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!”