IX
IN the morning it was announced in the newspapers that Chief Borden had been suspended, pending the decision of the courts on the charges against him, and that Moran had been appointed acting-chief in his place. Keighley opened his eyes wide upon the news, and then narrowed them cunningly as he considered it. He had expected that Borden would be thrown out neck and crop as a warning to all the “Anti-Jiggers;” and there was a glimmer of something hopeful in the half-heartedness of a tentative suspension. Keighley shut himself in his office with his desk telephone to find out what had happened.
It did not take him long to learn. One of his political friends in the upper circle explained that “the Boss” had objected to a fratricidal war that threatened to disrupt the whole fire department, to sacrifice public faith in the administration for no political ends, and to weaken the “organization” by dividing it against itself. The Fire Commissioner had compromised by suspending Borden instead of “breaking” him. Keighley listened—and shook his head. “That don’t letmeout,” he said. “It may keep ’em from comin’ after me on Broadway with a club, but it’ll never keep ’em from stickin’ me in the back some night around a dark corner.”
He hung up the receiver and scratched the back of his neck doubtfully. It was his day off duty, but he was reluctant to take it—and leave thelieutenant in charge. “Moore,” he summoned him, “get that report done, will yuh? I’ll see to cleanin’ the boat.”
“It’s all right,” Moore replied. “I can do both—if you want to get away.”
Keighley looked out the window at the humid haze of heat that hung over the water. “I guess I’ll be as cool here as anywhere,” he said. “Go ahead with the report.”
That Sunday was to be memorable in the records of the Weather Bureau as the hottest July day in forty years; and it was to be memorable in the records of the fire department for the most dangerous fire that had attacked the water front since the department had been formed. But the fire did not break out till sundown; and fate, while she was setting a terrific stage for Keighley’snext appearance, allowed him one of those entre-acts that make the fireman’s life such a thing of heart-breaking spurts of action and nerve-wracking blanks of peace.
Having given his orders for the day, he withdrew, upstairs, to a balcony off his bunkroom, where he sat all morning in the shade, watching the tugs and ferries, steamboats, floats and scows that bustled and wallowed and staggered past, squealing in a shrill impatience when they whistled, and puffing short of breath when they reversed. The water under their bows broke and fell back sluggishly. The swells in their wakes reeled away with an oily roll. The air was heavy with the drifting belch of their funnels.
It could not be said that Keighley really thought of anything while he satthere. It was one of the characteristics of his mind that it worked best under the conditions of bewildering excitement that make clear thought impossible to most men. He did not even think about the “Jiggers;” he merely snoozed, with one eye on that matter, like a watchdog, until the noonday sun drove him from his balcony. Then he went sleepily to a neighboring restaurant for his dinner, having already telephoned that he would not be home.
It was a blistering afternoon, with a sun overhead that struck a quivering refraction from the dried and warped planks of the wharves, and a breeze that came hot across the sparkle of the bay where the glancing facets of small waves shone like a million gleaming little mirrors. The pierhouse stood at the water’s edge, as bare as a lighthouse tothe beat and reflection of the heat, its row of open windows gaping in the sunlight like a line of gasping mouths. The men idled interminably, reading the papers, yawning for an interval and then reading them all over again. And Keighley dozed at his desk in his office—like Napoleon before a battle!—waiting for the attack of his enemy to develop the plan of his counter-assault.
A stiff easterly breeze sprang up at sunset. It came cool from the sea; and the crew of theHudsonreceived it as a grateful relief. But this same breeze—puffing steadily into the smolder of a small fire that had just broken out in the lumber yard of a furniture factory on the East River water front—blew the flames back through the stacks of seasoned boards like a blaze through kindlings; and while theHudson, in answerto a delayed alarm, was rounding the Battery and speeding up the river, the flames spread eagerly, in spite of all the efforts of the shore companies to check them, till, by the time theHudsonarrived, they covered as much ground as a prairie fire. Under a volume of dense smoke, they reached and writhed and leaped together, darting up their heads venomously, waving aloft their flickering crests, coiling back and striking low. When the wind lifted the pall that covered their trail, the piles of lumber could be seen burning like torches. In front of them, every now and then, a feathery stream rose white in the ruddy glow, spitting impotently into the air as the firemen, retreating, choked it and dragged it back; and overhead, continually, the triumphal sparks brightened and soared.
At the first sight of them Keighley’s indolence of mind disappeared with the quick blink of an alert eye. “Aha!” he said to himself. “There’s work for Moran.” He shouted to the men, “Get out ev’ry line we got, boys.”
He laid theHudsonbroadside on, at the head of the slip, between two wharves, under the dark wall of the furniture factory; and he led up three lines of his largest hose to take the fire in the rear. He left the boat empty except for the pilot, standing black in the door of the lighted wheelhouse, and quiet except when Dady, the engineer, came up from the engine room, looked across the darkness towards the struggle which he could not see, and called out to the pilot, “How’s she goin’, Pete?”
The pilot answered several times, indifferently, that she was “going her owngait all right,” that she was “chasing the boys all round the lot,” that she had “the bit in her teeth.” But at length he reported that the wind had fallen. Then, the next time, he said, “She’s puffing in from the southeast.” And at last he leaned his shoulder against the door-jamb and replied, “You better get your pumps well greased. The wind’s come round strong from the south.”
“South!” Dady sniffed the air. “That’ll bring her back this way!”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
The engineer popped into the hatch like a frightened rabbit into its burrow; and the silhouette in the doorway raised the shadow of a pair of night glasses to the black profile of a nose and stood watching.
The scene of the fire on the piers
In a moment, out of the darkness atthe head of the slip, two figures in long rubber coats came striding into the light of the incandescent lamp at the stern of theHudsonand sprang aboard. They were Captain Keighley and Acting-Chief Moran; and they came forward rapidly towards the wheelhouse, Moran waving his arm with an excited gesture of authority.
“She’s working back over there,” he was saying of the fire. “You’ll have to hold her, here, at the factory, and keep her from jumping that street to those gas tanks. If they blow up, it’ll smash half the ward.”
He ran up the ladder to the deck of the wheelhouse. “We can’t get water to hold her, back there,” he explained. “They’re sucking air from those plugs already.”
Keighley looked from the fire to theblack wall of the factory, from the factory to the shadow where the street was hidden, and from the street to the huge gas tanks that seemed to be leaping and falling in the wavering light of the flames. “We got the waterhereall right,” he said. He asked, “How wide is it?”
“It’s—I don’t know,” Moran answered impatiently. “It’s about seventy feet from the wall to the nearest tank. I can give you two water towers.”
Keighley looked back over his shoulder. The boat was lying between the lumber wharf at her stern and the gas company’s coal pier at her bows. “Fire’s bound to back onto that yard wharf,” he said. “We’ll be between Hell an’ Purgat’ry here.” He looked up at the factory wall above him.“That’ll be comin’ down on top of us.” He nodded at the gas tank. “All right. We can keep her off them.”
Moran ran down the ladder and hurried aft. Keighley followed him.
Suddenly the old captain said, in the voice of a challenge, “I’ll do it if the crew will.”
Moran asked, “What’s the matter with the crew?”
Keighley answered, “I guessyouknow as well as I do.”
Moran stepped ashore. “I’m going around the factory,” he said curtly, and vanished in the darkness.
Keighley stood stroking his sharp nose and smiling under his hand. Then he coughed a dry chuckle, turned, and ran along the trail of hose towards the fire.
He considered that he had “put it up”to Moran. It was Moran’s turn, now, to learn the danger of promoting dissension in the place of discipline. Here was a fire big enough to breakhim, if it were badly handled; and he was relying on a disaffected crew and a discredited captain to handle it for him.
Keighley smiled as he ran; and he ran until the bitter smell of wet embers, from the burned wood underfoot, was wiped out of his nostrils by a puff of smoke that came warm and dry on his face. It sobered him. He slackened his pace to fill his lungs against the stifle, and proceeded carefully. A few yards farther on, the expected blast scorched him. When it had passed, he yelled, “Hi, there! Moore, there!” He got no reply. He broke into a run, stumbled over the hose, and fell among the burnedbeams and steaming ashes; and as he sprang to his feet again, the smoke was cut by a quivering current of heat, and he saw his crew crouched in a line behind their pipes, fighting in a wide semi-circle of flames that held back before them but reached out, roaring, on both flanks. “Back out! Back!” he called. “Yuh’re no good here. Get back to the boat! We can’t stop her here. Come along with that two-inch line! Lighten up here, some o’ you men. Chase back an’ shut off, Moore.”
They obeyed him in a suffocated silence, dragging back the smaller hose. But it was impossible to move the larger lines as long as they were filled with the weight of water; and the pipemen who were directing these, blinded by the resinous smoke of yellow pine, remained bent double before the heat that camelicking across them like the touch of flame.
Keighley ran to them. “Get back an’ uncouple ’em. We’ll never get out o’ here this way.”
A man at the farthest pipe pitched forward on his face and lay huddled. His fellows left their nozzle in its pipe-stick, caught him under arms and knees, and stumbled back with him. Their undirected stream threshed about like a snake pinned down at the neck; and the fire began to creep stealthily across the drying debris around it.
A smoking pile of half-burned lumber close at hand flared up in a sudden flame. Keighley threw himself on the other men, dragged them from their pipe, and drove them back. “We can’t fool here,” he cried. “We got to get around to them gas tanks.”
They abandoned, reluctantly, the two nozzles that were caught by the lugs in the crotches of the pipe-sticks, and retreated with the smaller line. But, even so, they had to wait until the water had been shut off before they dared break the couplings to save the hose; and every minute was an hour long to the impatient Moran waiting for them to stretch in their lines to protect the threatened gas tanks. He was fresh to his responsibility, and Keighley’s cool insinuation of treachery had put him to the edge of a new fear.
When the men got back to theHudsonwith the first lengths of hose, he stormed down on them angrily.
“What’re you doing? Get a move on, will you? What the hell are you fooling round with that hose for, Keighley?Stretch in over there, where I told you! Why the devil—”
Keighley, who had his own sense of dignity, set his thin lips in a tight line and looked back at the factory. “Where’s yer truck comp’ny?” he growled. “D’ yuh expect eight men to stretch in enough o’ this boat’s hose to feed two water towers?”
Moran’s voice rose to a hoarse curse: “G— — you! don’t you talk back to me! Do what you’re told. Get a hustle on, or, by—”
Keighley obeyed without more words. “Come along, boys,” he ordered. “Leave yer lines there.”
They jumped aboard the boat and cast off. TheHudsonnosed her way across the head of the slip until she lay with her bows a few yards from the coal pier, her side to the foot of the street thatseparated the factory from the gas tanks, and her stern in the shadow of the factory wall. From that position, she would flank the advance of the fire; her supply lines, laid up the street, would front it; and her stern pipes, trained on the lumber wharf behind her would check the flames there. The great danger of the place was this: if the factory burned, the falling of its walls would crush the boat.
“Come along, now!” Keighley called. “Open up that hose box.”
His men obeyed him eagerly. “Shine” grumbled to Farley, “Moran thinks he’s the real screw. If he gets yappy, ol’ Clinkers’ll take an’ bite a piece off ’m.”
Farley, having always been of the captain’s faction, retorted jealously, “Don’tyouworry.”