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their arms, gagged and stifling; some drawn up in strained and twisted attitudes, as if in pain. There was a long silence. In their swollen eyeballs sudden lights darted and burst. Above the noise of the blood in their ears they heard a sound of moaning, and did not know it was themselves who moaned. A choked voice struggled in the first wanderings of delirium.

"Steady, there! Steady!" Captain Keighley said. He was standing up, his arms crossed, his face drenched with perspiration, the figure of authority in absolute and unquestioned command at last.

He was still standing there when the lamp burned low, flickered, and went out.

IV

What followed in that shaft-tunnel there is no one who can tell. The men themselves were never able to remember any more than a convalescent can remember of the delirium of his fever. For eight hours they were compelled to endure the blistering, choking, maddening heat of a metal oven; and those who kept their wits the longest recall a scene too horrible to be described.

How, finally, when the fire had burned down, they made their way forward from the tunnel, through the engine-room and the stoke-holes, to an empty bunker; how they climbed the ladders to a coal-port, and found the steel shutter of it open; who led them, or how he knew the way—all this is as unknown to any of them as if it were a dream that had been forgotten when they woke. But this is certain: At nightfall, when the Flamisch—beached on the Jersey mud-flats, with her paint peeled off her sides, her funnel blackened, her upper works a skeleton of blistered metal—lay like a smoking fire-log, gray, and hot, and steaming where the streams of tugs and fire-boats struck her, the battalion chief in charge of the Manhattan heard a noise of hammering that seemed to come from the Flamisch's ashen sides, and thought it was the sound of a pump set going by some crazy accident of the fire. He was sheltering himself behind the wheel-house from the radiated heat of the smoldering hulk. At a shout from a fire-man on the other side of the boat, he ran out to the bows. "I saw a light," the man said. "There!"

The spark of a lantern was swinging from side to side amidships. They howled excitedly: "Hi! Hi! Hullo! All right! All right! Hol' on!"

"Turn the spray on the deck here," the battalion chief ordered. "Half speed ahead. There 's some one alive on her. Gawd!"

The heat, as they crept in, dried their eyes till they were blinded by a gush of tears. Blurred by these, the light swung big in the darkness. "Who is it? Who is it?" they called.

A weak hail answered them. The dripping fender of hemp on the nose of the Manhattan touched the side of the Flamisch and hissed on the hot metal in a cloud of steam. Erect in the bows, drenched with the spray of the hose, the chief cried in a voice of suffocation: "Jump!"

From the coal-port above him a half-naked figure squirmed out, hung kicking, and fell into his arms. Another and another followed, the chief and his men catching them as they came, and shouting encouragement through the steam that rose on all sides with the smell of blistered paint. Some came head first, at the risk of their lives. One, in the struggle at the narrow opening, was thrown into the water and had to be dragged out with a boat-hook. Others fell on their feet, and throwing themselves on the deck with hoarse cries, began to roll around in the spray. Lieutenant Moore came down unconscious, stiff and contorted, and lay still; and Captain Keighley, falling beside him, crawled, with his mouth open, to the nozle of the hose. "All off!" he gasped. "Start—start yer water. Water!"

And that was the end of the dissensions among Captain Keighley's men. They forgot the tortures of their eight hours in the shaft-tunnel; they never forgot the fear and respect with which he had inspired them there. His manner toward them continued the same as it had been before the fire on the Flamisch, but they had learned what might hide behind it; and, old, cold, and silent, he commanded them, thereafter, almost with his eyes—from Lieutenant Moore, who never remained alone in their office with him, down to the latest "probationer" on trial with the Manhattan and awed by the awkward reverence of the crew.