There was no one there to laugh at his ridiculous appearance, except the wharf watchman, who had returned to the scene of the fire from the safety of a car-float in a neighboring slip. Keighley strode over to him. “Got any ripe bananas yuh don’t want?” “Sure,” the man replied. “Take all youse can ate.” “Shine” came up the ladder, panting from a race with Sturton. Keighley touched him on the bare shoulder. “Take a bunch o’ those bananas aboard with yuh,” he ordered, “an’ be damn quick about it.” VIII Twenty minutes later, the last of the fire had been drowned out; the _Hudson’s_ lines had all been picked up; and the crew sat along the bulwarks, eating bananas and waiting for the order to start back to their house. Cripps and Sturton, “Shine” and Farley were perched in a row along the edge of the engine-room skylight, “in their birthday clo’s,” each with a banana in his hand and a bulge in his cheek, fraternizing while they dried. Sturton was saying, with an air of ownership, “She’s a peach of a boat, jus’ the same. We c’u’d’ve swamped out that blaze ourselves, if there hadn’t been a steamer on the island.” “Shine,” blinking watery-eyed, condemned the fire in resentful anathemas and bit savagely on the banana. “Damn scorch burned my pipes so I can’t taste nuthin’,” he complained. Farley, with the tears still running down his cheeks, swung his heels blissfully, chewed, and regarded the lights of the city. “It’s hot work,” he said. “It’s hot work, all right. But how’d yuh like to be pushin’ a pen in one o’ them little furnaces, fer instance?” He nodded at the late lights in the upper windows of a distant office building. “One o’ them newspaper touts was tryin’ to pump me th’other day about that fire in the cotton. ‘Say,’ he says, ‘what takes you men into the fire department?’ ‘Oh, the pay,’ I says. ‘The pay.’ ‘Hell!’ he says, ‘the money’s no good to a dead man. Look at Bresnan.’” “The damn mut!” “Shine” put in. “’T’wasn’t Bresnan’s fault he got nipped.” “He didn’t mean it that way,” Cripps said. “Well, how _did_ he mean it?” “Shine” demanded. Farley waved his banana skin at the high building. “He meant ’at when it comes to this sort o’ bus’ness he’d sooner be settin’ up in one o’ them hen-coops peckin’ at an ink bottle an’ scratchin’ at a desk.” He gave a grotesque imitation of a clerk humped over his work, dipping his pen frantically, and writing, with his nose to the paper. Cripps laughed and threw his banana at the pier. “To the woods with him!” he said. “Gi’me a banana that’s ripe. That last one tasted like a varnish shop.” Captain Keighley rose, in his uniform, from the ladder of the engine room behind them, and caught the general smile. He heard Cripps say, “This suits me all right.” There were satisfied grunts of assent from the others. At the stern, Lieutenant Moore sat somewhat apart, spitting over the rail. “Get yer clothes on,” Keighley ordered gruffly. “Cast off there, Moore!”