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THE foreman of the "forward-hold gang" of freight-handlers still maintains that the fire in the cargo-room of the Flamisch started in a clay pipe, in the "heel 'f a longshoreman's cutty." "Don't I know that smell?" he said. "Man alive, I c'u'd tell it wit' my snoot cut off. I c'u'd taste it. I c'u'd so." The steamship's officers have described the same fire to the newspaper men as "a case of spontaneous combustion," and the newspapers have so reported it to the public. But when the fire-boat Manhattan, then just two weeks in commission, slid under the starboard quarter of the big Flamisch, Captain Keighley looked up to see scowling down on him, over the steamship's bulwarks, the dark face of a man whom he had helped to discharge from the service of the fire department one week before. And the presence of that man was at that moment as ominous to him as it subsequently became significant.

Captain Keighley was standing on the cement roof of the Manhattan's wheel-house, beside a monitor nozle that could drive a hole through a warehouse wall with a stream as stiff as a steel bar. The fact that he stood in that place of command, by virtue of his own cunning, in the face of intrigue in the department and treachery in his own crew, did not show in the look which he lifted to his enemy overhead. At most, he showed only a cool reliance on the streams of the Manhattan to cope with any mischief which there might be in hand; for she had a battery of four sets of duplex pumps that could force out of her pipes as much water in a minute