He felt the prompt response of loyalty in the way that every man hurried to obey him with a will. He observed that Lieutenant Moore received his orders with an almost obsequious meekness. He heard laughter from the stern of the boat as it steamed down the river; and from the looks of the men, as he went around among them inspecting his scorched paint, he knew that they had watched his quarrel with Moran, and were proud of him for “winning out.” When the boat had been tied up, and the men had trooped upstairs to their bunk room noisily, he sat down at his desk before the open window and looked out at the first rosy peep of morning over the horizon. His old eyes relaxed the thoughtful pucker of their wrinkles and filmed with a pathetic moisture. He blinked; his mouth twitched. He looked down quickly at his papers, tore a leaf from his daily calendar, rolled it in a ball, dropped it in the waste-basket--and smiled. When he looked up again, it was to meet, with a changed face, the beginning of a new day. XIII But when he had slept on it, he was not quite so sanguine, for though he recognized that he had overcome the active opposition of his crew, of his lieutenant, and now of the acting-chief, he understood that such victories could be but temporary. He was standing against the interests of these men; and by whatever emotions of fear and respect he had held them back, the emotion would pass and the interest remain. He conceded to himself that Moore was negligible, that the men were almost so. (If he exercised even ordinary care, he could protect himself from whatever small malice there might be among them.) But if Moran and the Commissioner spared him, it would be with the hope of winning from his gratitude what they had not been able to force from his fear--namely, a disposition to aid the progress of the benevolent association of the “Jiggers” by favoring their members in his crew. And he was determined to do no such thing. He turned to the newspaper account of the night’s fire--with the fireman’s usual excuse to himself that he wished to see how the reporter had “botched it”--and he read with sarcastic relish a detailed account of how Moran had used a “water-screen” to save the gas tanks, and had so headed off a “conflagration” that at one time threatened to wipe out half the East Side. He did not remember that by shouting “Chief’s orders!” he had himself given Moran the credit of that move. He accepted the report as another of those newspaper inaccuracies which are a tradition among firemen. He flung the paper aside and went out to start the men at work restoring the _Hudson’s_ blistered paint.