And as Harrigan and McTee, followed by Kate and Campbell, ran out to
the open air, they saw the crowd of the mutineers surge across the
waist toward Sloan with upturned faces, wondering, and ready for
terror. Hovey broke through their midst.
"Hovey!" shouted McTee. "Look at the mist over the sides! Draw a
breath; smell of it! It is fire! Henshaw has set fire in the hold!"
It was plain to every brain in the instant. To every man came the
thought of the complaints of the firemen concerning the heat in the
hold of the _Heron_; the noxious odor like musty straw; the warmth, the
deadly warmth of the decks. A volcano smoldered beneath them, and the
mist was the sign of the coming outbreak of flames. And the mutineers
stood mute, gaping at one another, looking for some hope, some comfort,
and finding the same question repeated in every eye. McTee climbed down
the ladder to the waist, followed by the rest of the fugitives. Ten
minutes before they would have been torn to pieces by the wolf pack.
Now no man had a thought for anything save his own death.
"Hovey," ordered McTee in his voice of thunder, "tell these fellows
they must obey my voice from now on."
They roared, snatching at this ghost of a hope: "We will! We'll follow
Black McTee! Hovey has brought us to hell!"
In a moment everyone was in frantic motion. Campbell started for the
engine room to see what had caused the stopping of the ship. McTee
himself, followed by Harrigan and the stokers, went down to the
fireroom. It was fiery hot there, indeed. When the Scotchman swung down
the ladder into the hole, it was like a blast from a furnace, and the
air was foul with the nauseating odor of the smoldering wheat. The men
gasped and struggled for breath, and yet they began to work without
complaint.
All hands set to. The fires were shaken down and started afresh; the
coal shoveled out from the bunkers. Then a fireman collapsed without a
cry of warning. They carried him out to the upper air, and brought down
two of the sailors to take his place. And the sailors went without a
murmur. They were fighting for the one chance in ten thousand, the
chance of bringing the ship to shore before the fire burst out in flame
which would lick the _Heron_ from one end to the other within an hour.
McTee went up to the bridge to take the bearings and lay the course. By
the time his reckonings were completed, steam was up; Campbell had
remedied the trouble in the engine room; the propeller began to turn,
and a yell went up from the ship and tingled to heaven. When McTee came
down from the bridge to the waist, leaving Hovey at the wheel, a dozen
of the tars gathered about the new skipper, weeping and shouting, for
in their eyes he was the deliverer, it was he who was giving them the
fighting chance to live.
And how they fought! There was something awe-inspiring and almost
beyond the human in the fury with which they labored. It was in the
fireroom that their chief difficulty lay. The fireroom of a large
steamer is a veritable furnace, and when to this heat was added that
from the hold of the ship, it was truly a miracle that any living thing
could exist there.
But Harrigan was in charge. When men wilted and pitched to their faces
on the sooty, dusty floor, he trussed them under one arm and bore them
up to the air. Then he went back and drove them on again. Before the
end of that day, however, with the coast still a full thirty-hour run
ahead of them, it became literally impossible to continue longer in the
fireroom. But Harrigan would not leave. He had a hose introduced into
the hold. The men worked absolutely naked with a stream of water
playing on them. Now and again when one of them collapsed, Harrigan
snatched the fire bar or the shovel from the hands of the worker and
labored furiously until another substitute was found.
The necessity of his presence was amply demonstrated that night. The
Irishman was too exhausted to continue another minute, and the men
helped him to the deck and sluiced buckets of salt water over his
great, trembling body. To keep the men at work, Campbell went down in
the hole.
They had to carry him up in half an hour. Then McTee tried his hand. He
stood the heat as well as Harrigan, but he could not inspire such
daredevil enthusiasm in the men. They missed the raucous, cheery voice
of Harrigan; they missed the inspiring sight of that flame-red hair;
and they missed above all his peculiar driving force. In other words,
when Harrigan came among them, they felt _hope_, and when a man has
hope, he will work on in the face of death.
And at last McTee came up and begged Harrigan to go back. He went, and
found an empty fireroom and dying fires. He ran back to the deck, and
at his shout the dead veritably rose to life. Men staggered to their
feet to follow him below. Every man on the ship took his turn. Hovey
came down and passed coal; McTee came down and wielded the fire bar,
doing the labor of three men while he could endure.
And the _Heron_ drove on toward the shore. The morning passed; the
afternoon wore away. It was a matter of hours now before the shore
would be in sight, and McTee spread this news among the crew. He sent
little Kamasura and Shida, the cabin boys, running here and there
saying to every man they passed: "Four hours! Four hours! Four hours!"
And then: "Three hours! Three hours! Three hours!"
And the crew swallowed whisky neat and returned to the fireroom.
At sunset, dim as a shadow, a thing to be guessed at rather than known,
the man on the bridge sighted land. The word spread like lightning. The
staggering workers in the fireroom heard and joined the cheer which
Harrigan started. Then the catastrophe came.
A torch of red fire licked up the stern of the ship; the flames had
eaten their way out to the open air!
It was the quick action of McTee which kept the panic from spreading to
the hold of the ship at once and bringing up every one of the workers
from the fireroom. He gathered the sailors on deck who had strength
enough left to walk, and they made a line and attacked the flames with
buckets of water. There was, of course, no possibility of quelling the
fire at its source, for by this time the hold of the ship where the
wheat was stowed must have been one glowing mass of smoldering matter.
Yet they were able, for a time, to keep the course of the fire from
spreading over the decks of the ship.
With this work fairly started, McTee ran back to the forward cabin and
upper deck of the _Heron_ and set several men to tear down some of the
framework, sufficient at least to build enough rafts to maintain the
crew in the water. So the three sections of the work went on--the
firefighting, the lifesaving, and the driving of the ship. McTee on
deck managed two ends of it; Harrigan in the fireroom handled the most
desperate responsibility. It seemed as if these two men by their naked
will power were lifting the lives of the crew away from the touch of
death and hurling the ship toward the shore.
And now for an hour, for two hours, that ghastly labor continued. The
entire stern of the _Heron_ was a sheet of flames when the last workers
staggered up from the fireroom, their skin seared and blistered by the
terrific heat. Last of all came Harrigan, raving and cursing and
imploring the men to return to their work. As he staggered up the deck,
reeling and sobbing hoarsely, Kate Malone ran to him. She pointed out
across the waters ahead of the ship. There rose the black shadow of the
shore and under it a thin line of white--the breakers!
Now by McTee's direction the rafts were hoisted and dragged over the
side of the ship, while one frail line of men remained to struggle
against the encroaching flames.
They were licking into the waist of the _Heron_, and the wireless house
was a mass of red; White Henshaw was burning at sea, and the prophecy
was fulfilled.
The last of the rafts were hoisted overboard and half a dozen men
tumbled into each. When the rest of the crew were overboard, McTee,
Kate, and Harrigan, lingering behind by mutual consent, took one raft
to themselves. All about them tossed the other rafts, and not one man
of all the crowd had thought of the golden treasure which they were
abandoning with the _Heron_. Each might be carrying a few gold pieces,
but the wealth of White Henshaw would go back into the sea from which
it came.
They had not abandoned the flaming ship too soon. A fresh breeze was
sweeping from the ocean onto the shore, and red tongues licked about
the main cabin and darted like reaching hands into the heart of the
sky. By these flashes they could make out the struggling rafts where
the sailors cheered and yelled in the triumph of their escape. But
McTee set about erecting a jury sail.
He wrenched off two strips of board from their raft and across these he
and Harrigan affixed their shirts. The same wind which had lashed the
fires forward on the _Heron_ now hurried the fugitives toward the
shore. They had a serious purpose in outstripping the rest of the
rafts, because when the mutineers reached the shore, the mood of
gratitude which they held for Harrigan and McTee was sure to change,
for these two men could submit enough evidence to hang them in any
country in the world.
Looking back, the _Heron_ was a belching volcano, which suddenly lifted
in the center with the sound of a dozen siege guns in volleyed unison,
and a column of fire vaulted high into the heavens. Before they reached
the tossing heart of the breakers, the _Heron_ was dwindling and
sliding, fragment by fragment into the sea.
Through those breakers the last light from the ship helped them, and
the wind tugging at their little jury sail aided to drive them on until
they could swing off the raft and walk toward the beach, carrying Kate
between them. On the safe, dry sands they turned, and as they looked
back, the Heron slid forward into the ocean and quenched her fires with
a hiss that was like a far-heard whisper of the sea.