“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!”
[Illustration: “_I’ll brain any man that tries to open this door before
I give the word_”