They were waiting so, one night, when the next water-front blaze came to relieve the monotony of their inaction. At the first stroke of the jigger Keighley laid down his pen and brightened with the hope that there was a fire in his district to release him from his desk. Lieutenant Moore dropped his newspaper and looked up to count the strokes of the bell with an expression of relief. The men straightened back from their dominoes; and when the little bell started to ring the third number of a station in their district, they rose with a smile. With the first stroke of the larger gong, the sitting-room was empty--Captain Keighley was shouting to the pilot, “All right there! Pier ----, North River!”--and the _Hudson_ was under way. They found the river as crowded with a summer evening’s traffic as Broadway with street-cars and hansoms on a theatre night; and the _Hudson_ had no shore engine’s right of way under the law. She went whistling up the stream, dodging and spurting, throbbing, grunting and checking speed. Blazing excursion boats, bedecked with colored lights, answered her impatient signals with cheerful impudence and held their courses. Squat ferries paddled serenely across her path. A tug cut in ahead of her to race with her for salvage, and worried her like a cur at a horse’s head. The pilot twirled his wheel, worked his engine room signals, and swore despairingly. And Captain Keighley, staring at the shore lights in the distance, revolved the first sentence of his report in memory, and vainly tried to forget it. When the river opened into a free stretch of water, the tug fell behind; and Keighley saw the pier-end lamp--towards which they were heading--blinking like the intermittent flash of a lighthouse. It disappeared, and he guessed that it had been blotted out by the drift of smoke. “Wind from the south?” he asked. The pilot answered, “Yes’r.” Keighley said, “Take us in on this side o’ the pier.” He stepped out of the wheelhouse to go aft to the crew. “Get out two two-inch lines from the port gates,” he ordered Lieutenant Moore. “Shine” came running back from the bows and joined the men who were taking the hose from its metal-sheathed box. “Banana fritters fer ours,” he said. “It’s the fruit pier!” And Keighley observed that some of the men laughed, that the others at least smiled, and that Lieutenant Moore was the only one who remained out of reach of the invitation to good humor. The captain returned forward again, frowning thoughtfully.