pecially the oils and turps. Jump lively!'

"This was the job I went on when I said I saw the cowboy crumpled up
against a bitt, but still full of fight.

"Linseed oil, turpentine, and some tins of fine lubricants--I had them
all turned out of the fore-peak and carried, rolled, dragged, or tossed
down to the stokehold.

"Most of the stuff was in kegs or cans small enough to go through a
furnace door, and these we threw in without broaching them. The Old Man
called me up twice--the first time to say that there was no increase in
smoke, and wanting to know why I was so slow; and the second time to say
that he had just got a bullet through his shoulder, and ordering me to
come up and take over, as he was beginning to feel groggy.

"There was an ominous crackling and sputtering in the furnaces as I
sprang for the ladder, and before my foot was on the lowermost rung, one
of the doors jumped violently up on its top-swing hinges from the kick
of an exploding tin or keg of oil. As it fell back with a clang the
swish of sudden flame smote my ears, and then a regular salvo of muffled
detonations. The last picture I had of the boiler-room was of the
stokers trying to confine the infernos they had created by wedging shut
the doors with their scoops.

"The whole ship was a-shiver with the roaring conflagration in her
furnaces as I reached the upper deck, and, above a tufty, white frizzle
of escaping steam, rolled a greasy jet of smoke that looked thick enough
for a man to dance a hornpipe on it without sinking above his ankles. I
found the Old Man, with a dazed sort of look in his eyes, and his jaw
set like grim death, hanging on to the binnacle when I gained the
bridge, and all he had the strength to say, before slithering down in a
heap, was, 'Damn good smoke! Carry on--zigzag down wind! Think blighter
has finished. Look to--fire.'

"The fact that the Hun was now circling the ship at considerable
distance had evidently made the skipper believe that he had come to the
end of his cartridges, and in this I am inclined to think the Old Man
was right.

"Which fire, however, he referred to I was not quite sure about, but, in
my own mind, I was rather more concerned about the one I had started
with the ship's paint than the one the Hun's incendiary bomb had set
going. Indeed, the 'fire brigade,' which had taken advantage of the lull
to get a hose playing on the conflagration on the poop, was rapidly
reducing the latter to a black