“Just in time,” murmured Ned, as he came to the ground, a few seconds after Jerry reached it.
Willing hands took the burden of the old man, and he was carried to a place where volunteer nurses and a physician worked over him.
By this time the tenement house was a mass of flames. The fire involved the end where the old Frenchman had lived, and there was no hope of saving it. The place was like a tinder-box, and soon after Jerry and Ned had left it the roof at that end fell in.
Quickly the fire burned itself out, and then came the problem of caring for the unfortunates who had lost nearly everything, and who were homeless. Kind friends and neighbors took in such as they could.
“How’s our Frenchman?” asked Ned of Jerry, as they were about to go to their automobile and depart for home, since the high point of the excitement had passed.
“I don’t know. We might take a look.”
A policeman directed them to a near-by store, where several firemen and spectators had been treated for cuts from glass or partial smoke suffocation, and there the boys found the old Frenchman. He was a cripple, with a stiff left leg, and had suffered much from shock. He was in great distress of mind.
“These are the boys who brought you down the ladder, who saved you,” said a doctor, pointing to Ned and Jerry.
The man murmured something in his own expressive language, and then, as if realizing that the boys could not understand very well, though they knew some French, he said, in English:
“I can never thank you enough! You saved my life! But tell me, did you see Crooked Nose or my iron box of money and jewelry?”