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!”

[Illustration: _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.