Careers of Danger and Daring

by Cleveland Moffett

As they drew along the curb, Fireman McDermott sprang up the slowly rising ladder, and two men came behind with scaling-ladders, for they saw that the main ladder would never reach the woman. Five stories is what it did reach, and then McDermott, standing on the top round, smashed one of the scaling-ladders through a sixth-story window, and climbed on, smashed the second scaling-ladder through a seventh-story window, and five seconds later had the woman in his arms.

USE OF THE SCALING LADDERS.

To carry a woman down the front of a burning building on scaling-ladders is a matter of regular routine for a fireman, like jumping from a fourth story down to a net, or making a bridge of his body. It is part of the business. But to have one foot in the air reaching for the lower rung of a swaying, flimsy thing, and to feel another rung break under you and your struggling burden, and to fall two feet and catch safely, that is a thing not every fireman could do; but McDermott did it, and he brought the woman unharmed to the ground—and the dog, too.

Almost at the same moment, the crowd on Forty-seventh Street thrilled in admiration of a rescue feat even more perilous. On the roof, screaming in terror, was Kate Flannigan, a servant, swaying over the cornice, on the point of throwing herself down. Then out of a top-floor window crept a little fireman, and stood on the fire-escape, gasping for air. Then he reached in and dragged out an unconscious woman and lowered her to others, and was just starting down himself when yells from the street made him look up, and he saw Kate Flannigan. She was ten feet above him, and he had no means of reaching her.

The crowd watched anxiously, and saw the little fireman lean back over the fire-escape, saw him motion and shout something to the woman. And then she crept over the cornice edge, hung by her hands for a second, and dropped into the fireman's arms. It isn't every big strong man who could catch a sizable woman in a fall like that and hold her, but this stripling did it, because he had the nerve and knew how. And that made another life saved.

By this time flames were breaking out of every story from street to roof. It seemed impossible to go on with the rescue work; yet the men persisted, even on the Fifth Avenue front, bare of fire-escapes. They used the long extension ladders as far as they could, and then "scaled it" from window to window. Here it was that William Clark of Hook and Ladder 7 made the rescues that gave him the Bennett medal—took three women out of seventh-story windows when it was like climbing over furnace mouths to get there. And one of these women he reached only by working his way along narrow stone ledges for three windows, and back the same way to his ladder with the woman on his shoulders. Even so it is likely he would have failed in this last effort had not Edward Ford come part way along the ledges to meet and help him.

Meantime Fireman Kennedy of Engine 23 had rescued an old lady from the sixth floor; and Joseph Kratchovil of Hook and Ladder 2 had carried out Mrs. Leland, wife of the proprietor, from deadly peril on the fifth floor; and Frank Tissier of Hook and Ladder 4 had found a family named Wells—father, mother, and daughter—in a blazing room, and borne them out, with his own clothes burning, to the arms of Brennan and Sweeney, who were waiting for him in a fury of fire at the top of the eighty-five-foot extension ladder.

And Andrew Fitzgerald, also of Hook and Ladder 4, but off on sick-leave with pneumonia, had shown the true fireman spirit as he came from the doctors. His instructions were to go home and stay there. He was not on duty at all. He was scarcely strong enough to be out of bed, but when he heard that there were lives in peril down the avenue he forgot everything, and ran to the place of danger. There was need of him here, and, sick-leave or not, pneumonia or not, he would do what he could. What he did was to carry out the last ones taken alive from the ill-fated hotel—three women whom he bore in his arms from the fourth floor through roaring hallways, then up a fire-escape, then back into the building, with the flames singeing him, and a shattering blast of exploding gas pursuing him, and finally out on a balcony whence, with the help of Policeman Harrigan, he got them over safely to an adjoining housetop. No wonder the Bonner medal was awarded him later for conspicuous courage.