V
WHEN he came down stairs to the “office,” he found Deputy-Chief Moran waiting to see him, and he received Moran as if nothing unusual had been happening, despite the fact that his left arm was still in its support. Moran had a morning newspaper on the desk, spread at a page that held a portrait of Captain Keighley and an account of the fire on theSachsen. He greeted Keighley with congratulations, as pugilists shake hands before they come to blows.
Keighley glanced at the paper, indifferently. “We didn’t stay in the engine room,” he corrected the account. “We were in the shaft tunnel.”
Moran was full-blooded and dark-haired.His mouth was harsh under a wiry black mustache that looked as if it had been bitten off at the teeth. He asked, curtly, “How did you get into that mess?”
Keighley dropped the paper in the waste basket before he replied, “I didn’t get into it. I got out of it.” He confronted Moran with a defiant eye. “There was some funny work at the bottom of it. The men in the tunnel seemed to think it was Moore an’ his gang.”
Moore’s gang, of course, was also Moran’s. And Moran demanded, “Did they say so?”
“No.”
“Then what doyousay so for?”
“Yuhaskedme, didn’t yuh?” Keighley replied, unperturbed.
“I asked you for facts!”
“Well, that’s what yuh’re goin’ to get—if yuh want to hear them. Those men know.They can tell.I’m not int’rested—unless someone wants to make trouble fer me.”
“Whowants to make trouble for you?” Moran blustered.
Keighley replied, with meaning, “That’s what I’m waitin’ to find out.”
The Deputy-Chief had come there intending to hold over Keighley the threat of an investigation. He found, now, that Keighley had the butt end of that whip in his hand. He said roughly, “Look here, Keighley, you might as well understand first as last, the order for Chief Borden’s retirement’s coming. You know which side your bread’s buttered on, don’t you?”
Without an instant’s hesitation, Keighley put his hand down flat on hisdesk-top and answered, “I stand pat. I don’t oweyousenothin’. Yuh can do what yuh like, but yuh can’t scare me. See?”
He knew that he was safe for the time, for he had the prestige of the morning’s newspaper notoriety behind him, and the Commissioner would not dare to remove him without cause, and any attempt to make a case against him out of the fire on theSachsenwould prove—in the language of politics—“a boomerang.” The charges against Chief Borden had been held proven by the Commissioner, but they had yet to be defended before a court of appeal under the Civil Service laws. Public sentiment had been aroused in the chief’s favor by the arbitrary and insolent conduct of the Commissioner sitting in judgment at the trial. And Keighleycalculated that if the order were issued for the chief’s retirement, the “Jiggers,” to obtain that order, would have to fling themselves into a blow that would take, for the moment, all their strength.
Moran took up his cap from the desk and put it on. “All right, Keighley,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do foryou.”
Keighley turned his back to reach his coat that hung on a hook beside the window. When he looked around, Moran had gone. He resumed possession of his office with a frowning glance about him, and then went out to the pier to inspect the work that had been done on theHudson.
The quarrel in the fire-department was less political than personal; for, of course, both “Jiggers” and “Anti-Jiggers”were adherents of Tammany Hall. It was a quarrel between the old chief, Borden, and the new Fire Commissioner, who was in some degree indebted to the “Jiggers” for his appointment; they had used their “voice and influence” for him with “the Boss”; Chief Borden had objected to their doing so, and had used his position to make life uneasy for their leaders, among whom was Deputy-Chief Moran. The quarrel had passed down from the officers to the men; Captain Keighley had undertaken to stop it in his company by preferring charges against the malcontent Doherty and having him “broken” by the chief; and this unexpected action had uncovered a whole conspiracy against him with Lieutenant Moore at its head.
Now, if Chief Borden were retired byorder of the Commissioner, Keighley would be left without a friend in power; Moran would be made chief; and the full revenge of Keighley’s enemies would fall upon him. He had no hope of avoiding it. He had no intention of trying to conciliate it. He was resolved merely to fight—after the manner of his kind—and to attend to his duties on theHudsonas thoroughly as possible, meanwhile, so that there might be no valid excuse for removing him from his command.
It was in this spirit that he received his men as they returned one by one to their work—and relieved the strangers who had been detailed in their places while they were in the hospital—and settled down again to pierhouse routine. “Shine” Conlin was the first to reappear, and he reported to the captain witha sort of hangdog shamefacedness; but Keighley—old, cold and silent—showed no sign of remembering the part the little wharf-rat had played aboard theSachsen, and “Shine” resumed possession of his locker and his bunk, with the abashed grin of a guilty schoolboy who is allowed to return to his place in his class under suspended sentence. Sturton—“The Turr’ble Turk”—came eagerly, having a clear conscience; and he was a little crestfallen after his reception; whereas the sly and sandy Cripps accepted the captain’s manner as a tribute to his own powers of concealment and winked to himself in secret self-congratulation as he came out of the office, his eyes on his feet. The loyal Farley looked blank. The others behaved according to their natures andtheir degrees of innocence or guilt. Only Lieutenant Moore—the last to arrive, very pale and shaken—received any intimation that Keighley had not forgotten what had occurred; and he received it in the captain’s refusal to allow him to write the company’s reports, as he had been accustomed.
Life in the pierhouse, between fires, was as dull as imprisonment. There were brasses to be polished, hose to be dried, and a watch to be kept on the “jigger”—the little bell that rang in the alarms; but when the chores for the day had been done, all the rest was idleness. As long as there were strangers in the company, there was some show of sociability in the sitting-room, but when the entire crew had returned to duty, whether they worked or idled, it was ina constrained silence, with side-mouthed whispers and a suspicious aloofness between group and group.
There was little said about the fire on theSachseneven within the groups. Firemen have no more taste for discussing their day’s work with one another than any other laborers have; and in this case, there was an uneasy feeling that the man who said least, now, would have least to answer for if there were to be an official investigation of the disaster. As for Keighley, he did not ask himself—or anybody else—what was going on in the minds of either faction. He did not ask, from either, anything but obedience; and he got that, now, without perceptible difficulty. They had evidently acquired some sort of unholy respect for him; and if they were plotting against him, they were doingit hypocritically. He was satisfied, if it had not been for the difficulty of making out the daily reports.
It was as if to make that difficulty greater that the engineer of theHudsoncame to him to complain of the trouble it was to keep the boat’s low-pressure cylinder warm and ready to start. “I can’t see the sense o’ puttin’ triple-expansion engines into a fire-boat, any way,” he reported. “That third cylinder’s just a drag on the other two. She goes cold here, layin’ in the dock, an’ we’re half way to a fire before she gets hot enough to handle the steam.”
Keighley replied, “Well, send in yer kick to headquarters”—and avoided Dady’s eye as he said it; for it was the captain’s duty to make all such reports.
The engineer looked at him, looked at the floor, and then rubbed his nose withthe back of an oily hand. “I guessyoubetter do it, cap’n,” he said meekly. “I ain’t much of an ink-slinger.” And Keighley’s greater sense of dignity compelled him to answer, with an affected indifference, “All right. All right.”
But when he shut the door of his office and took out his pocket Webster from the locked drawer in which he kept it—with as much secrecy as if it were a rhyming dictionary—he sat down before his official letter paper to nurse his jaw with no more dignity than a schoolboy. He began to screw out the tortuous scrawl of his report, breathing hard at the end of every line and muttering curses at the beginning of the next; and when he decided that he had come to the end of his first sentence, he put down his pen to relax the muscles of his mouth and wipe his forehead and swear angrilyat Moore for having failed him. TheHudsoncuddling up against the pier, purring a little fume of steam from the exhaust pipe, was roused from her rest every now and then by the engineer in charge turning over the engines to get the water out of the low-pressure cylinder. And in the sitting-room Lieutenant Moore was tilted back against the wall in a cane chair, reading a newspaper, looking over his sheet at the closed door of the office with an expression of sulky resentment, and with the same expression glancing aside at the men who were reading, loafing and playing dominoes around him.
There was nothing of the genial atmosphere of an engine house’s leisure hour about the scene.
“Shine” had confided, in a husky undertone, to the freckled Cripps besidehim, “I s’pose Moore’s sore ’cause we won’t fight it out to a finish fer ’m. What’dwemake by it, supposin’ we got th’ ol’ man trun out of his job, eh?”
Cripps shut his eyes and nodded solemnly. He was still “lying low.”
At a round table in the center of the room, Farley, of the curled mustache, was playing dominoes with Sturton, “The Turr’ble Turk;” and Farley, being an expert, could loll back in his chair and play absent-mindedly; while Sturton, to whom the game was an almost violent mental exercise, bent over his dominoes, with his big-boned face set in a worried scowl, playing deliberately, with slow movements of his hairy paws.
Farley had been watching Lieutenant Moore. “That loot’nt looks like a bullpup shut out on a door-step,” he summed it up to Sturton. But “Turk”merely grunted, without letting his attention be drawn from the game; and they continued to play in silence—waiting, as the whole department was waiting, for the retirement of Chief Borden and its consequences.