed. “Yes, sir,” he said, almost gratefully.

Keighley turned away before he added with an effect of kindliness, “All right. Dady’ll explain about it to yuh to-morrah. Go out an’ tell those boys we want some bananas in here. I guess we’re smoked as dry as they are.”

It was not that Keighley felt the impulse of any unguarded generosity. He knew his fire-department too well for that! For there is this peculiarity in firemen: being free of any business worries or other anxieties concerning their incomes, they spend their days in efforts to “get even,” to avenge slights and repay friendships. They are men of no philosophy, unable to get outside of themselves into any calm view of their troubles, incapable of forgiving an injury and unable to understand such a capability in others; and they despise particularly the “quitter” and the “ingrate.” Keighley did not wish to be sneered at, by his men, as a “quitter”; and he knew that if Moran did not help the “Jiggers” in their quarrel with their captain, they would consider the deputy-chief an “ingrate.” The fight was “to a finish,” whatever interludes of good-natured fellowship might happen to relieve it.

Keighley knew it. He merely accepted the truce in the spirit of a “game” antagonist who could fight without malice and win without spite.

He saw the boat berthed, watched the men go off to their beds, and then turned in himself—relieved to be free of his daily reports—with a feeling that the truce would last over the next day, at least, which was Sunday.

IX

IN the morning it was announced in the newspapers that Chief Borden had been suspended, pending the decision of the courts on the charges against him, and that Moran had been appointed acting-chief in his place. Keighley opened his eyes wide upon the news, and then narrowed them cunningly as he considered it. He had expected that Borden would be thrown out neck and crop as a warning to all the “Anti-Jiggers;” and there was a glimmer of something hopeful in the half-heartedness of a tentative suspension. Keighley shut himself in his office with his desk telephone to find out what had happened.

It did not take him long to learn. One of his political friends in the upper circle explained that “the Boss” had objected to a fratricidal war that threatened to disrupt the whole fire department, to sacrifice public faith in the administration for no political ends, and to weaken the “organization” by dividing it against itself. The Fire Commissioner had compromised by suspending Borden instead of “breaking” him. Keighley listened—and shook his head. “That don’t let me out,” he said. “It may keep ’em from comin’ after me on Broadway with a club, but it’ll never keep ’em from stickin’ me in the back some night around a dark corner.”

He hung up the receiver and scratched the back of his neck doubtfully. It was his day off duty, but he was reluctant to take it—and leave the lieutenant in charge. “Moore,” he summoned him, “get that report done, will yuh? I’ll see to cleanin’ the boat.”

“It’s all right,” Moore replied. “I can do both—if you want to get away.”

Keighley looked out the window at the humid haze of heat that hung over the water. “I guess I’ll be as cool here as anywhere,” he said. “Go ahead with the report.”

That Sunday was to be memorable in the records of the Weather Bureau as the hottest July day in forty years; and it was to be memorable in the records of the fire department for the most dangerous fire that had attacked the water front since the department had been formed. But the fire did not break out till sundown; and fate, while she was setting a terrific stage for Keighley’s next appearance, allowed him one of those entre-acts that make the fireman’s life such a thing of heart-breaking spurts of action and nerve-wracking blanks of peace.

Having given his orders for the day, he withdrew, upstairs, to a balcony off his bunkroom, where he sat all morning in the shade, watching the tugs and ferries, steamboats, floats and scows that bustled and wallowed and staggered past, squealing in a shrill impatience when they whistled, and puffing short of breath when they reversed. The water under their bows broke and fell back sluggishly. The swells in their wakes reeled away with an oily roll. The air was heavy with the drifting belch of their funnels.

It could not be said that Keighley really thought of anything while he sat there. It was one of the characteristics of his mind that it worked best under the conditions of bewildering excitement that make clear thought impossible to most men. He did not even think about the “Jiggers;” he merely snoozed, with one eye on that matter, like a watchdog, until the noonday sun drove him from his balcony. Then he went sleepily to a neighboring restaurant for his dinner, having already telephoned that he would not be home.

It was a blistering afternoon, with a sun overhead that struck a quivering refraction from the dried and warped planks of the wharves, and a breeze that came hot across the sparkle of the bay where the glancing facets of small waves shone like a million gleaming little mirrors. The pierhouse stood at the water’s edge, as bare as a lighthouse to the beat and reflection of the heat, its row of open windows gaping in the sunlight like a line of gasping mouths. The men idled interminably, reading the papers, yawning for an interval and then reading them all over again. And Keighley dozed at his desk in his office—like Napoleon before a battle!—waiting for the attack of his enemy to develop the plan of his counter-assault.

A stiff easterly breeze sprang up at sunset. It came cool from the sea; and the crew of the Hudson received it as a grateful relief. But this same breeze—puffing steadily into the smolder of a small fire that had just broken out in the lumber yard of a furniture factory on the East River water front—blew the flames back through the stacks of seasoned boards like a blaze through kindlings; and while the Hudson, in answer to a delayed alarm, was rounding the Battery and speeding up the river, the flames spread eagerly, in spite of all the efforts of the shore companies to check them, till, by the time the Hudson arrived, they covered as much ground as a prairie fire. Under a volume of dense smoke, they reached and writhed and leaped together, darting up their heads venomously, waving aloft their flickering crests, coiling back and striking low. When the wind lifted the pall that covered their trail, the piles of lumber could be seen burning like torches. In front of them, every now and then, a feathery stream rose white in the ruddy glow, spitting impotently into the air as the firemen, retreating, choked it and dragged it back; and overhead, continually, the triumphal sparks brightened and soared.