XII
THEY sprang aboard theHudsontogether. Keighley ran to the pipe that was feeding the second water tower and cut it off at the gate. “Get this standpipe on the fac’try,” he ordered Moran. “We got the water now—all yuh want. I’ll look after the pier.”
“Shine” wiped the tears from his eyes and stared open-mouthed. Moran shouldered past him and swung around the standpipe and turned it on the blazing windows. Keighley clambered up the ladder to the wheelhouse top and began to bellow his orders through his hands.
There followed the hottest half hourthat theHudsonever knew. The coal wharf had taken fire, and the full power of the two monitor nozzles was needed to subdue it. Meanwhile the belch of heat from the burning factory, checked only by the lesser streams from the waist of the boat, swept the deck like the blast from a furnace. The paint peeled from the smokestack, blistered on the wheelhouse, bubbled on the rail. The men crouched behind the bulwarks, their eyes smarting, their throats parched, silent except for a feeble complaint from “Shine” that they would be “spittin’ black buttons fer a month.” Moran clung to his standpipe. Lieutenant Moore struggled against the kick of a pipe which he had turned on the burning pier at the stern of the boat. Keighley’s voice came to them all, thin and far, “To yerleft, Moore. Higher up there, chief. Stick to it, boys!”
There is, in such men, an ideal of self-subordination as strong as the instinct of liberty itself. In the face of danger it held them together, under Keighley, like an oath. “Stick to it!” “Shine” gasped. “Stick to it an’ roast! Roast! He don’t care! The damn ol’ clinker!” Farley muttered, “Ol’ hunk o’ slag!” They were filled with a heroic contempt for him, for themselves, and for their work; and with an ironical and bitter loyalty they held to their posts. The lieutenant blinked the spray from his stinging eyes and turned for another look at the acting-chief beside the standpipe and Keighley commanding on the wheelhouse. Moran, at every crash of falling floors in the factory, expected to see the broken wall forcedout, and was glad that, by virtue of Keighley’s foresight, the bricks that might have crushed the boat were already lying in a harmless pile at the water’s edge.
It was the culmination of Keighley’s triumph—the triumph of the man who forgets himself in his work, who commands unquestioned because he orders what must be done of necessity in the situation, who humbles himself to his duty and is exalted by it.
He had drowned out the flames in the coal wharf; he turned one of his nozzles on the factory, and poured his tons of water through the broken wall, and cut off the flames in the windows. The roof had long since fallen, and now the walls followed it; and the hot bricks, just missing the stern of theHudson,hissed in the water like a blacksmith’s irons. For a moment it seemed that the opening of the building only gave the flames a fiercer draft. They rose sky-high with the roar of a volcano in eruption. But they fell as suddenly; and, instead of smoke, it was steam that rose in clouds, and, instead of the busy crackling of new fuel, the men heard the sizzle of hot coals drowning in the flood that was pouring in on them.
The final relief came from the shore companies that closed in on the ruin, fighting their way through the smolder of the yard, and beating down the dying struggles of the flames with a score of pipes. To Keighley’s orders, the boat drew off and turned broadside to the burning lumber pier and fairly swept it from its piles. The acting-chief lefthis nozzle and went forward dazedly.
“All right, chief!” Keighley called to him. “We got her beat.”
Moran sat down weakly on the bulwarks and wiped his face. “Gee!” he said. “I’m done out. Phew!”
He sat there, unnoticed, until the last flicker of the blaze had been stamped out; then, knowing that the shore companies would be waiting his orders to return to their houses, he went to Keighley. “All right, captain,” he said gruffly. “The men ashore can finish this. Let me off here, and go back to your quarters.”
Keighley nodded. “All right, boys,” he cried. “We’re through. Pick up an’ get away out o’ here.”
He felt the prompt response of loyalty in the way that every man hurried to obey him with a will. He observedthat Lieutenant Moore received his orders with an almost obsequious meekness. He heard laughter from the stern of the boat as it steamed down the river; and from the looks of the men, as he went around among them inspecting his scorched paint, he knew that they had watched his quarrel with Moran, and were proud of him for “winning out.”
When the boat had been tied up, and the men had trooped upstairs to their bunk room noisily, he sat down at his desk before the open window and looked out at the first rosy peep of morning over the horizon. His old eyes relaxed the thoughtful pucker of their wrinkles and filmed with a pathetic moisture. He blinked; his mouth twitched. He looked down quickly at his papers, tore a leaf from his daily calendar, rolled itin a ball, dropped it in the waste-basket—and smiled. When he looked up again, it was to meet, with a changed face, the beginning of a new day.