“He’s goin’ to bring his gang down here to take charge o’ the boat,” Keighley assured him. “How’re yer teeth?” Noonan licked his lips. “No!” he exclaimed. “That’s right.” Noonan began to unbutton his rubber coat. He snorted, “Huh!” bellicosely. “Here,” Keighley said, “tend to yer nozzle. Don’t let it play in one place. It’ll knock holes in that wharf, if yuh do.” Noonan took the directing-wheel again, and began to swing the nozzle from side to side mechanically, watching over his shoulder for Dolger’s return. Keighley went down the ladder to take charge of his crew, and left Noonan alone on the wheelhouse top. And when Dolger’s men appeared running through the smoke with their chief’s white helmet leading them like an ikon, it was Noonan who saw them first. He raised a warlike shout of “Hi, boys, hi! Hooks an’ axes! hooks an’ axes!” The men looked up curiously at the charge of the redshirts. Keighley said, “Go on with yer work.” Noonan screamed, “All aboard! They’re comin’! They’re comin’!” And then, seeing that the crew would be taken unprepared, he swung around his nozzle to repel the attack himself. He had had no experience of the strength of such a stream, and before Keighley could get back to the wheelhouse to interfere, the water struck the deck of the old pier almost at the feet of the volunteers, lifted the loose planks on the rebound, and overwhelmed the company like a burst of surf. Dolger’s white helmet flew on the crest of it; the first men, taken in the faces with the sheet of spray, were thrown back bodily on the others; and when the stream, tearing its way through the planking, struck a stringer that had already rotted from its supporting piles, that section of the pier collapsed under the sprawling weight of the fallen men, and dropped them, with the chief himself, into the water. By that time Keighley had reached the nozzle and thrown it up. “Hell, Tim,” he growled, “do yuh want to drown ’em? Get yer ladders there, men!” he shouted. “Haul those fullahs out!” The crew caught up their scaling-ladders and ran to the gap in the pier. “They w’u’d, w’u’d they!” Noonan fumed. He shook his fist at the redshirts that had rallied at a safe distance. Keighley caught him by the shoulders and turned him round. “Take a joke, Tim!” he said curtly. “Take a joke. These ain’t the days o’ Silver Nine.” He went down the ladder, and Noonan--with his coat half off and his helmet pushed back from his forehead--remained to swallow and stare after Keighley, in the posture of a man who had been egged on to a fight and then left and laughed at when his blood was up. He understood that he had been made a fool of. He did not know that he had done worse than that for Dolger. XVI