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THE INCENDIARY
A Story of Mystery.
BY W. A. LEAHY.
CHICAGO AND NEW YORK:
RAND, McNALLY & COMPANY,
MDCCCXCVII.
A PRIZE STORY
In THE CHICAGO RECORD series of "Stories of Mystery."
THE INCENDIARY
BY W. A. LEAHY.
(This story--out of 816 competing--was awarded the fourth prize in the
CHICAGO RECORD'S "$30,000 to Authors" competition.)
Copyright, 1896, by W. A. Leahy.
THE INCENDIARY.
CHAPTER I.
FANFARE: THE PLAY BEGINS.
It was about half-past three in the afternoon when Bertha, the
housemaid, came running down the steps, with a shrill cry of "Fire!" and
fell plump into the arms of the bake-shop girl, who had seen the smoke
curling from Prof. Arnold's window and was hastening across to warn the
occupants of his house. The deep bark of a dog was heard within and
presently Sire, the professor's old St. Bernard, rushed by the two young
women and darted hither and thither, accosting the bystanders
distractedly, as if burdened with a message he could not communicate.
"Ring the alarm!" cried Bertha and the bake-shop girl in a breath, as
soon as they had recovered from the shock of their collision. Their cry
was taken up by a knot of three boys, who, as usual, were the first on
the spot; passed along till it reached some loungers on the corner,
whose inertia was more gradually overcome; and presently half the
neighborhood, as if by a spontaneous impulse, came thronging into
Cazenove street, each following his leader, like a flock of startled
ewes. Bertha, caught in the middle of this ring of sight-seers, stood
paralyzed a moment; then singling out the one man of action, she broke
through the crowd and stopped him midway in his advance.
"For the love of heaven, will you ring the alarm?"
The postman turned and scudded to the box. There was an interval of
suspense that seemed an age.
"Is there any one in the house?" was the first question of Patrolman
Chandler, when he galloped up to the scene. He had been attracted at
once by the barking of Sire.
"Mr. Robert," cried Bertha, wringing her hands. "Mr. Robert was in the
study." The crowd looked up and measured the swift gains of the
destructive element.
"Young Floyd?" said Chandler. Then he rushed into the house and up the
first flight of winding stairs, the dog, as he did so, following him
with a great fusillade of delighted barks.
"There's some one inside," said the crowd, and the rumor passed from
mouth to mouth.
"Fire! Fire!" called Chandler from the corridor window above. "Yell, you
fellows, as you never yelled before!"
In response a cry of "Fire!" went up from man, woman and child, bass and
treble intermingling, loud enough to have waked the seven sleepers from
their trance. But no one stirred inside. Just at this moment the tardy
bells rang out the number of the box, and almost immediately, as an
engine came rounding a distant corner and the great gray horses bounded
up the grade, the uproar began to subside. On, on, past the doomed
house, now enveloped in flames, to the nearest hydrant, the driver
lashed his pair. The hydrant cover had been thrown off and the first
block of coal flung into the engine's furnace before Patrolman Chandler
reissued from the door which he had entered.
"There is no one there," he gasped, as if choking with the smoke. But
the dog continued to leap about, accosting the bystanders appealingly,
until his barks and pawing became a nuisance to several and they spurned
him pettishly away.
Now engines from many directions came clattering by and the air was full
of clangor. Lines of hose were unraveled, ladders hoisted against the
walls, and finally, amid hoarse shouts that pierced the deep sighing of
the flames within, a rubber-clad, helmeted fellow, with a nozzle
strapped to his body, slowly led a line up to the second-story window,
where the fire had apparently started. There was another interval of
suspense, orders to and fro, and then a helpless pause. Something
refused to work.
But the fire met no such impediment. Suddenly an explosion of uncertain
origin shook the air, and the onlookers retreated in terror, as if the
ground were yawning beneath them. Of a sudden one, two, three slack,
snaky hose lines rounded out, and a burst of foam, battering in
window-panes and sashes, inaugurated the great combat of elements--one
angry, vindictive, as if ravening to sunder the bonds of control cast
about it by the pigmy, its master, the other docile and benignant, but
in the end the more puissant of the two.
"Exactly nine minutes from the start before a drop of water fell on that
fire," said the bake-shop girl, who was noted for her accurate
observation of time. By the "start" she meant the moment when Bertha and
she collided on the doorsteps, but the fire must have gained a strong
headway before that. For every timber in the house was flaming now. The
heat scorched the firemen's cheeks and made frightened children in the
windows opposite turn away. All the neighbors were packing up their
valuables, preparing for the worst. Singed and blinded, the firemen had
been driven back down their ladders and compelled to fight from the
street. At 3:40 the district chief ordered a second alarm rung in, and,
as this was followed by another explosion, a third alarm immediately
after. Amid a great clanging of bells, engine after engine, with drivers
standing at the reins and firemen riding backward, drove up and sought
out positions of vantage.
With the arrival of Chief Federhen their plan of attack seemed to assume
a definite shape at once. The ding, ding, ding, of his light carriage,
riding over distended and bedraggled hose, told the impatience of the
man on the seat. A tall, gaunt figure, wrapped in a cloak, which he
threw off as the excitement grew on him, he first turned his attention
to the police and the crowd.
"We want room to do this work in," he cried in a loud voice, and the
bluecoats began vigorously routing the onlookers back until the fire was
to them like something seen through an inverted opera glass, and the
sagging ropes nearly broke under the black weight of humanity which they
fended off.
Federhen's practiced eye saw the doom of the dwelling-house. So he
called off his engines and threw up ladders against the great mercantile
buildings to leeward and in the rear. It was from one of these,
presumably the fireworks-room of Schnitzler Bros., that the second
explosion, scattered and prolonged like an enfilading volley of
musketry, had come, and already a thatch of flame had run around under
the projecting roof of the structure. Against this the fire tower was
slowly brought into position and sloped over, its tip just topping the
eaves, but the axes of the squad sent up failed to make any impression
on the solid sheathing of the roof. When the tower ladder itself began
to take fire, and a stream had to be played on it constantly, the order
was given, none too early, "Come down!" and the firemen's first
ambition, to get above the enemy, had to be abandoned for less
efficacious measures. Fountain jets, rising from the street, and level
streams from the roofs of the dwelling-houses opposite, did their
ineffectual best to quench the red thirst of the triumphing element.
"This is glorious!"
"Tristram!"
The girl pulled a dolman over her shoulders, fear simulating cold,
before the savage dance of the flames. Their carriage had passed through
Broad street, in the rear of Cazenove, a few minutes before, and when
the alarm sounded Tristram had ordered the coachman to turn and drive
them back.
"Glorious, Rosalie!" he repeated, looking up at the red streamers and
the swirling smoke.
"It was just here we met your friend, Harry Arnold," murmured Rosalie.
"Did you notice he had only one glove on?"
"Glorious!" echoed her enraptured brother, as a section of the wall
fell in, disclosing an oven view like the interior of a Bessemer blast
furnace.
"See the horses pawing. The sparks will fall on them. Let us drive
away."
"My palette!" was Tristram's answer. "Brush! Easel! Canvas! Oh, the lost
chance of a lifetime!"
"Doesn't it make you shudder?"
"Certainly, my dear. That is the very deliciousness of it"
"But the danger!"
"Ah, you know I'm a perfect Bluebeard in the taste for horrors. I really
envy Parrhasius his enjoyment in flaying the old slave--or did he flog
him? But it's of no consequence which. He tortured him somehow, you
remember, and chained him to a stake in his studio, so that he might
paint Prometheus' writhings to the life."
But just here something happened which cut short his tirade of irony.
It was on the Broad street side of the Harmon building (such the great
six-story structure was called), just where the Marches' coachman had
halted their span, that the most pitiful incident of this memorable fire
took place. By 4 o'clock everybody conceded that the Harmon building was
lost. Occupied principally by dry-goods firms, whose light wares, spread
over the counters, were like so much hay to the flames, it needed
scarcely more than the touch of a match to convert it into smoke. At the
sound of the second explosion hundreds of salesgirls and male employes
had rushed to the exits, barely outstripping the fire. It was supposed
that all had been warned and escaped, and only a signal shriek from the
top story in the rear notified the beholders that human lives were in
peril. Looking up, they saw at the windows a dozen girls and half as
many youths huddling together with the blanched faces of deadly fear.
Thick smoke was already curling up and enveloping them and reflections
of the flames, like an aurora rising in the north, were visible behind.
The cries they made could not be understood, but their gestures were
dumbly eloquent.
"Jump!" came the cry from a hundred throats below. A teamster pulled
the rubber covers off the Protective company's wagon. Firemen and
policemen improvised nets of canvas, which they tore from the awnings
near by and spread under the shrinking group. Two or three of the girls,
who leaped for a telegraph pole on the outer edge of the sidewalk,
almost miraculously succeeded in scrambling down. Others climbed out on
the ledge and made as if to jump, but drew back from the awful plunge.
The fire was upon them now, and one could weep to see the men, brave
fellows, coaxing their timid companions to take the leap. One woman of
coarser build ran along the dizzy ledge, which scarcely yielded footing
for a sparrow, and sprang into the branches of a tree on the corner, her
dress saving her at the cost of fearful laceration. Then a form came
crashing down into the outspread nets, another and another, without
pause, without certainty of aim. Two struck the sidewalk and were
carried off shapeless and silent. One young girl's fall was broken by a
policeman's brawny arms--no other than Patrolman Chandler. She picked
herself up laughing, only to faint away, while her rescuer was borne off
groaning. It was all over soon--a tragedy of five minutes--but those who
witnessed it felt as if their hearts had been standing still for a
century.
"Let us drive away," said Rosalie, a sickness seizing her.
"Yes," answered Tristram; "the people are beginning to stare at you."
His sensitive lips were pale and he shut his eyes lest their film of
pity should be seen. It was true, some of the bystanders had pointed out
his companion to one another as Rosalie March. The face of this
beautiful girl had become familiar since Manager Mapletree the season
before had persuaded her to come out from the privacy of her home and
assume two or three roles in his revival of Shakespeare's comedies.
Perhaps they wondered who the gentleman beside her might be. Brother and
sister bore each other little specific resemblance.
"What's that carriage halting here for? Do you think this is a
procession? Pass on!" cried Federhen to the coachman, who whipped up his
horses in a hurry. The police had not yet got around to this side of
the block, but the fire chief seemed at all times to be where the crisis
was. At a word from him ambulances arose from the very ground and the
dead and injured were carried off to the hospital. His straggly gray
beard confronted the fire-fighters everywhere, goading on the laggards,
cheering the valiant. Indomitable, tireless, he sent them again and
again at the ruined shell, drowning the neighboring dwelling-houses
meanwhile in a flood of water. The calm air favored him. People said
"him," for somehow the forces of salvation seemed to be embodied and
centralized in one implacable form. But the wind created by the fire was
carrying sparks and brands to a distance of half a mile. The awed
spectators winced and scattered at these hot showers. It was still a
speculation where the holocaust would end.
If the Southern depot caught, then the whole Bay quarter, a warren of
tinder-box tenements, swarming densely with poor tenants, was in peril.
To save the depot was to win the day. But special editions of the
newspapers, appearing at 5 o'clock, were only able to announce, under
half-column scare-heads, that the result was still in doubt; and when
twilight came it was not the sunset glow (for a storm was gathering in
the overcast sky) which burnished the factory windows across the harbor
till they shone like plates of gold.