IV
THE fire on theSachsenhad 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.
TheHudsonhad 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 Keighleyand 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 theSachsenfor 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 theHudson’swheelhouse, 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 theSachsen, and he thought it was the sound of a pump set going by some crazy accident of the fire. At a shout from a firemanon the other side of theHudson, 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 theSachsenhigh 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.... GoodGod!”
The heat, as theHudsoncrept 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 oftheHudsontouched the side of theSachsenand steamed on the hot metal. Erect in the bows, drenched with the spray of the hose, Moran cried in a voice of suffocation, “Jump!”
Dotted line shows passage of Keighley’s men from forward cargo room to shaft tunnelThey 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 theHudson, 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 tohis 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 theHudsonhad 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. “Putsome 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; theHudsonhad 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.