  At the fire-house they found Rob and Tubby helping to drag out the antiquated apparatus which was the best that Hampton boasted. Glad enough of the aid of the Boy Scouts, the firemen greeted them warmly. They recalled a former occasion when the khaki-clad lads had been of signal service to them. Accordingly, while some of the men hitched up a pair of bony old nags to the engine, and others got the fire lighted, the hose cart was rushed out and the ropes unraveled. “Fall in, boys,” shouted Rob. They obeyed his order with military promptitude. The long rope was swiftly seized. Rob was in front, as became the leader of the troop. “All ready!” came the cry. “Heave!” shouted Rob. Like one boy the Eagles bent to the work. Off they scampered down the street, Andy’s bugle calling to clear the way. Men and women on their way to the fire scattered to right and left as the hose cart came lumbering along, drawn by its willing young escort at almost as fast a gait as horses could have dragged it. “’Ray for the Boy Scouts,” shrilled a small boy. The excited crowd took up the cry as the hose cart went roaring by, speeding toward the sinister glow on the sky ahead of them. A throng rushed behind it, making believe to aid greatly by pushing the lumbering vehicle. Suddenly a terrible thought flashed across Rob’s mind. The house occupied by the janitor of the school was undergoing extensive repairs and he and his family had been given temporary quarters in some rooms at the top of the school building. The sudden realization of this sent a thrill shooting through the boy. What if they were caught in a fiery trap, unable to escape? “Oh, I hope they are all right,” Rob found himself muttering half aloud as at the head of a line of straining boys he galloped along. “Hey! Here comes the engine,” went up a sudden shout from the crowd behind. Glancing back Rob saw the engine, the pride of the Vigilants, coming careening down the street. Its whistle wailed in a melancholy fashion and from its stack there streamed sparks in sufficient volume to render timid folks apprehensive that another fire would be started. “Pull out! Pull out!” cried Rob, as he saw it, “here comes the engine.” But there was no need to tell his followers that. Every boy in the village knew the old Vigilant and had seen it go screeching and lurching to a dozen fires. They rushed the hose cart up on the sidewalk as the engine came swinging nearer. It looked quite inspiring with its flaming stack, hissing jets of steam and thunder of horses’ hoofs. The driver, Ed Blossom, was belaboring his steeds furiously. Suddenly, out into the middle of the road darted a tiny little girl. In the excitement and confusion no one noticed her at first. She stood there apparently oblivious of the approaching fire engine for one instant. Then, although she saw her doom thundering down on her, she still stood as helplessly as a tiny bird fascinated by a glowing-eyed serpent. “Out of the way! Run! Run!” shrieked a dozen frenzied voices as several people perceived the child’s danger. “Great Scotland! She’ll be killed,” cried Merritt. The engine was almost opposite the hose cart as the Scouts took in the scene, but with one spring Merritt darted right in the path of the heavy machine. It happened so quickly that no one quite knew what had happened until they saw a second figure in the path of the Juggernaut. To snatch up the child was the work of an instant; but in that instant, as a groan from the horror-stricken onlookers testified, it looked as if Merritt’s doom had been sealed. Ed Blossom tugged frantically at his horses’ bits and swerved them a trifle as he saw what was before him. As Merritt sprang backward with the agility of an acrobat, clasping the child in his arms, Ed succeeded in swinging just a little more. The horses grazed Merritt as they snorted and reared. Suddenly there came a crash and a loud, tearing, ripping sound and the rear of the fire-engine was seen to collapse on one side. In pulling out to avoid running down Merritt and the little girl, Ed Blossom had quite forgotten, under the stress of the moment, the trees that grew on each side of the road. The hub of the rear wheel had struck one of these and the wheel had been torn off completely. If Ed had not been strapped to his seat he would have been hurled to the road. A half hysterical woman fell on Merritt’s neck and covered him with tearful thanks. Then she snatched up the child and vanished in the crowd, leaving the Boy Scout free and greatly relieved that her gratitude was to be spared him just at that time. There was a quick hand-clasp from Rob, “Well done, old man.” And then they all turned toward the wreck of the engine. Steam was hissing in clouds from the crippled bit of apparatus. Merritt heard someone say that the pump had been broken. He knew then that the engine was out of commission for that night. Men had already unhitched the plunging horses and tied them to a tree. But it was soon evident that the engine must lie where it was for the present. “Can’t do nawthin’ with her,” decided the foreman and Ed Blossom, after a necessarily hurried examination, “but say,” continued the foreman, enthusiastically, as if the breakage of the engine was only a secondary consideration, “that rescue of the little gal was as plucky a thing as I ever seen.” And there was no one in that crowd who did not agree with him. But there was no time to linger by the engine. The thing to be done was to push on to the fire. The crowd rushed along and the foreman stopped to say to Rob aside:— “You boys must help us keep the crowd back while we form a bucket line; it’s our only chance to save the place now—and a mighty slim one,” he added, as again a red tongue of flame slashed the dark firmament like a scarlet scimitar. “There goes the last of the old ’cademy!” cried a man as he saw. “In an hour’s time there won’t be a stick of it left.” Without the engine to pump a stream through the pipes, the hose cart was useless and was abandoned where it rested. Under the foreman’s directions the Boy Scouts invaded houses and borrowed and commandeered every bucket, pail or can they could find. Everything that would hold water was rushed to the scene. There was a creek opposite the blazing Academy, and while the Boy Scouts held back the crowd the firemen formed a double line and passed the filled utensils rapidly from hand to hand. As fast as they were emptied they came back again to be refilled by those at the creek end of the line. With improvised staves, cut and broken from shrubs, the boys held the crowd back. The method was this: each lad held the ends of two staves, the other ends of which were grasped by his comrades on either side of him. This formed a sort of fence and to the credit of the Hampton citizens be it said they had too much respect for the good work of the Boy Scouts to try and press forward unduly. The Boy Scouts were on duty now. Alert, watchful, aching to be taking part in the active scene before them, they schooled themselves into doing their best in the—by comparison—hum-drum task assigned to them. The Academy, an aged brick building, was wreathed in flames. From the cupola on top, from which had sounded for so many years the morning summons to study, was spouting vivid fire. They could see Dr. Ezekiel Jones, the head of the school, and some of the other instructors running about in the brilliantly lighted grounds and saving armfuls of books and papers. The fire appeared to be on the middle floors. At any rate up to this time it had been possible for the men bent on saving what they could to dart in at the big front doors, reappearing with what they had been able to salvage from the flames. With the pitifully inadequate means at their command, the firemen could do little more than work like fiends at passing buckets. It was necessary to be doing something, but even the stoutest hearted and most hopeful of the onlookers knew that the case was hopeless. Suddenly there appeared, from no one knew exactly where, a little pale-faced man with sandy whiskers. He wore overalls and was hatless. A woman, a white-faced woman, clung to his arm desperately. “No, Eben,” she kept screaming, “not you, too! Not you, too!” “Let me go, Jane!” the pallid little man kept shouting in reply. “It’s our baby, we’ve got to get him out!” He made a struggle toward the blazing building, but the woman clung to him frenziedly. Now a fireman rushed at him and added his strength to the woman’s. “Great Scotland,” gasped Merritt, who stood next to Rob, “it’s old Duffy, the janitor, and his wife!” “What is it?” cried Rob, without replying, as a fireman hastened past him. “What’s the matter?” “Her baby. She’s left it in the ’cademy,” came the choking answer. The man, whose face was white with helpless horror, hurried on to obey some order, while a shudder of sympathy and fear ran through the crowd. Now came more details as men hastened back and forth. The woman, thinking that her husband had the baby, had rushed from the house at the first alarm. For his part, old Duffy, the janitor, never dreaming that the fire would gain such rapid headway, had tried to fight it alone, thinking all the time that his wife had the infant. The true situation had just been discovered and the man was frantic to get back into the place although he was a semi-invalid, known to suffer with heart disease. The flames were leaping up more savagely every minute. For all the effect that the feeble dribble supplied by the bucket brigade had, they might as well have given up their efforts. Rob felt his heart give a bound as he watched the janitor and his wife kindly, but firmly, forced back. His pulses throbbed wildly. He gave one look at the red inferno before him. Then,— “Here, spread your arms and take my place in line,” he snapped out suddenly to Merritt. The next instant his lithe young figure darted across the flame-lit open space in front of the school. He knew the interior of the old building like a book, and that would aid him in the task he had steeled himself to perform. He rushed up to the group about the shrieking woman. “What room is your child in?” he cried, his heart seeming to rise in his throat and choke back the words. “That one on the south corner,” cried the woman mechanically, staring at him with frightened eyes. “See, the flames are getting nearer to it! Oh, my baby! My baby!” She gave a terrible scream and sank back. Had they not caught her she would have fallen. When she opened her eyes again there was a roar all about her that was not the roar of the flames. It was the tremendous, awe-stricken turmoil of the crowd. They had seen a boyish figure dart from the fainting woman’s side, shake off a dozen detaining hands, and then, wrapping his coat about his head, dash by a back entrance into the burning building. As he flung open the door and vanished, a great puff of smoke rolled out. The cry of awed admiration for such bravery changed to a groan of despair,—the terrible voice of massed human beings seeing a lad go to his death. For, as the flames crackled upward more relentlessly than before, it did not seem within the bounds of possibility that anyone could enter the place and emerge alive. |
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