Miss Carewe was at her desk, writing to Sister Cecilia, whom she most
loved of all the world, when the bells startled her with their sudden
clangor. The quill dropped from her hand; she started to her feet,
wide-eyed, not understanding; while the whole town, drowsing peacefully
a moment ago, resounded immediately with a loud confusion. She ran to
the front door and looked out, her heart beating wildly.
The western sky was touched with a soft rose-color, which quickly became
a warm glow, fluctuated, and, in the instant, shot up like the coming of
a full Aurora. Then through the broken foliage of the treetops could be
seen the orange curls of flames, three-quarters of a mile away though
they were.
People, calling loudly that “it was Carewe's warehouses,” were running
down the street. From the stable, old Nelson, on her father's best
horse, came galloping, and seeing the white figure in the doorway, cried
out in a quavering voice, without checking his steed.
“I goin' tell yo' pa, Miss Betty, he in de kentry on lan' bus'ness. Go
back in de house, Missy!”
The other servants, like ragged sketches in the night, flitted by, with
excited ejaculations, to join the runners, and Miss Betty followed them
across the dew-strewn turf in her night slippers, but at the gate she
stopped.
From up the street came the sound of a bell smaller than those of the
churches and courthouse, yet one that outdid all others in the madness
of its appeal to clear the way. It was borne along by what seemed at
first an indefinite black mass, but which--as the Aurora grew keener,
producing even here a faint, yellow twilight--resolved itself into a
mob of hoarsely-shouting men and boys, who were running and tugging at
ropes, which drew along three extraordinary vehicles. They came rapidly
down the street and passed Miss Betty with a hubbub and din beyond all
understanding; one line of men, most of them in red shirts and oil-cloth
helmets, at a dead run with the hose-cart; a second line with the
hand-engine; the third dragging the ladder-wagon. One man was riding, a
tall, straight gentleman in evening clothes and without a hat, who stood
precariously in the hose-cart, calling in an annoyed tone through a
brazen trumpet. Miss Betty recognized him at once; it was he who caught
her kitten; and she thought that if she had been Fanchon Bareaud she
must have screamed a warning, for his balance appeared a thing of mere
luck, and, if he fell, he would be trampled under foot and probably run
over by the engine. But, happily (she remembered), she was not Fanchon
Bareaud!
Before, behind, and beside the Department, raced a throng of boys,
wild with the joy experienced by their species when property is being
handsomely destroyed; after them came panting women, holding their sides
and gasping with the effort to keep up with the flying procession.
Miss Betty trembled, for she had never seen the like in her life; she
stood close to the hedge and let them go by; then she turned in after
them and ran like a fleet young deer. She was going to the fire.
Over all the uproar could be heard the angry voice through the trumpet,
calling the turns of the streets to the men in the van, upbraiding them
and those of the other two companies impartially; and few of his hearers
denied the chief his right to express some chagrin; since the Department
(organized a half-year, hard-drilled, and this its first fire worth the
name) was late on account of the refusal of the members to move until
they had donned their new uniforms; for the uniforms had arrived from
Philadelphia two months ago, and tonight offered the first opportunity
to display them in public.
“Hail Vanrevel!” panted Tappingham Marsh to Eugene Madrillon, as the
two, running in the van of the “Hose Company,” splattered through a
mud-puddle. “You'd think he was Carewe's only son and heir instead of
his worst enemy. Hark to the man!”
“I'd let it burn, if I were he,” returned the other.
“It was all Crailey's fault,” said Tappingham, swinging an arm free
to wipe the spattered mud from his face. “He swore he wouldn't budge
without his uniform, and the rest only backed him up; that was all.
Crailey said Carewe could better afford to lose his shanties than the
overworked Department its first chance to look beautiful and earnest.
Tom asked him why he didn't send for a fiddle,” Marsh finished with a
chuckle.
“Carewe might afford to lose a little, even a warehouse or two, if only
out of what he's taken from Crailey and the rest of us, these three
years!”
“Taken from Vanrevel, you mean. Who doesn't know where Crailey's--Here's
Main Street; look out for the turn!”
They swung out of the thick shadows of Carewe Street into full view of
the fire, and their faces were illuminated as by sunrise.
The warehouses stood on the river-bank, at the foot of the street,
just south of the new “covered bridge.” There were four of them, huge,
bare-sided buildings; the two nearer the bridge of brick, the others
of wood, and all of them rich with stores of every kind of
river-merchandise and costly freight: furniture that had voyaged from
New England down the long coast, across the Mexican Gulf, through
the flat Delta, and had made the winding journey up the great river a
thousand miles, and almost a thousand more, following the greater
and lesser tributaries; cloth from Connecticut that had been sold in
Philadelphia, then carried over mountains and through forests by steam,
by canal, by stage, and six-mule freight-wagons, to Pittsburg, down the
Ohio, and thence up to Rouen on the packet; Tennessee cotton, on its way
to Massachusetts and Rhode Island spindles, lay there beside huge mounds
of raw wool from Illinois, ready to be fed to the Rouen mill; dates and
nuts from the Caribbean Sea; lemons from groves of the faraway tropics;
cigars from the Antilles; tobacco from Virginia and Kentucky; most
precious of all, the great granary of the farmers' wheat from the level
fields at home; and all the rich stores and the houses that held them,
as well as the wharves upon which they had been landed, and the steamers
that brought them up the Rouen River, belonged to Robert Carewe.
That it was her father's property which was imperilled attested to the
justification of Miss Betty in running to a fire; and, as she followed
the crowd into Main Street, she felt a not unpleasant proprietary
interest in the spectacle. Very opposite sensations animated the breast
of the man with the trumpet, who was more acutely conscious than any
other that these were Robert Carewe's possessions which were burning
so handsomely. Nor was he the only one among the firemen who ground his
teeth over the folly of the uniforms; for now they could plainly see the
ruin being wrought, the devastation threatened. The two upper stories
of the southernmost warehouse had swathed themselves in one great flame;
the building next on the north, also of frame, was smoking heavily; and
there was a wind from the southwest, which, continuing with the fire
unchecked, threatened the town itself. There was work for the Volunteer
Brigade that night.
They came down Main Street with a rush, the figure of their chief
swaying over them on his high perch, while their shouting was drowned in
the louder roar of greeting from the crowd, into which they plunged as
a diver into the water, swirls and eddies of people marking the wake.
A moment later a section of the roof of the burning warehouse fell in,
with a sonorous and reverberating crash.
The “Engine Company” ran the force-pump out to the end of one of the
lower wharves; two lines of pipe were attached; two rows of men mounted
the planks for the pumpers, and, at the word of command, began the
up-and-down of the hand-machine with admirable vim. Nothing happened;
the water did not come; something appeared to be wrong with the
mechanism. As everyone felt the crucial need of haste, nothing could
have been more natural than that all the members of the “Engine Company”
should simultaneously endeavor to repair the defect; therefore ensued
upon the spot a species of riot which put the engine out of its sphere
of usefulness.
In the meantime, fifty or sixty men and boys who ran with the machines,
but who had no place in their operation, being the Bucket Brigade, had
formed a line and were throwing large pails of water in the general
direction of the southernmost warehouse, which it was now impossible to
save; while the gentlemen of the “Hook-and-Ladder Company,” abandoning
their wagons, and armed with axes, heroically assaulted the big door
of the granary, the second building, whence they were driven by the
exasperated chief, who informed them that the only way to save the
wheat was to save the building. Crailey Gray, one of the berated axemen,
remained by the shattered door after the others had gone, and, struck by
a sudden thought, set his hand upon the iron latch and opened the door
by this simple process. It was not locked. Crailey leaned against the
casement and laughed with his whole soul and body.
Meanwhile, by dint of shouting in men's ears when near them, through
the trumpet when distant, tearing axes from their hands, imperiously
gesticulating to subordinate commanders, and lingering in no one spot
for more than a second, Mr. Vanrevel reduced his forces to a semblance
of order in a remarkably short time, considering the confusion into
which they had fallen.
The space between the burning warehouse and that next it was not more
than fifty feet in width, but fifty feet so hot no one took thought
of entering there; an area as discomfiting in appearance as it was
beautiful with the thick rain of sparks and firebrands that fell upon
it. But the chief had decided that this space must be occupied, and
more: must be held, since it was the only point of defence for the
second warehouse. The roof of this building would burn, which would mean
the destruction of the warehouse, unless it could be mounted, because
the streams of water could not play upon it from the ground, nor, from
the ladders, do much more than wet the projecting eaves. It was a gable
roof, the eaves twenty feet lower on the south side than on the north,
where the ladders could not hope to reach them. Vanrevel swung his line
of bucketeers round to throw water, not upon the flames, but upon the
ladder-men.
Miss Carewe stood in the crowd upon the opposite side of the broad
street. Even there her cheeks were uncomfortably hot, and sometimes she
had to brush a spark from her shoulder, though she was too much excited
to mind this. She was watching the beautiful fiery furnace between the
north wall of the burning warehouse and the south wall of its neighbor,
the fifty feet brilliant and misty with vaporous rose-color, dotted
with the myriad red stars, her eyes shining with the reflection of their
fierce beauty. She saw how the vapors moved there, like men walking in
fire, and she was vaguely recalling Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego,
when, over the silhouetted heads of the crowd before her, a long black
ladder rose, wobbled, tilted crazily, then lamely advanced and ranged
itself against the south wall of the second warehouse, its top rung
striking ten feet short of the eaves. She hoped that no one had any
notion of mounting that ladder.
A figure appeared upon it immediately, that of a gentleman, bareheaded
and in evening dress, with a brass trumpet swinging from a cord about
his shoulders; the noise grew less; the shouting died away, and the
crowd became almost silent, as the figure, climbing slowly drew up above
their heads. Two or three rungs beneath, came a second--a man in helmet
and uniform. The clothes of both men, drenched by the bucketeers, clung
to them, steaming. As the second figure mounted, a third appeared;
but this was the last, for the ladder was frail, and sagged toward the
smoking wall with the weight of the three.
The chief, three-fourths of the way to the top, shouted down a stifled
command, and a short grappling-ladder, fitted at one end with a pair of
spiked iron hooks, was passed to him. Then he toiled upward until his
feet rested on the third rung from the top; here he turned, setting his
back to the wall, lifted the grappling-ladder high over his head so
that it rested against the eaves above him, and brought it down sharply,
fastening the spiked hooks in the roof. As the eaves projected fully
three feet, this left the grappling-ladder hanging that distance out
from the wall, its lowest rung a little above the level of the chief's
shoulders.
Miss Betty drew in her breath with a little choked cry. There was a
small terraced hill of piled-up packing-boxes near her, possession of
which had been taken by a company of raggamuffinish boys, and she found
herself standing on the highest box and sharing the summit with these
questionable youths, almost without noting her action in mounting
thither, so strained was the concentration of her attention upon the
figure high up in the rose-glow against the warehouse wall. The man,
surely, surely, was not going to trust himself to that bit of wooden web
hanging from the roof! Where was Miss Bareaud that she permitted it?
Ah, if Betty had been Fanchon and madwoman enough to have accepted
this madman, she would have compelled him to come down at once, and
thereafter would lock him up in the house whenever the bells rang!
But the roof was to be mounted or Robert Carewe's property lost. Already
little flames were dancing up from the shingles, where firebrands had
fallen, their number increasing with each second. So Vanrevel raised his
arms, took a hard grip upon the lowest rung of the grappling-ladder and
tried it with his weight; the iron hooks bit deeper into the roof; they
held. He swung himself out into the air with nothing beneath him, caught
the rung under his knee, and for a moment hung there while the crowd
withheld from breathing; then a cloud of smoke, swirling that way, made
him the mere ghostly nucleus of himself, blotted him out altogether,
and, as it rose slowly upward, showed the ladder free and empty, so that
at first there was an instant when they thought that he had fallen. But,
as the smoke cleared, there was the tall figure on the roof.
It was an agile and daring thing to do, and the man who did it was
mightily applauded. The cheering bothered him, however, for he was
trying to make them understand, below, what would happen to the “Engine
Company” in case the water was not sent through the lines directly; and
what he said should be done to the engineers included things that would
have blanched the cheek of the most inventive Spanish Inquisitor that
ever lived.
Miss Betty made a gesture as if to a person within whispering distance.
“Your coat is on fire,” she said in an ordinary conversational tone,
without knowing she had spoken aloud, and Mr. Vanrevel, more than one
hundred feet away, seemed particularly conscious of the pertinence of
her remark. He removed the garment with alacrity, and, for the lack
of the tardy water, began to use it as a flail upon the firebrands and
little flames about him; the sheer desperate best of a man in a rage,
doing what he could when others failed him. Showers of sparks fell upon
him; the smoke was rising everywhere from the roof and the walls below;
and, growing denser and denser, shrouded him in heavy veils, so that, as
he ran hither and thither, now visible, now unseen, stamping and beating
and sweeping away the brands that fell, he seemed but the red and
ghostly caricature of a Xerxes, ineffectually lashing the sea. They were
calling to him imploringly to come down, in heaven's name to come down!
The second man had followed to the top of the ladder against the wall,
and there he paused, waiting to pass up the line of hose when the
word should come that the force-pump had been repaired; but the people
thought that he waited because he was afraid to trust himself to the
grappling-ladder. He was afraid, exceedingly afraid; though that was not
why he waited; and he was still chuckling over the assault of the axes.
His situation had not much the advantage of that of the chief: his red
shirt might have been set with orange jewels, so studded it was with the
flying sparks; and, a large brand dropping upon his helmet, he threw up
his hand to dislodge it and lost the helmet. The great light fell
upon his fair hair and smiling face, and it was then that Miss Betty
recognized the Incroyable of her garden.