ked your bulkheads, else I would have
opened a stop-cock and flooded the hold long ago. Still, what water
would burst through, fire might not."

Horace Howland, who had paid his own price for the _Tampico_, and who
by the same token had his own opinion of her, said nothing.

"I have arranged about the boats," resumed Dan. "If the worst comes,
my men know what to do and they are the men to do it. It's not too
rough to launch safely. Now, Mr. Howland, I've wasted too much time
talking. Don't forget to send two men to Mr. Jackson," and he sprang
up the ladder and hurried forward.

The feet of the men at work over the burning hold were blistering. Dan
yanked out an inch hose and set a cabin boy to sluicing the deck where
they stood, sending up dense clouds of enveloping steam. A broad
tongue of blue flame curled out of the port hawse-hole, licked along
the half-protruding anchor, rose above the rail, and then burst into a
puff of red fire which floated away in the wind. A cargo port door
warped in the heat, buckled outward, tearing plates and rivets with a
rasping screech, and dropped hissing into the black waters; and the
wind, blowing from astern, was sucked into the opening, fanning the
flames to screaming ferocity.

The tale was plain for every one, and Dan read it to the last word.
Water would be of more service elsewhere, that was certain. So he
withdrew the four crews from their hose vents, ordered two of them to
take their lines into the second hold, and set the others flooding the
deck. He shifted two of his seven-inch steam lines to the midship
plugs, and then followed the hose men, who had joined their comrades in
the darkness of the second hold. Streams of water were hissing against
the steel barrier and flying back at the faces of the nozzle men in hot
spray.

"There's a bulge in the centre," reported the second officer.

"Yes," said Dan, who seized a lantern and held it above his head,
pointing out new objective marks for the water. The smoke had grown
thicker. One man gagged at a nozzle; but drinking from the pipe the
air which the water brought, he lowered his head and fought on.

They fought as men should fight, in the pungent half-gloom, colliding
or falling prone as the vessel pitched, eyes fixed straight ahead,
following the powerful silver lines of water which ribbed the dark and
splashed against the steaming steel; white-yellow smoke spirals writhed
about their heads like some grot