“What’re you doing? Get a move on, will you? What the hell are you fooling round with that hose for, Keighley? Stretch in over there, where I told you! Why the devil--” Keighley, who had his own sense of dignity, set his thin lips in a tight line and looked back at the factory. “Where’s yer truck comp’ny?” he growled. “D’ yuh expect eight men to stretch in enough o’ this boat’s hose to feed two water towers?” Moran’s voice rose to a hoarse curse: “G-- -- you! don’t you talk back to me! Do what you’re told. Get a hustle on, or, by--” Keighley obeyed without more words. “Come along, boys,” he ordered. “Leave yer lines there.” They jumped aboard the boat and cast off. The _Hudson_ nosed her way across the head of the slip until she lay with her bows a few yards from the coal pier, her side to the foot of the street that separated the factory from the gas tanks, and her stern in the shadow of the factory wall. From that position, she would flank the advance of the fire; her supply lines, laid up the street, would front it; and her stern pipes, trained on the lumber wharf behind her would check the flames there. The great danger of the place was this: if the factory burned, the falling of its walls would crush the boat. “Come along, now!” Keighley called. “Open up that hose box.” His men obeyed him eagerly. “Shine” grumbled to Farley, “Moran thinks he’s the real screw. If he gets yappy, ol’ Clinkers’ll take an’ bite a piece off ’m.” Farley, having always been of the captain’s faction, retorted jealously, “Don’t _you_ worry.” X Keighley went forward and climbed to the roof of the wheelhouse. He stripped the cover from the searchlight, and ordered the current switched to it from the engine room; and the leakage of light from the metal hood showed his hard face set in muscular impassiveness, strong-jawed. He measured with his eyes the distance from the boat’s side to the probable position of the water towers. “Two three-an’-a-half-inch lines, Moore,” he called,--“eight len’ths. Four inch-an’-three-quarter ones--same len’ths.” Then he swung the searchlight around to the wall of the factory, and passed the circle of light, like a great hand, up the windows to the roof. It showed a brick wall five stories high and apparently a brick and a half thick. He brought the light back to the window frames and grunted “Jerry-built!” He pushed up the helmet from his hot forehead and stood studying. The fire, doubling back beside its own trail, where the half burned lumber was tinder to the flames, had wheeled around towards the factory with such rapidity that the glare of it already lighted the dark interior of the building. Where that glare went the blaze would soon be following; for the windows were unshuttered, the window trim was bare, and the walls were a frail shell filled with all the inflammable material of a furniture factory. To Keighley’s mind, it would be impossible to protect such a structure.