Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/182

168 his buckets into the icy water desperately and straightened and handed up his buckets, seized the emptied ones and stooped and filled again, Geoff remembered the exact estimate of the amount remaining—two thousand eight hundred gallons of gasoline would go together.

Fear, terror, made him weak, and he dropped a pail he had filled. He tried not to think of it, but to work, work, work. As long as the men going down into the flaming hold would stay, he would stay. Linn, the cook, beside him, bent again and again steadily to his task. They could scarcely see each other now for the smoke, and could not see at all the men who seized the buckets from their hands. These groped, choking and calling for direction through the thick, black cloud. Geoff called back and Linn shouted beside him, and hands blundered down and felt for the filled buckets, lifted the weight from the men on the ice and went away. Either Geoff and Linn were working better or the smoke so slowed the work of the others that the buckets no longer were being emptied as fast as they could be filled; a row of full pails stood unseized upon