Lieutenant Moore, explaining in the manner of a man with a grievance, took a valuable minute to make the situation plain. He made it plainer than he knew. Keighley narrowed his old eyes and nodded. “Back out, boys!” he called. “Leave yer lines. We’ll pick ’em up from the deck.” The men dropped their hose and climbed up the ladders; and as soon as they had passed the orlop deck it was evident to them that they were in a trap. Flames were blowing across the hatch above them, as if the very air had suddenly become inflammable and taken fire from the fierce heat of the July sun. Captain Keighley led up the ladders until he was almost at the top--and then dropped down again. There was no escape by that way. “We’ll have to go aft between decks,” he said. An officer of the _Sachsen_, who had remained with the firemen fighting the fire, replied in broken English that this forward hold was shut off from the rest of the boat by two bulkheads and a cross-bunker. Captain Keighley said, “Here! You know yer own boat. Take us out o’ here.” The German shook his big, blond head, thought a moment, shook it again, and then made a pass with his hand and nodded. He dropped down the ladder, and they followed him, choking, back to the deep hold. He groped his way aft in the smoke to the partition of steel plates that makes the after wall of the cargo room, and there he stopped. They heard him beating on the plates with the dull blows of a fat fist. One of the firemen passed him a belt hatchet. He rang it on the bulkhead. There was no answer. Captain Keighley seized it and rapped like a miner signalling for aid. The German said resignedly, “T’ey haf gone.” But they had not gone. There was an answering tap from the other side of the metal; a bolt squeaked and grated; and then the bulkhead door swung back on the empty coal bunker and the faint glow of a furnace in the stoke hole. Through this narrow opening the firemen crawled into an atmosphere that was cool by comparison with the one they had been breathing in the burning cargo room; and they drew long breaths of relief there, looking around the well of steel at the bottom of which they stood. The German officer took a little tin lamp--the shape of a miniature watering pot with a flame in the spout--and held it to give light to the two stokers, who were screwing the bolts of the door in place again; and one of the stokers looked back over his shoulder, surprised at this condescension. The officer said nothing until both doors were fast. Then he growled at the stokers gutturally--and on the word they dropped their tools and ran, with the whole party at their heels, between hot boilers, through dark furnace rooms, between more boilers, through the doors of other bulkheads, and finally into the grated galleries of the engine room, where they found two engineers still standing before their levers, waiting for further orders from the bridge.