The _Sachsen_ was a freighter of the Baltic-American line, plying between New York and Hamburg; she was tied to her pier in the North River, receiving cargo, that afternoon, when fire was discovered among the bales of cotton that were being loaded into her forward hold; and according to the foreman of her forward-hold gang of freight-handlers, the fire started in a longshoreman’s clay pipe, smoked, against orders, while the man was at his work below decks receiving the bales. According to the officials of the Baltic-American line, the fire was “a pure case of spontaneous combustion;” and the newspapers of the day reported it as such. But when New York’s new fire-boat, the _Hudson_, in answer to the alarm from the pier, came whistling up the river from her berth near the Battery and turned in under the starboard quarter of the big _Sachsen_, Captain Keighley of the _Hudson_ looked up to see a longshoreman scowling down at him over the steamship’s bulwarks; and the presence of that particular longshoreman was at the moment as ominous of trouble for old Keighley as it subsequently became significant to him in considering the origin of the fire. For the man was an ex-fireman, of the name of Doherty, whom Captain Keighley had helped to dismiss from the service of the fire-department one week before. The reasons for his dismissal need not concern us here. The important point is that he had been a “Jigger-jumper,” as the members of a certain “benevolent association” of the firemen had been nicknamed; and Captain Keighley’s crew was full of “Jiggers” who were eager to avenge their fellow “Jigger” for the loss of his uniform. Captain Keighley, when he looked up to see Doherty above him, was standing on the cement roof of the _Hudson’s_ wheelhouse, beside a monitor nozzle that could drive a hole through a brick wall with a stream as stiff as a steel bar; and the fact that he stood in this place of command by virtue of his own cunning, in spite of intrigue in the fire-department and treachery in his own crew, did not show in the look that he lifted to his enemy overhead. At most he showed only a cool reliance on the streams of the _Hudson_ to cope with any mischief that might be in hand; for the _Hudson_ had a battery of four sets of duplex pumps that could force out of her pipes as much water in a minute as twenty shore-engines in a row; and Keighley was eager for a big fire to test her powers on. The pilot in the wheelhouse brought her sweeping into the narrow slip beside the _Sachsen_, riding the ridges of her own swell--her keel all but naked amidships--and reversed with a suddenness that shook her to the stack. From the deck of the _Sachsen_ men were bawling down: “Cotton in the forrud hold! Cotton afire! Cotton afire!” Captain Keighley struck at the whistle rope and blew for tugboats. “Moore,” he called to his lieutenant, “get a lighter alongside here and wet down the cotton I hoist out. Couple up two lines. Get the cotton spray.”