X
KEIGHLEY went forward and climbed to the roof of the wheelhouse. He stripped the cover from the searchlight, and ordered the current switched to it from the engine room; and the leakage of light from the metal hood showed his hard face set in muscular impassiveness, strong-jawed.
He measured with his eyes the distance from the boat’s side to the probable position of the water towers. “Two three-an’-a-half-inch lines, Moore,” he called,—“eight len’ths. Four inch-an’-three-quarter ones—same len’ths.” Then he swung the searchlight around to the wall of the factory, and passed the circle of light, like agreat hand, up the windows to the roof.
It showed a brick wall five stories high and apparently a brick and a half thick. He brought the light back to the window frames and grunted “Jerry-built!” He pushed up the helmet from his hot forehead and stood studying.
The fire, doubling back beside its own trail, where the half burned lumber was tinder to the flames, had wheeled around towards the factory with such rapidity that the glare of it already lighted the dark interior of the building. Where that glare went the blaze would soon be following; for the windows were unshuttered, the window trim was bare, and the walls were a frail shell filled with all the inflammable material of a furniture factory. To Keighley’s mind, it would be impossible to protect such a structure.
He narrowed his eyes and watched Acting-Chief Moran leading up a truck company to aid in laying the lines from the boat. Farther up the street, the lights of swinging lanterns marked the massing of other companies with hose and engines, in the probable path of the fire. He heard the whistle of the steamers, the bells of the trucks, the immense murmur of the pumps vibrating like a huge purr in the resounding night, and the faint rumor of roaring flames and falling timbers as low and wide as the reverberation of a surf. His nostrils dilated; his frown cleared. He put his hand on the wheel of the monitor nozzle beside him and shouted, “Loosen yer lines there, men. Hey, you at the wheel, ring Dady to jack her back! I want her in under that wall.”
The boat slid back, paying out its lines, until the captain and the wheelhouse came under the factory wall again. “Hold her!” he cried. “Start yer water! Look out fer yerselves there men!”
They scattered as he brought the standpipe around like a machine gun, laid it to train on the upper story of the factory, and spun the valve wheel. There was a shout of orders from the deck, answered by another shout from the engine room; and behind a shrill hiss of air and spray, a solid stream of water, under the mighty pressure of eight pumps, shot from the quivering nozzle and struck like an exploding shell in a burst of spray between two upper windows. For an instant that spray hid the wall there; then it vanished, sucked into a black gap; and, above the roar ofwater, glass crashed and bricks thudded; and the stream, swinging slowly from window to window, tore its way along above the line of sills. It rose to reach the edge of the roof, and ripped up the sheathing boards, and stripped the tin, and burst apart the rafters. It came down again to the windows, and bore in the wall above the floor, and battered in the bricks below the floor, and cut into the floor itself and stripped it to the beams.
By the time Moran had fought his way to the pier—through the rush of a truck company retreating from a fall of bricks—half the wall of the upper story had been carried away, the section of the roof above it hung down in a broken wing, and the stream, thrown up to clear the ruin, shot over the building, singing fiercely.
“Get yer men away from there!” Keighley shouted.
Moran cleared the bulwarks with a running jump and sprang up the ladder to the wheelhouse top. He clutched Keighley by the breast of his rubber coat and faced him, white with fury, his lower teeth bared as if he were going to bite, his eyes like two balls of yellow glass in the blaze of the searchlight, speechless.
Keighley caught his wrist and growled, “What’s the matter with yuh?”
Moran flung him off and yelled, “What’s the matter withyou? Why don’t you do what you’re told, you — —! DidItell you to do that?” He threw out his arm at the wrecked factory.
Keighley shook his head. “No. Yuh hadn’t sense enough to.”
The captain was a tall, big-shouldered build of Irish ruffian, as hard with age as an old oak. Moran was shorter, stockier, heavier in the waist. They drew back from each other with a menacing stiffening of neck and shoulders. Then Moran said, “You’re relieved of your command here. Report to me to-morrow at headquarters.”
They had climbed the bunker ladders, and found the port
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Keighley turned to his pipe. “Relieved be damned! I’m responsible fer this boat, an’ I’ll take her back to her berth.” He threw the stream down to strike the wall again, and shouted, “If we lay here feedin’ yer water towers till the fire drops the side of a house on us, where d’ yuh s’pose we’ll be? We got water to smash it in now. We won’t have it when we’re pumpin’ yer six lines full, will we? There’s time enoughto stretch in after them bricks is down. Look out, there!”
A section of the weakened wall, taken in the middle, broke and dropped on itself like a curtain. Half the roof collapsed and bore down the upper floors; and the stream, striking free on the ruin, began to pick it down, course by course, as Keighley laid the pipe to it.
He did not so much as glance at Moran again. In the excitement of his work, he appeared to have brushed aside the quarrel from his thoughts as he would have brushed aside any man who got in his way at such a time. It was a manner that made all blustering insistence of authority impossible to Moran. He waited for the opportunity to reassert himself.
“All right!” Keighley shouted, at last. “Shut her off.”
The stream weakened, fell, and ceased. Keighley turned the searchlight on the street and called, “All right. Now put her back where she was!” He dropped down the wheelhouse ladder and ran aft as the boat drew up again at the foot of the street.
Moran stood a moment, the jaw muscle working in his cheek. Then he went ashore in grim silence.
It was a silence that promised him satisfaction in the morning, when Keighley should be notified that he was relieved of his command.
“Shine” chuckled as he dragged on his line. “Moran gothisdose, I guess.”
Farley replied, “There’s trouble in it fer th’ ol’ man, though.”
“Shine” retorted, in his turn, “Don’tyouworry!”