But when he shut the door of his office and took out his pocket Webster from the locked drawer in which he kept it--with as much secrecy as if it were a rhyming dictionary--he sat down before his official letter paper to nurse his jaw with no more dignity than a schoolboy. He began to screw out the tortuous scrawl of his report, breathing hard at the end of every line and muttering curses at the beginning of the next; and when he decided that he had come to the end of his first sentence, he put down his pen to relax the muscles of his mouth and wipe his forehead and swear angrily at Moore for having failed him. The _Hudson_ cuddling up against the pier, purring a little fume of steam from the exhaust pipe, was roused from her rest every now and then by the engineer in charge turning over the engines to get the water out of the low-pressure cylinder. And in the sitting-room Lieutenant Moore was tilted back against the wall in a cane chair, reading a newspaper, looking over his sheet at the closed door of the office with an expression of sulky resentment, and with the same expression glancing aside at the men who were reading, loafing and playing dominoes around him. There was nothing of the genial atmosphere of an engine house’s leisure hour about the scene. “Shine” had confided, in a husky undertone, to the freckled Cripps beside him, “I s’pose Moore’s sore ’cause we won’t fight it out to a finish fer ’m. What’d _we_ make by it, supposin’ we got th’ ol’ man trun out of his job, eh?” Cripps shut his eyes and nodded solemnly. He was still “lying low.” At a round table in the center of the room, Farley, of the curled mustache, was playing dominoes with Sturton, “The Turr’ble Turk;” and Farley, being an expert, could loll back in his chair and play absent-mindedly; while Sturton, to whom the game was an almost violent mental exercise, bent over his dominoes, with his big-boned face set in a worried scowl, playing deliberately, with slow movements of his hairy paws. Farley had been watching Lieutenant Moore. “That loot’nt looks like a bullpup shut out on a door-step,” he summed it up to Sturton. But “Turk” merely grunted, without letting his attention be drawn from the game; and they continued to play in silence--waiting, as the whole department was waiting, for the retirement of Chief Borden and its consequences. VI