They sprang aboard the _Hudson_ together. Keighley ran to the pipe that
was feeding the second water tower and cut it off at the gate. “Get
this standpipe on the fac’try,” he ordered Moran. “We got the water
now--all yuh want. I’ll look after the pier.”
“Shine” wiped the tears from his eyes and stared open-mouthed. Moran
shouldered past him and swung around the standpipe and turned it on the
blazing windows. Keighley clambered up the ladder to the wheelhouse top
and began to bellow his orders through his hands.
There followed the hottest half hour that the _Hudson_ ever knew.
The coal wharf had taken fire, and the full power of the two monitor
nozzles was needed to subdue it. Meanwhile the belch of heat from the
burning factory, checked only by the lesser streams from the waist
of the boat, swept the deck like the blast from a furnace. The paint
peeled from the smokestack, blistered on the wheelhouse, bubbled on the
rail. The men crouched behind the bulwarks, their eyes smarting, their
throats parched, silent except for a feeble complaint from “Shine” that
they would be “spittin’ black buttons fer a month.” Moran clung to his
standpipe. Lieutenant Moore struggled against the kick of a pipe which
he had turned on the burning pier at the stern of the boat. Keighley’s
voice came to them all, thin and far, “To yer left, Moore. Higher up
there, chief. Stick to it, boys!”
There is, in such men, an ideal of self-subordination as strong as
the instinct of liberty itself. In the face of danger it held them
together, under Keighley, like an oath. “Stick to it!” “Shine” gasped.
“Stick to it an’ roast! Roast! He don’t care! The damn ol’ clinker!”
Farley muttered, “Ol’ hunk o’ slag!” They were filled with a heroic
contempt for him, for themselves, and for their work; and with an
ironical and bitter loyalty they held to their posts. The lieutenant
blinked the spray from his stinging eyes and turned for another look at
the acting-chief beside the standpipe and Keighley commanding on the
wheelhouse. Moran, at every crash of falling floors in the factory,
expected to see the broken wall forced out, and was glad that, by
virtue of Keighley’s foresight, the bricks that might have crushed the
boat were already lying in a harmless pile at the water’s edge.
It was the culmination of Keighley’s triumph--the triumph of the man
who forgets himself in his work, who commands unquestioned because he
orders what must be done of necessity in the situation, who humbles
himself to his duty and is exalted by it.
He had drowned out the flames in the coal wharf; he turned one of his
nozzles on the factory, and poured his tons of water through the broken
wall, and cut off the flames in the windows. The roof had long since
fallen, and now the walls followed it; and the hot bricks, just missing
the stern of the _Hudson_, hissed in the water like a blacksmith’s
irons. For a moment it seemed that the opening of the building only
gave the flames a fiercer draft. They rose sky-high with the roar of a
volcano in eruption. But they fell as suddenly; and, instead of smoke,
it was steam that rose in clouds, and, instead of the busy crackling of
new fuel, the men heard the sizzle of hot coals drowning in the flood
that was pouring in on them.
The final relief came from the shore companies that closed in on
the ruin, fighting their way through the smolder of the yard, and
beating down the dying struggles of the flames with a score of
pipes. To Keighley’s orders, the boat drew off and turned broadside
to the burning lumber pier and fairly swept it from its piles. The
acting-chief left his nozzle and went forward dazedly.
“All right, chief!” Keighley called to him. “We got her beat.”
Moran sat down weakly on the bulwarks and wiped his face. “Gee!” he
said. “I’m done out. Phew!”
He sat there, unnoticed, until the last flicker of the blaze had been
stamped out; then, knowing that the shore companies would be waiting
his orders to return to their houses, he went to Keighley. “All right,
captain,” he said gruffly. “The men ashore can finish this. Let me off
here, and go back to your quarters.”
Keighley nodded. “All right, boys,” he cried. “We’re through. Pick up
an’ get away out o’ here.”
He felt the prompt response of loyalty in the way that every man
hurried to obey him with a will. He observed that Lieutenant Moore
received his orders with an almost obsequious meekness. He heard
laughter from the stern of the boat as it steamed down the river; and
from the looks of the men, as he went around among them inspecting his
scorched paint, he knew that they had watched his quarrel with Moran,
and were proud of him for “winning out.”
When the boat had been tied up, and the men had trooped upstairs to
their bunk room noisily, he sat down at his desk before the open window
and looked out at the first rosy peep of morning over the horizon. His
old eyes relaxed the thoughtful pucker of their wrinkles and filmed
with a pathetic moisture. He blinked; his mouth twitched. He looked
down quickly at his papers, tore a leaf from his daily calendar, rolled
it in a ball, dropped it in the waste-basket--and smiled. When he
looked up again, it was to meet, with a changed face, the beginning of
a new day.