They were taken to their homes or to the hospitals, in ambulances, “to lay up for repairs.” Captain Keighley refused to do even that. “I’m all right,” he told the ambulance surgeons. “Put some grease on me--somethin’ to take the smart out. If I go home lookin’ sick, I’ll scare the girl to death.” (He was a widower, living with a married daughter whose husband was a police captain.) “Fix up my hands. That’s all I need.” He had been burned about the head and arms chiefly, and they washed and bandaged him. They put his left arm in a sling--much to his disgust--and would have bound up his right hand, too, if he had not refused to allow them. “Let that alone,” he ordered. “I got use for that.” They warned him that he might have blood poisoning if he did not protect his burns from the air, “Huh!” he grunted. “Blood poisonin’! Put somethin’ on it so’s I can get a night’s sleep. That’s all I need.” And they had to let him have his way. He went upstairs to his bedroom and lay down in his underclothes--because it would have been too great an effort to remove them--and slept the sleep of exhaustion. He was not disturbed; the _Hudson_ had been reported out of commission and no alarms were rung in. He slept the sleep of exhaustion, and he wakened next morning to the noises made by an improvised crew at work cleaning up the fire-boat. When he had blinked away the first alarming idea that he had overslept, he sat up painfully and looked at the blisters on his free hand. He looked at them a long time--as if he saw there the whole story of his battle with the “Jiggers”--and then he looked up, under his eyebrows, at the open door and the vacant cots of the crew’s bunkroom, and he almost smiled. He straightened up slowly, like a rheumatic, as he stood; and he went about his toilet with a cripple’s patience, his mind on the “Jiggers” and their discomfiture--considering what they would do next. 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 the _Sachsen_. 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.”