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