It was a blistering afternoon, with a sun overhead that struck a quivering refraction from the dried and warped planks of the wharves, and a breeze that came hot across the sparkle of the bay where the glancing facets of small waves shone like a million gleaming little mirrors. The pierhouse stood at the water’s edge, as bare as a lighthouse to the beat and reflection of the heat, its row of open windows gaping in the sunlight like a line of gasping mouths. The men idled interminably, reading the papers, yawning for an interval and then reading them all over again. And Keighley dozed at his desk in his office--like Napoleon before a battle!--waiting for the attack of his enemy to develop the plan of his counter-assault. A stiff easterly breeze sprang up at sunset. It came cool from the sea; and the crew of the _Hudson_ received it as a grateful relief. But this same breeze--puffing steadily into the smolder of a small fire that had just broken out in the lumber yard of a furniture factory on the East River water front--blew the flames back through the stacks of seasoned boards like a blaze through kindlings; and while the _Hudson_, in answer to a delayed alarm, was rounding the Battery and speeding up the river, the flames spread eagerly, in spite of all the efforts of the shore companies to check them, till, by the time the _Hudson_ arrived, they covered as much ground as a prairie fire. Under a volume of dense smoke, they reached and writhed and leaped together, darting up their heads venomously, waving aloft their flickering crests, coiling back and striking low. When the wind lifted the pall that covered their trail, the piles of lumber could be seen burning like torches. In front of them, every now and then, a feathery stream rose white in the ruddy glow, spitting impotently into the air as the firemen, retreating, choked it and dragged it back; and overhead, continually, the triumphal sparks brightened and soared. At the first sight of them Keighley’s indolence of mind disappeared with the quick blink of an alert eye. “Aha!” he said to himself. “There’s work for Moran.” He shouted to the men, “Get out ev’ry line we got, boys.” He laid the _Hudson_ broadside on, at the head of the slip, between two wharves, under the dark wall of the furniture factory; and he led up three lines of his largest hose to take the fire in the rear. He left the boat empty except for the pilot, standing black in the door of the lighted wheelhouse, and quiet except when Dady, the engineer, came up from the engine room, looked across the darkness towards the struggle which he could not see, and called out to the pilot, “How’s she goin’, Pete?”