“Well,” said Phineas, “they never could have come through if it hadn’t been for Apollos! ‘Those angels have just got to be saved, if any of us are,’ says Apollos. So he grabbed up a saw and a screw-driver, and what the saw couldn’t do, the screw-driver could. He worked like lightning, Apollos did. ‘Easy, boys, easy,’ he kept saying, calm as if he was down at the boarding-house, eating griddle cakes. ‘It’ll be quite a disappointment for the boss, anyhow, the best we can do,’ says Apollos. So while the rest of the fellers were fighting the fire outside with brooms and spades and inside with whatever water they could get, and, gosh, it wasn’t much, Apollos got Prince Eugene Gage, the town drunkard, you know, and One-Eye Sims that’s supposed to keep the toll-house, and that hulkingest one of the two big Beecher boys, and the three of them, along with him and me, we got those angels out somehow, safe enough, and not much jarred, really, sir. And we carried them into the garage here, and stuck ’em on the horses, as you see.”
“Good work, my lad, but how about Apollos?”
“Well, you know how thorough Apollos is. He suddenly remembered that the half-size study was in back there, right in the midst of the fire; and he’d heard you say you wanted to keep it and send it down to New York. We couldn’t stop him. He got away from us, went in there, slid the thing quick down onto the little green truck, and pushed it out over the sill just in time. Only not quite in time. That’s how he got his broken leg. And his shirt had just begun burning on him when he fell over himself. The doctor says the arm will be all right inside a week, but the leg’s a longer job.”
I had rather lost interest in Phineas, before I went away, but now I found myself changing. I was glad to see that boy’s complete loyalty to Apollos; recognition of valor had apparently left no room for the customary Stickney complacency. I had noted, too, that the aristocratic Stickney countenance was somewhat disfigured by a red wound across the upper lip, but I forbore to ask the boy if he got it eating roast corn. Within the garage, I took careful account of my angels. Their celestial composure was scarcely shaken, it would seem. If only I could get them upright again, as successfully as Apollos and his band of ne’er-do-weels had laid them flat, all would yet be well, and the name of Jefferson unmuddied.
By the end-window of the garage, in what chanced to be a good north light, I saw a bust; the bust that Apollos, of all persons in the world, had been modelling from memory in the dark privacy of his farmhouse attic room, and immediately on my departure, had brought to the garage for an orgy of peaceful study. Even from the distance at which I stood, I perceived that the thing was a startlingly good likeness of myself; myself in a somewhat heroic aspect, to be sure, but still unmistakably me, almost life-size, in clay. My me-ness stuck out all over it. It really gave me a start, offered me an ideal to live up to. I don’t say it was finer than anything of Houdon’s or Rodin’s. I merely say it was amazing for a boy who had had no instruction save the crumbs he had picked up while posing. The lad’s secret ambition was quite evident to me now. But for my own rather heartless absorption in my Three Angels, I might have guessed it before. I felt ashamed.
“Phineas,” I remarked very seriously, and I suited the action to the word, “I take off my hat to Apollos!”
Phineas answered, with a sincerity not to be doubted in a Stickney, “So do I, and I always shall. That is, if he keeps on like this!”
The fire gave me a new light on my models. I learned to my surprise that my aristocrat was something of a carpenter. He was full of plans for rebuilding the destroyed wing of my studio, and even drew everything out carefully on paper in scale, and very creditably too. I saw that if I could get a few men at once, it would take but a short time to rig up a temporary refuge for finishing my angels. Late haying being over, the thing was somehow accomplished; Phineas worked like a boy possessed; and, as Apollos was soon hobbling about very capably on crutches, we had a studio-warming, during which the two lads superintended the replacing of the angels, by the efforts of their former crew, Prince Eugene Gage, the town drunkard, One-Eye Sims that’s supposed to keep the toll-house, and the hulkingest Beecher boy. Those three were the scum of the village. Hence I often say, In an emergency, don’t scorn the scum.
But the oddest part of the adventure was this. And I’ve not yet finished marvelling at it. After the two angels were really up again, and Phineas and Apollos and I stood staring at them, Apollos, with that little air of authority that nobly earned crutches sometimes confer, suddenly said out, quite loud, “But there’s nothing to do to them, really, Mr. Jefferson! They’re done!” And after one good glance, my inward eye told me that he was absolutely right. I might never have known that they were done, however, if I had kept on working at them, and if I had not, in despair, gone a-fishing! That very night, I telegraphed for my plaster-moulder.