Then no luncheon (all fire chiefs are two-meal men), but off for a four-hours' spin behind Kitty and Belle, his daylight team, driving from station to station for the work of inspection, holding the reins himself for arm exercise, seeing with his own eyes how the work is going, holding every man to his duty. Studying the city, too, as he goes about, noting its growth and changes from the view-point of a fire expert, detecting weak points, bad streets, defective structures, fixing in mind the danger spots, here oil, there lumber, yonder paint or chemicals, and planning always for the defense.
After this inspection tour comes the only time in the day when the chief is not on duty, an hour and a half or two hours, when he gets a glimpse of his family and eats his dinner. Even then the fire buggy waits outside, and many a time this brief home stay is cut short and off goes the chief, dropping knife and fork, to answer a third alarm. There is some perversity about fires, so his wife and children think, that makes more of them start between six and eight in the evening (this is really a fact) than at any other period of the day.
A FALLING WALL.
So here we have a chief who actually holds himself ready for hardest service twenty-two hours in every twenty-four, who seldom knows a night's unbroken rest, who never takes a day off—not even Sundays or holidays, but uses these for longer inspection tours, driving forty or fifty miles of a Christmas day over Long Island or out into Queens County, or up through the Westchester region.
And he is never ill, and he never complains!
To watch the chief at a big fire is a thing worth doing, though not easy to do, for he moves about constantly, up-stairs and down-stairs, from roof to roof, from engine to engine, in danger like his men, not sending his orders merely, but following after to observe their execution. "I expect each of my captains," he told me one day, "to know the location and general condition of every alleyway, every stairway, every hydrant, every fire-escape in his section. When I get to a fire the captain must tell me what I want to know, and do it quick. Will we find water in there behind the smoke? Is there a back door at the end of that passage? How about the balconies? Where does this lane between the houses come out? And a dozen other things. If you want to fight fires well you must know the ground as if you lived on it."