“Come on!” Keighley ordered.
“Turk” Sturton followed the voice of authority. “Shine” followed the
voice of the man. Cripps obeyed where obedience had been proved the
wiser policy. Farley went to do the work for which he was paid. Their
obedience drew them together like a yoke; they helped one another,
rubbed shoulders facing a common enemy, and touched hands in an almost
friendly sympathy, sharing one task and one danger.
They stopped when the hose would come no farther, and Sturton sent back
the signal for water. “Some Guinny had a roost in there,” Farley said,
peering through his fingers at the flames.
“Shine” replied, “’Tust to be the gang’s club-house. There she goes!”
He shouted, above the noise of the stream, “She ain’t insured, at that!”
Keighley rested his elbows on a beam, rubbed his smarting eyes,
and grunted half-disgustedly. To him “Shine’s” playfulness was the
ingratiating gamboling of a dog that had tried to bite him. He felt no
inclination to pat the treacherous cur; but neither did he purpose to
kick him. To Farley “Shine” seemed to show a spirit of good-fellowship
that let bygones be bygones and reduced their relations to the merely
human intercourse of man and man. To Sturton, absorbed in his duties,
it was the encouragement of a kindred spirit who took the joy of battle
more noisily than he.
The blaze, caught at close range, seemed to snuff out as suddenly as
if it had been no more than the flame of a candle; and when Keighley
looked back over his shoulder in the darkness, he saw the spark of a
belated lantern which Lieutenant Moore was lowering through the hole
that his squad had cut in the floor. “There’s the loot’nt,” “Shine”
sang out impudently. “If he ain’t careful with that lamp he’ll set fire
to somethin’.” And the laugh that followed came heartily from the men.
Keighley made his way back to the lantern and called to Moore to put a
ladder down. “Fire’s out here,” he shouted. “Go in up there an’ help
wet down.”
He waited at the foot of the ladder until he was sure that the last
glimmer of flame had been extinguished below; then, calling to his own
squad to leave their lines and “back out,” he climbed the ladder to the
floor of the pier.
There was no one there to laugh at his ridiculous appearance, except
the wharf watchman, who had returned to the scene of the fire from the
safety of a car-float in a neighboring slip. Keighley strode over to
him. “Got any ripe bananas yuh don’t want?”
“Sure,” the man replied. “Take all youse can ate.”
“Shine” came up the ladder, panting from a race with Sturton. Keighley
touched him on the bare shoulder. “Take a bunch o’ those bananas aboard
with yuh,” he ordered, “an’ be damn quick about it.”