From the coal port above him a naked figure squirmed out, hung kicking and fell into his arms. Another and another followed--Moran and his men catching them as they came, and shouting encouragement through the steam that rose on all sides with the smell of blistered paint. One man in the struggle at the narrow opening, was thrown into the water and had to be dragged out with a boat hook. Others fell on their feet, and, throwing themselves on the deck with hoarse cries, began to roll around in the spray. Lieutenant Moore came down unconscious, as if baked stiff, and lay crouched. Captain Keighley, falling beside him, crawled with his mouth open, to the nozzle of the spray. “All off!” he gasped. “Start--yer water.... _Water!_” Moran shouted, “Back off. Full speed. Get these men to the hospital.” They were madmen. And the squad on the _Hudson_, fighting with them to prevent them from jumping overboard, had to carry them below to the engineer’s quarters and wrap them in wet blankets and hold them down. Not one of them was in a condition to tell how they had escaped. (Indeed few of them ever succeeded in recalling any more of what had happened in the shaft tunnel than a convalescent remembers of the delirium of his fever.) Only Keighley--between the gulps of water that were doled out to him cautiously--explained that he had come to his senses sitting with his back against the door of the shaft tunnel, ankle deep in water, and had realized that they would all be drowned in the tunnel unless they escaped to some higher level. He had forced the steel door back and driven or dragged the men out to the engine room where they climbed to the first tier of gratings, the fire in this part of the boat having burned itself out first, for want of fuel. From there, he had found his way through the stokeholes to an empty coal bunker, where a cooler current of air warned him that there was probably a coal port open up above him. He had come back for the others; they had climbed the bunker ladders, and found the port; an engineer had made the signal with a stoker’s lamp; and the _Hudson_ had seen it. “Gi’ me a drink,” Keighley ended. “Gi’ me a drink.” He was the least exhausted of all the crew--although the truth is that none of them was more than dangerously blistered and temporarily maddened by pain. They were of the toughness that is characteristic of their profession--chosen men who got themselves injured by the hundreds every year, but who succumbed to their injuries so rarely that the death rate of the department was, at that time, only six men a year--trained men who had the agility of cats and a cat’s tenacity of life.