What happened was this: Engine 29, pumping and pounding her prettiest, stood at the northwest corner of Greenwich and Warren streets, so close to the blazing drug-house that Driver Marks thought it wasn't safe there for the three horses, and led them away. That was fortunate, but it left Brown alone, right against the cheek of the fire, watching his boiler, stoking in coal, keeping his steam-gage at 75. As the fire gained chunks of red-hot sandstone began to smash down on the engine. Brown ran his pressure up to 80, and watched the door anxiously where the boys had gone in.
Then the explosion came, and a blue flame, wide as a house, curled its tongues half-way across the street, enwrapping engine and man, setting fire to the elevated railway station overhead, or such wreck of it as the shock had left. Bill Brown stood by his engine, with a wall of fire before him and a sheet of fire above him. He heard quick footsteps on the pavements, and voices, that grew fainter and fainter, crying: "Run for your lives!" He heard the hose-wagon horses somewhere back in the smoke go plunging away, mad with fright and their burns. He was alone with the fire, and the skin was hanging in shreds on his hands, face, and neck. Only a fireman knows how one blast of flame can shrivel up a man, and the pain over the bared surfaces was—well, there is no pain worse than that of fire scorching in upon the quick flesh seared by fire.
Here, I think, was a crisis to make a very brave man quail. Bill Brown knew perfectly well why every one was running; there was going to be another explosion in a couple of minutes, maybe sooner, out of this hell in front of him. And the order had come for every man to save himself, and every man had done it, except the lads inside. And the question was, Should he run or should he stay and die? It was tolerably certain that he would die if he stayed. On the other hand, the boys of old 29 were in there. Devanny and McArthur, and Gillon and Merron, his friends, his chums: he'd seen them drag the hose in through that door—there it was now, a long, throbbing snake of it—and they hadn't come out. Perhaps they were dead. Yes, but perhaps they weren't. If they were alive, they needed water now more than they ever needed anything before. And they couldn't get water if he quit his engine.
Bill Brown pondered this a long time, perhaps four seconds; then he fell to stoking in coal, and he screwed her up another notch, and he eased her running parts with the oiler. Explosion or not, pain or not, alone or not, he was going to stay and make that engine hum. He had done the greatest thing a man can do—had offered his life for his friends.
It is pleasant to know that this sacrifice was averted. A quarter of a minute or so before the second and terrible explosion, Devanny and his men came staggering from the building. Then it was that Merron fell, and McArthur checked his flight to save him. Then it was, but not until then, that Bill Brown left Engine 29 to her fate (she was crushed by the falling walls), and ran for his life with his comrades. He had waited for them, he had stood the great test.
It were easy to multiply stories of the firemen, stories of the captains, stories of the chiefs—there is no end to them. However many may be told or written, they are but fragments of fragments. New York has one hundred and thirty-six engine companies, forty hook-and-ladder companies, besides the volunteers on Staten Island, and there is not one of these but has its proud record of courage and self-sacrifice. Other lives show bravery for gain, bravery for show, bravery for sport; these show bravery for the public good and for no other reason—unselfish bravery. Think what the firemen do! They give up regular sleep, they give up home life, they bear every exposure, they face death in many forms as a matter of daily routine, they never refuse an order, lead where it may (such a case is practically unknown), and they do all this for modest pay and scant glory. Three or four dollars a day will cover their earnings, and as for the glory, what is it? For some a medal, a tattered paper with roll-of-honor mention, a picture in the newspapers; for most of them nothing. Yet they are cheerful, happy men. Why? I have wondered about this.
Shall we think of firemen as braver than other men, as finer or more devoted? No and yes. I should say that most of them, to start with, had no such superiority, but came into the department (usually by opportunity or drift) out of unpromising conditions, came in quite as selfish and timorous, quite as human as the ordinary citizens. And the life did the rest. The life changed them, made them braver and better. Why? Because it is a brave, unselfish life, and no man can resist it. Put a convict in the fire department and he will become an honest man—or leave. It's like changing scamps into heroes on the battle-field, only these battles of hose and ax are all righteous battles to save life, to avert loss and suffering. In the whole business of fighting fires there is no place for a mean or a base motive, and can be none. Therefore, meanness and baseness go out of fashion just as whining goes out of fashion on a football team. It's the fashion among firemen to do fine things.
Let me give a further instance to show what this fire department fashion does for men at the very top—for battalion chiefs and deputy chiefs and the chief himself. It swings them into line like men in the ranks. With the chance to work less, they find themselves working harder. With orders to take from no one, they assume voluntarily a severer duty than any man would put upon them. And this even if power has come through the way of politics, through influence or scheming. Let the most spoils-soaked veteran become chief of a city fire department and I believe we should see him, in spite of himself, forgetting his pocket-stuffing principles, and seeking the heroic goal, though it kill him. Which it probably would. As a matter of fact, New York has never had a chief who did not work harder than his men, and spare himself less than he spared his men.
Take our present chief, Edward F. Croker, the youngest man who ever held this place. Let me run over his twenty-four hours, from eight in the evening, when he goes on night duty at the Great Jones Street engine-house. From now until daylight he will cover personally some two hundred stations on the first alarm—that is, everything from Twenty-third Street to the Battery, the region of greatest danger. And on the second or third alarm he will cover the whole of Manhattan Island. That means answering every night from two to a dozen calls scattered over a great area. It means a pair of horses (Dan and John, usually) and driver clean worn out when morning comes. And it means to the chief, besides physical fatigue, an exhausting responsibility in quickly judging each fire and outlining the way of fighting it.
Almost a day's work this, one would say, but it is only a beginning. However broken his rest, the chief is up at seven in the morning—and note that what sleep he gets, three, four, five hours, is at an engine-house, not at his home—and by nine he is at headquarters, in Sixty-seventh Street, ready for a hard morning transacting business for the department, doing as much work as a merchant in his counting-room. This until one o'clock.