The boat went throbbing through the water at a “fourteen-mile gait.” There was silence in the wheelhouse. “Take us in south o’ th’ ol’ pier,” Keighley ordered. He caught the heel of one boot with the toe of the other, and jerked off the elastic gaiter; the glasses did not leave his eyes. “If yuh’d like to come in with us, Tim, I can give y’ a turnout,” he said to Noonan. A fireman passed under the window. “Bring me me rubbers,” Keighley ordered him, without looking down. “Yuh’re allowin’ fer the current, are yuh?” he said to the pilot. Lieutenant Moore came to the doorway. “Get the starboard lines out,” Keighley directed, without turning. He kicked off the other gaiter, after loosening it with the toe of his stockinged foot. “It’ll remind y’ of ol’ times,” he said to Noonan. And his orders and his remarks were all given in the same absent-minded voice of a man who has his eyes fixed and his mind busy on another matter. Noonan laughed admiringly. “That aint the way Nip ust to give his orders, Dan,” he said. XV From that distance, the village of Nohunk was a cluster of yellow houses that looked as if they had been rolled down the sides of the Nohunk valley and piled together on the water’s edge. Behind them, a trail of small cottages marked the path by which they had come from the hill-top. In front of them lay the soap works and the brewery--as if their greater bulk had given them greater momentum--with their foundations awash at high tide, on the far side of an open field at which the houses had all stopped. It was this field that had saved the village from the fire; for the local firemen, massing in the open, had been able to force the flames back on the water front, following them and confronting them as they extended down the piers towards the brewery and the coal yards. And Captain Keighley, putting in at a disused and broken pier, on the flank of the extending line of fire, planned to drive it back before it reached the coal wharves, and to hold it back until the shore companies could drown it out. To a boat that could lift its hundreds of gallons of water with every drive of its pumps, the blaze was a bonfire. To a crew of men who knew that they were beyond the reach of the departmental authorities, the whole affair was a warm-weather lark. Under a stern spray that kept them cool, they manned their lines in blue shirts and old trousers, all of them bareheaded and some of them in their bare feet. Keighley, on the wheelhouse deck, and Lieutenant Moore, in the fantail, wore helmets and rubber boots; but Noonan was the only one who put on a waterproof coat, and he was directing a monitor nozzle, under Keighley’s instructions, with all the deadly earnestness of an old man at play.