Originally the Catholic church at Manitou had stood quite by itself,
well back from the river, but as the town grew its dignified isolation
was invaded and houses kept creeping nearer and nearer to it. So that
when it caught fire there was general danger, because the town possessed
only a hand fire-engine. Since the first settlement of the place there
had been but few fires, and these had had pretty much their own way.
When one broke out the plan was to form a long line of men, who passed
buckets of water between the nearest pump, well, or river, and the
burning building. It had been useful in incipient fires, but it was
child’s play in a serious outburst. The mournful fact that Manitou had
never equipped itself with a first-class fire-engine or a fire-brigade
was now to play a great part in the future career of the two towns.
Osterhaut put the thing in a nutshell as he slithered up the main street
of Lebanon on his way to the manning of the two fire-engines at the
Lebanon fire-brigade station.
“This thing is going to link up Lebanon and Manitou like a trace-chain,”
he declared with a chuckle. “Everything’s come at the right minute.
Here’s Ingolby back on the locomotive, running the good old train of
Progress, and here’s Ingolby’s fire-brigade, which cost Lebanon twenty
thousand dollars and himself five thousand, going to put out the fires
of hate consuming two loving hamulets. Out with Ingolby’s fire-brigade!
This is the day the doctor ordered! Hooray!”
Osterhaut had a gift of being able to do two things at one time. Nothing
prevented him from talking, and though it had probably never been
tested, it is quite certain he could have talked under water. His words
had been addressed to Jowett, who drew to him on all great occasions
like the drafts of a regiment to the main body. Jowett was often very
critical of Osterhaut’s acts, words and views, but on this occasion they
were of one mind.
“I guess it’s Ingolby’s day all right,” answered Jowett. “When you say
‘Hooray!’ Osterhaut, I agree, but you’ve got better breath’n I have.
I can’t talk like I used to, but I’m going to ride that fire-engine to
save the old Monseenoor’s church--or bust.”
Both Jowett and Osterhaut belonged to the Lebanon fire-brigade, which
was composed of only a few permanent professionals, helped by capable
amateurs. The two cronies had their way, and a few moments later,
wearing brass helmets, they were away with the engine and the hose,
leaving the less rapid members of the brigade to follow with the
ladders.
“What did the Chief do?” asked Osterhaut. “Did you see what happened to
him?”
Jowett snorted. “What do you think Mr. Max Ingolby, Esquire, would do?
He commandeered my sulky and that rawbone I bought from the Reverend
Tripple, and away he went like greased lightning over the bridge. I
don’t know why I drove that trotter to-day, nor why I went on that
sulky, for I couldn’t hear good where I was, on the outskirts of the
meeting; but I done it like as if the Lord had told me. The Chief
spotted me soon as the fire-bell rung. In a second he bundled me off,
straddled the sulky, and was away ‘fore you could say snakes.”
“I don’t believe he’s strong enough for all this. He ain’t got back to
where he was before the war,” remarked Osterhaut sagely.
“War--that business at Barbazon’s! You call that war! It wasn’t war,”
declared Jowett spasmodically, grasping the rail of the fire-engine
as the wheel struck a stone and nearly shot them from their seats. “It
wasn’t war. It was terrible low-down treachery. That Gipsy gent, Fawe,
pulled the lever, but Marchand built the scaffold.”
“Heard anything more about Marchand--where he is?” asked Osterhaut, as
the hoofs of the horses clattered on the bridge.
“Yes, I’ve heard--there’s news,” responded Jowett. “He’s been lying
drunk at Gautry’s caboose ever since yesterday morning at five o’clock,
when he got off the West-bound train. Nice sort of guy he is. What’s the
good of being rich, if you can’t be decent Some men are born low. They
always find their level, no matter what’s done for them, and Marchand’s
level is the ditch.”
“Gautry’s tavern--that joint!” exclaimed Osterhaut with repulsion.
“Well, that ranchman, Dennis What’s-his-name, is looking for him, and
Felix can’t go home or to the usual places. I dunno why he comes back at
all till this Dennis feller gits out.”
“Doesn’t make any bones about it, does he? Dennis Doane’s the name,
ain’t it? Marchand spoiled his wife-run away with her up along the Wind
River, eh?” asked Osterhaut.
Jowett nodded: “Yes, that’s it, and Mr. Dennis Doane ain’t careful;
that’s the trouble. He’s looking for Marchand, and blabbing what he
means to do when he finds him. That ain’t good for Dennis. If he kills
Marchand, it’s murder, and even if the lawyers plead unwritten law, and
he ain’t hung, and his wife ain’t a widow, you can’t have much married
life in gaol. It don’t do you any good to be punished for punishing
someone else. Jonas George Almighty--look! Look, Osterhaut!”
Jowett’s hand was pointing towards the Catholic church, from a window of
which smoke was rolling. “There’s going to be something to do there. It
ain’t a false alarm, Snorty.”
“Well, this engine’ll do anything you ask it,” rejoined Osterhaut.
“When did you have a fire last, Billy?” he shouted to the driver of the
engine, as the horses’ feet caught the dusty road of Manitou.
“Six months,” was the reply, “but she’s working smooth as music. She’s
as good as anything ‘twixt here and the Atlantic.”
“It ain’t time for Winter fires. I wonder what set it going,” said
Jowett, shaking his head ominously. “Something wrong with the furnace,
I s’pose,” returned Osterhaut. “Probably trying the first heatup of the
Fall.”
Osterhaut was right. No one had set the church on fire. The sexton
had lighted the furnace for the first time to test it for the Winter’s
working, but had not stayed to see the result. There was a defect in the
furnace, the place had caught fire, and some of the wooden flooring had
been burnt before the aged Monseigneur Lourde discovered it. It was he
who had given the alarm and had rescued the silver altar-vessels from
the sacristy.
Manitou offered brute force, physical energy, native athletics, muscle
and brawn; but it was of no avail. Five hundred men, with five hundred
buckets of water would have had no effect upon the fire at St. Michael’s
Church at Manitou; willing hands and loving Christian hearts would have
been helpless to save the building without the scientific aid of the
Lebanon fire-brigade. Ingolby, on founding the brigade, had equipped it
to the point where it could deal with any ordinary fire. The work it had
to do at St. Michael’s was critical. If the church could not be saved,
then the wooden houses by which it was surrounded would be swept away,
and the whole town would be ablaze; for though it was Autumn, everything
was dry, and the wind was sufficient to fan and spread the flames.
Lebanon took command of the whole situation, and for the first time in
the history of the two towns men worked together under one control like
brothers. The red-shirted river-driver from Manitou and the lawyer’s
clerk from Lebanon; the Presbyterian minister and a Christian brother
of the Catholic school; a Salvation Army captain and a black-headed
Catholic shantyman; the President of the Order of Good Templars and a
switchman member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament slaved
together on the hand-engine, to supplement the work of the two splendid
engines of the Lebanon fire-brigade; or else they climbed the roofs of
houses, side by side, to throw on the burning shingles the buckets of
water handed up to them.
For some time it seemed as though the church could not be saved. The
fire had made good headway with the flooring, and had also made progress
in the chancel and the altar. Skill and organization, combined with good
luck, conquered, however. Though a portion of the roof was destroyed and
the chancel gutted, the church was not beyond repair, and a few thousand
dollars would put it right. There was danger, however, among the smaller
houses surrounding the church, and there men from both towns worked with
great gallantry. By one of those accidents which make fatality, a small
wooden house some distance away, with a roof as dry as wool, caught fire
from a flying cinder. As everybody had fled from their own homes
and shops to the church, this fire was not noticed until it had made
headway. Then it was that the cries of Madame Thibadeau, who was
confined to her bed in the house opposite, were heard, and the crowd
poured down towards the burning building. It was Gautry’s “caboose.”
Gautry himself had been among the crowd at the church.
As Gautry came reeling and plunging down the street, someone shouted,
“Is there anyone in the house, Gautry?”
Gautry was speechless with drink. He threw his hands up in the air
with a gesture of maudlin despair, and shouted something which no one
understood. The crowd gathered like magic in the wide street before the
house--the one wide street in Manitou--from the roof and upper windows
of which flames were bursting. Far up the street was heard the noisy
approach of the fire-engine, which now would be able to do little more
than save adjoining buildings. Gautry, reeling, mumbling and whining,
gestured and wept.
A man shook him roughly by the shoulder. “Brace up, get steady, you
damned old geezer! Is there any body in the house? Do you hear? Is there
anybody in the house?” he roared.
Madame Thibadeau, who had dragged herself from her bed, was now at the
window of the house opposite. Seeing Fleda Druse passing beneath, she
called to her.
“Ma’mselle, Felix Marchand is in Gautry’s house--drunk!” she cried.
“He’ll burn to death--but yes, burn to death.”
In agitation Fleda hastened to where the stranger stood shaking old
Gautry.
“There’s a man asleep inside the house,” she said to the stranger, and
then all at once she realized who he was. It was Dennis Doane, whose
wife was staying in Gabriel Druse’s home: it was the husband of
Marchand’s victim.
“A man in there, is there?” exclaimed Dennis. “Well, he’s got to be
saved.” He made a rush for the door. Men called to him to come back,
that the roof would fall in. In the smoking doorway he looked back.
“What floor?” he shouted.
From the window opposite, her fat old face lighted by the blazing roof,
Madame Thibadeau called out, “Second floor! It’s the second floor!”
In an instant Dennis was lost in the smoke and flame.
One, two, three minutes passed. A fire-engine arrived; in a moment the
hose was paid out to the river near by, and as a fireman seized the
nozzle to train the water upon the building the roof fell in with a
crash. At that instant Dennis stumbled out of the house, blind with
smoke, his clothes aflame, carrying a man in his arms. A score of hands
caught them, coats smothered Dennis’s burning clothes, and the man he
had rescued was carried across the street and laid upon the pavement.
“Great glory, it’s Marchand! It’s Felix Marchand!” someone shouted.
“Is he dead?” asked another.
“Dead drunk,” was the comment of Osterhaut, who had helped to carry him
across the street.
At that moment Ingolby appeared on the scene. “What’s all this?” he
asked. Then he recognized Marchand. “He’s been playing with fire again,”
he added sarcastically, and there was a look of contempt on his face.
As he said it, Dennis broke through the crowd and made for Marchand.
Stooping over, he looked into Marchand’s face.
“Hell and damnation--you!” he growled. “I risked my life to save you!”
With a sudden access of rage his hand suddenly went to his hip-pocket,
but another hand was quicker. It was that of Fleda Druse.
“No--no,” she said, her fingers on his wrist. “You have had
your revenge. For the rest of his life he will have to bear his
punishment--that you have saved him. Leave him alone. It was to be. It
is fate.”
Dennis Doane was not a man of great thinking capacity. If he got
a matter into his head it stayed there till it was dislodged, and
dislodging was a real business with him.
“If you want her to live with you again, you had better let this be as
it is,” whispered Fleda, for the crowd were surging round and cheering
the new hero. “Just escaped the roof falling in,” said one.
“Got the strength of two, for a drunk man weighs twice as heavy as a
sober one!” exclaimed another admiringly.
“Marchand’s game is up on the Sagalac,” declared a third decisively.
The excitement was so great, however, that only a very few of them knew
what they were saying, and fewer still knew that Dennis Doane had risked
his life to save the man he had been stalking for weeks past. Marchand
had been lying on his face in the smoke-filled room when Dennis broke
into it, and he had been carried down the stairs without his face being
seen at all.
To Dennis it was as though he had been made a fool of by Fate or
Providence, or whatever controlled the destinies of men; as though the
dangerous episode had been arranged to trap him into this situation.
Ingolby drew near and laid a hand upon Dennis’s arm. Fleda’s hand was on
the other arm.
“You can’t kill a man and save him too,” said Ingolby quietly, and
holding the abashed blue eyes of Dennis. “There were two ways to punish
him; taking away his life at great cost, or giving it him at great cost.
If you’d taken away his life, the cost would probably have been your own
life; in giving him his life you only risked your own; you had a chance
to save it. You’re a bit scorched-hair, eyebrows, moustache, clothes
too, but he’ll have brimstone inside him. Come along. Your wife would
rather have it this way; and so will you, to-morrow. Come along.”
Dennis suddenly swung round with a gesture of fury. “He spoiled
her-treated her like dirt!” he cried huskily.
With savage purpose he made a movement towards where Marchand had lain;
but Marchand was gone. With foresight Ingolby had quickly and quietly
accomplished that while Dennis’s back was turned.
“You’d be treating her like a brute if you went to prison for killing
Marchand,” urged Ingolby. “Give her a chance. She’s fretting her heart
out.”
“She wants to go back to Elk Mountain with you,” pleaded Fleda gently.
“She couldn’t do that if the law took hold of you.”
“Ain’t there to be any punishment for men like him?” demanded Dennis,
stubbornly yet helplessly. “Why didn’t I let him burn! I’d have been
willing to burn myself to have seen him sizzling. Ain’t men like that to
be punished at all?”
“When he knows who has saved him, he’ll sizzle inside for the rest of
his life,” remarked Ingolby. “Don’t think he hasn’t got a heart. He’s
done wrong and gone wrong; he has belonged to the sewer, but he isn’t
all bad, and maybe this is the turning-point. Drink’ll make a man do
anything.”
“His kind are never sorry for what they do,” commented Dennis bitterly.
“They’re sorry for what comes from what they do, but not for the doing
of it. I can’t think the thing out. It makes me sick. I was hunting for
him to kill him; I was watching this town like a lynx, and I’ve been and
gone and saved his body from Hell on earth.”
“Well, perhaps you’ve saved his soul from Hell below,” said Fleda.
“Ah, come! Your face and hands are burned, your hair is scorched--your
clothes need mending. Arabella is waiting for you. Come home with me to
Arabella.”
With sudden resolve Dennis squared his shoulders. “All right,” he said.
“This thing’s too much for me. I can’t get the hang of it. I’ve lost my
head.”
“No, I won’t come, I can’t come now,” said Ingolby, in response to an
inquiring look from Fleda.
“Not now, but before sundown, please.”
As Fleda and Dennis disappeared, Ingolby looked back towards the fire.
“How good it is to see again even a sight like that,” he said. “Nothing
that the eyes see is so horrible as the pictures that come to the mind
when the eyes don’t see. As Dennis said, I can’t get the hang of it, but
I’ll try--I’ll try.”
The burning of Gautry’s tavern had been conquered, though not before it
was a shell; and the houses on either side had been saved. Lebanon had
shown itself masterful in organization, but it had also shown that that
which makes enemies is not so deep or great a thing as that which makes
friends. Jealous, envious, narrow and bitter Manitou had been, but she
now saw Lebanon in a new light. It was a strange truth that if Lebanon
had saved the whole town of Manitou, it would not have been the same
to the people as the saving of the church. Beneath everything in
Manitou--beneath its dirt and its drunkenness, its irresponsibility and
the signs of primeval savagery which were part of its life, there was
the tradition of religion, the almost fanatical worship of that which
was their master, first and last, in spite of all--the Church. Not
one of its citizens but would have turned with horror from the man who
cursed his baptism; not one but would want the last sacrament when his
time came. Lebanon had saved the Catholic church, the temple of their
faith, and in an hour was accomplished what years had not wrought.
The fire at the church was out. A few houses had been destroyed, and
hundreds of others had been saved. The fire-brigade of Lebanon, with its
two engines, had performed prodigies of valour. The work done, the men
marched back, but with Osterhaut sitting on one fire-engine and Jowett
on the other, through crowds of cheering, roaring workmen, rivermen,
shantymen, and black-eyed habitants. When Ingolby walked past Barbazon’s
Tavern arm in arm with Monseigneur Lourde, to the tiny house where the
good priest lived, the old man’s face beaming with gratitude, and with
a piety which was his very life, the jubilant crowd followed them to the
very door. There the sainted pioneer expressed the feeling of the moment
when he raised his hands in benediction over them and said:
“Peace be unto you and the blessings of peace; and the Lord make his
face to shine upon you and give you peace now and for ever more.”