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"We 'll have to go aft between decks," he said.

An officer of the Flamisch, who had remained with them fighting the fire, replied in broken English that the forward hold was shut off from the after part of the boat by two "boolkheads" 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, past the burning cotton, and they followed him, scorched, to the deep hold. He groped his way aft, beside the first pile of grain-sacks, to the partition of steel plates which 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 signaling for aid.

The German said resignedly: "He haf gone."

But he was 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 bunker and the faint glow of a furnace in the stoke-hole.

They crawled through the narrow opening into an atmosphere that was cool by comparison with that of 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, waiting for the two stokers to screw the bolts of the door in place again. The 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 on the work. One of the stokers looked back over his shoulder, surprised at this condescension. The officer said nothing till both doors were fast. Then he growled at them 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.

Now 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. Hut 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 which 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 smoke 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 passage-way was filled with flames.

He stepped back from the rush of the four firemen who had refused to obey Lieutenant Moore and who were caught here in the burning house-work. And then, grasping the greasy railing of the ladder, he slid down after them on the "Brownies" who had been following him up. "Get further aft!" he cried.

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 farther 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 to go on. He answered nothing 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 to the shaft-tunnel 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