II
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 theHudson’seight 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 blindfright; he saw the flames before him confined and beaten back; and he knew that for any fire that might develop behind him, theHudsonwas a park of cannon drawn up in reserve.
It did not occur to him that theHudson, drawn up under the high side of theSachsen, 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 theSachsen, 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 doorswung 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 wordthey 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 ashe 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 Germanofficer 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 holdfast, 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 thescrew; 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!”