A Saturday evening was a sign always for a larger crowd to parade the
thoroughfare. In summer the band played until ten o'clock in the
little park. Most of the young men of the town affected to be superior
to this band, even to despise it; but in the still and fragrant
evenings they invariably turned out in force, because the girls were
sure to attend this concert, strolling slowly over the grass, linked
closely in pairs, or preferably in threes, in the curious public
dependence upon one another which was their inheritance. There was no
particular social aspect to this gathering, save that group regarded
group with interest, but mainly in silence. Perhaps one girl would
nudge another girl and suddenly say, "Look! there goes Gertie Hodgson
and her sister!" And they would appear to regard this as an event of
importance.
On a particular evening a rather large company of young men were
gathered on the sidewalk that edged the park. They remained thus
beyond the borders of the festivities because of their dignity, which
would not exactly allow them to appear in anything which was so much
fun for the younger lads. These latter were careering madly through
the crowd, precipitating minor accidents from time to time, but
usually fleeing like mist swept by the wind before retribution could
lay hands upon them.
The band played a waltz which involved a gift of prominence to the
bass horn, and one of the young men on the sidewalk said that the
music reminded him of the new engines on the hill pumping water into
the reservoir. A similarity of this kind was not inconceivable, but
the young man did not say it because he disliked the band's playing.
He said it because it was fashionable to say that manner of thing
concerning the band. However, over in the stand, Billie Harris, who
played the snare-drum, was always surrounded by a throng of boys, who
adored his every whack.
After the mails from New York and Rochester had been finally
distributed, the crowd from the post-office added to the mass already
in the park. The wind waved the leaves of the maples, and, high in the
air, the blue-burning globes of the arc lamps caused the wonderful
traceries of leaf shadows on the ground. When the light fell upon the
upturned face of a girl, it caused it to glow with a wonderful pallor.
A policeman came suddenly from the darkness and chased a gang of
obstreperous little boys. They hooted him from a distance. The leader
of the band had some of the mannerisms of the great musicians, and
during a period of silence the crowd smiled when they saw him raise
his hand to his brow, stroke it sentimentally, and glance upward with
a look of poetic anguish. In the shivering light, which gave to the
park an effect like a great vaulted hall, the throng swarmed, with a
gentle murmur of dresses switching the turf, and with a steady hum of
voices.
[Illustration: "The Band Played a Waltz"]
Suddenly, without preliminary bars, there arose from afar the great
hoarse roar of a factory whistle. It raised and swelled to a sinister
note, and then it sang on the night wind one long call that held the
crowd in the park immovable, speechless. The band-master had been
about to vehemently let fall his hand to start the band on a
thundering career through a popular march, but, smitten by this giant
voice from the night, his hand dropped slowly to his knee, and, his
mouth agape, he looked at his men in silence. The cry died away to a
wail and then to stillness. It released the muscles of the company of
young men on the sidewalk, who had been like statues, posed eagerly,
lithely, their ears turned. And then they wheeled upon each other
simultaneously, and, in a single explosion, they shouted, "One!"
Again the sound swelled in the night and roared its long ominous cry,
and as it died away the crowd of young men wheeled upon each other
and, in chorus, yelled, "Two!"
There was a moment of breathless waiting. Then they bawled, "Second
district!" In a flash the company of indolent and cynical young men
had vanished like a snowball disrupted by dynamite.
V
Jake Rogers was the first man to reach the home of Tuscarora Hose
Company Number Six. He had wrenched his key from his pocket as he tore
down the street, and he jumped at the spring-lock like a demon. As the
doors flew back before his hands he leaped and kicked the wedges from
a pair of wheels, loosened a tongue from its clasp, and in the glare
of the electric light which the town placed before each of its
hose-houses the next comers beheld the spectacle of Jake Rogers bent
like hickory in the manfulness of his pulling, and the heavy cart was
moving slowly towards the doors. Four men joined him at the time, and
as they swung with the cart out into the street, dark figures sped
towards them from the ponderous shadows back of the electric lamps.
Some set up the inevitable question, "What district?"
"Second," was replied to them in a compact howl. Tuscarora Hose
Company Number Six swept on a perilous wheel into Niagara Avenue, and
as the men, attached to the cart by the rope which had been paid out
from the windlass under the tongue, pulled madly in their fervor and
abandon, the gong under the axle clanged incitingly. And sometimes the
same cry was heard, "What district?"
"Second."
[Illustration: "What District"]
On a grade Johnnie Thorpe fell, and exercising a singular muscular
ability, rolled out in time from the track of the on-coming wheel, and
arose, dishevelled and aggrieved, casting a look of mournful
disenchantment upon the black crowd that poured after the machine. The
cart seemed to be the apex of a dark wave that was whirling as if it
had been a broken dam. Back of the lad were stretches of lawn, and in
that direction front-doors were banged by men who hoarsely shouted out
into the clamorous avenue, "What district?"
At one of these houses a woman came to the door bearing a lamp,
shielding her face from its rays with her hands. Across the cropped
grass the avenue represented to her a kind of black torrent, upon
which, nevertheless, fled numerous miraculous figures upon bicycles.
She did not know that the towering light at the corner was continuing
its nightly whine.
Suddenly a little boy somersaulted around the corner of the house as
if he had been projected down a flight of stairs by a catapultian
boot. He halted himself in front of the house by dint of a rather
extraordinary evolution with his legs. "Oh, ma," he gasped, "can I go?
Can I, ma?"
She straightened with the coldness of the exterior mother-judgment,
although the hand that held the lamp trembled slightly. "No, Willie;
you had better come to bed."
Instantly he began to buck and fume like a mustang. "Oh, ma," he
cried, contorting himself--"oh, ma, can't I go? Please, ma, can't I
go? Can't I go, ma?"
"It's half-past nine now, Willie."
He ended by wailing out a compromise: "Well, just down to the corner,
ma? Just down to the corner?"
From the avenue came the sound of rushing men who wildly shouted.
Somebody had grappled the bell-rope in the Methodist church, and now
over the town rang this solemn and terrible voice, speaking from the
clouds. Moved from its peaceful business, this bell gained a new
spirit in the portentous night, and it swung the heart to and fro, up
and down, with each peal of it.
"Just down to the corner, ma?"
"Willie, it's half-past nine now."
[Illustration: "They Did Not Care Much for John Shipley"]