"Hovey!" shouted McTee. "Look at the mist over the sides! Draw a breath; smell of it! It is fire! Henshaw has set fire in the hold!" It was plain to every brain in the instant. To every man came the thought of the complaints of the firemen concerning the heat in the hold of the _Heron_; the noxious odor like musty straw; the warmth, the deadly warmth of the decks. A volcano smoldered beneath them, and the mist was the sign of the coming outbreak of flames. And the mutineers stood mute, gaping at one another, looking for some hope, some comfort, and finding the same question repeated in every eye. McTee climbed down the ladder to the waist, followed by the rest of the fugitives. Ten minutes before they would have been torn to pieces by the wolf pack. Now no man had a thought for anything save his own death. "Hovey," ordered McTee in his voice of thunder, "tell these fellows they must obey my voice from now on." They roared, snatching at this ghost of a hope: "We will! We'll follow Black McTee! Hovey has brought us to hell!" In a moment everyone was in frantic motion. Campbell started for the engine room to see what had caused the stopping of the ship. McTee himself, followed by Harrigan and the stokers, went down to the fireroom. It was fiery hot there, indeed. When the Scotchman swung down the ladder into the hole, it was like a blast from a furnace, and the air was foul with the nauseating odor of the smoldering wheat. The men gasped and struggled for breath, and yet they began to work without complaint. All hands set to. The fires were shaken down and started afresh; the coal shoveled out from the bunkers. Then a fireman collapsed without a cry of warning. They carried him out to the upper air, and brought down two of the sailors to take his place. And the sailors went without a murmur. They were fighting for the one chance in ten thousand, the chance of bringing the ship to shore before the fire burst out in flame which would lick the _Heron_ from one end to the other within an hour. McTee went up to the bridge to take the bearings and lay the course. By the time his reckonings were completed, steam was up; Campbell had remedied the trouble in the engine room; the propeller began to turn, and a yell went up from the ship and tingled to heaven. When McTee came down from the bridge to the waist, leaving Hovey at the wheel, a dozen of the tars gathered about the new skipper, weeping and shouting, for in their eyes he was the deliverer, it was he who was giving them the fighting chance to live. And how they fought! There was something awe-inspiring and almost beyond the human in the fury with which they labored. It was in the fireroom that their chief difficulty lay. The fireroom of a large steamer is a veritable furnace, and when to this heat was added that from the hold of the ship, it was truly a miracle that any living thing could exist there.