Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/179

Rh "I heard it," said Latham, and shook him off.

"The gasoline!" cried Geoff as he straightened. "Three thousand gallons of gasoline!" He beat on the partition between his cabin and his sister's. "Meg, are you up?" he called. "There's fire, do you hear?"

"I heard," his sister's voice came back strongly.

Geoff rushed out from the cabin and on to the deck. The tramp of feet and the commotion already had told him that the men from the stern of the ship were about. A black cloud of smoke, which he smelled and felt rather than saw at first, was rising from the engine-room. Now the red glare of a flame burst out below it and he saw men's big forms battling with buckets. He rushed to them to help; the apparatus and hose of the patent fire extinguisher tangled his feet. The extinguisher tanks were emptied; they had been tried and had been inefficient. McNeal, seeing Geoff, bawled to him to get into the bucket line. Overside on the ice, where he had chopped a hole, Linn was filling pails and handing them