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 American line, the fire was "a pure case of spontaneous combustion;" and the newspapers of the day reported it as such. But when New York's new fire-boat, the Hudson, in answer to the alarm from the pier, came whistling up the river from her berth near the Battery and turned in under the starboard quarter of the big Sachsen, Captain Keighley of the Hudson looked up to see a longshoreman scowling down at him over the steamship's bulwarks; and the presence of that particular long-shoreman was at the moment as ominous of trouble for old Keighley as it subsequently became significant to him in considering the origin of the fire.

For the man was an ex-fireman, of the name of Doherty, whom Captain Keighley had helped to dismiss from the service of the fire-department one