Captain Keighley, thus far, had moved with a certain swift calmness, speaking in a low voice, and using his eyes, as he used his hands, deliberately, without any darting glances or quick turns. But when he looked up the railed ladders that rose from tier to tier of machinery in the engine room, he heard a sound above him that he had not expected; and he started up those ladders at the double quick. The crackle of the fire grew louder as he climbed. He heard cries and shouting in the cabins. He smelt scorch again. A puff of heat swirled down on him in a fierce blast. And when he reached the sliding door that gave on the deck, the passageway was filled with smoke. Here the four firemen who had refused to obey Lieutenant Moore and who were caught in the burning house-work, came running down on their captain. “It’s no go--that way--Cap’n,” Farley cried. Keighley grasped the greasy railing of the ladder and slid down on the “Jiggers” who had been following him up. “Get further aft!” he ordered. They dropped into the engine room as lightly as they would have dropped down the sliding poles of their “house,” and they called to the German officer to show them another stairway further aft. That officer did not need to be told what they had found above them. He jumped down among the dynamos, stumbled past the ice engine, dived through the open door of the shaft tunnel, and swinging himself to the ladder that went up the inside of a ventilator shaft, he led them up that narrow flue hand over hand. They were not half way up it before they met what they had met above the engine room--a suffocating heat and smother. The firemen heard the German growling and coughing above them, as big and clumsy as a bear that is being smoked out of a hollow tree. Captain Keighley caught up to him and shouted to him go on. He answered nothing that was intelligible, and tried to back down. Keighley ordered him to hold fast, and went up over him like a cat. The others waited, head to heels. “Can’t make it,” they heard the captain call at last. “Back down, men! Back down!” They went down without a word. “We got to wait here till they get that blaze out,” he said curtly. “She’s afire up there from end to end. I’ve shut the ventilator cover to keep out the smoke. We’ll be better down below here till they get some water on her.” They were in the shaft tunnel--a corridor of steel plates, seven feet high, five feet wide, and more than thirty feet long. From end to end of it, the big shaft that spins the starboard propeller lay shining like a steel python, stretched and bound in its bearings. At one end was the wall through which the shaft passed to the after peak and the screw; at the other was the entrance from the engine room, already blue with smoke; above them was the throat of the closed ventilator. They were in a metal vault, far below the surface of the river, with every avenue of escape cut off by the fire above them.