“We’ll get you all out,” declared Jerry, with more confidence when he had looked through the window and saw no flames in the room behind the three. “You’ve got plenty of time.”
He helped the two girls down to the flat roof of the one-story extension, where Ned and Bob took charge of them, calming them and telling them they would soon be on the ground.
“Can you save Mr. Cromley?” gasped the woman, when Jerry went back to assist her. “He’s lame and he’s in that room where the smoke is. The girls and I were up there talking to him when the fire broke out.”
“I’ll get him as soon as you get down,” cried Jerry. “How lame is he? Will he have to be carried?”
“Oh, no, he just walks with a limp—that’s all.”
“Then I guess I can get him down the ladder. But you must come now,” and the mother was soon on the low roof. “I’m going after the lame man, fellows!” Jerry then called to his chums. “Keep the ladder here until I get him to the window.”
“Corporal” Jerry Hopkins was giving orders as he had done on the battlefields of France, and his chums “snapped into” obedience as they had done in those terrible days.
Up the ladder the tall lad raced, to meet a limping man stumbling toward the window from which Jerry had already assisted the woman and girls to the roof.
“I—I must have swallowed some of the smoke!” the man coughed. “I didn’t know where I was for a minute!”