"But there was a chief to save now. He was about gone when he got back to the door, and there he found that a spring-lock had snapped shut on him, and he was a prisoner, sir—a prisoner in a stove. He didn't have any strength left, poor old chief; he couldn't breathe, let alone batter down doors, and we'd had some choice mourning around here inside of a minute if the lads of Hook and Ladder 18 hadn't smashed in after him. They thought he'd looked for that baby about long enough. The last thing he did was to kick his foot through a panel, and they found him there unconscious, with his rubber boot sticking out into the hall.
"Tell ye another thing the chief did," continued the driver. "He rescued a husband and wife in the Hotel Jefferson, out of a seventh-story window, when the whole business was roaring with fire. That's only about a month ago; it was a mighty sad case. We had three people to save, if we could, and two of 'em sick—the husband and wife—and the third was a trained nurse taking care of 'em. Shows how people get rattled in a fire. Why, if they'd only kept their hall door shut—well, they didn't, and there they were, all three at the window, without hardly any clothes on, and the flames close behind 'em.
"We got up on the top floor of the Union Square Hotel, the chief and I, about ten feet away along the same wall, and by leaning out of our windows we could tell 'em what to do. It was a case of ropes and swing across to us, but it isn't every man can make a rope fast right when a fire is hurrying him, especially a sick man, or mebbe it was a poor rope he had. Anyhow, when the nurse came out of that window, you might say tumbled out (you see, they made her go first), she just fell like that much dead weight, scared, you know, and when the rope tightened it snapped, and down she went, seven stories—killed her bang.
"The chief saw that would never do, so we went up on the roof and threw over more rope. It was clothes-line, the only thing handy, but I doubled it to make sure. And with that we got the husband and wife across all safe, for now, you see, we could lift 'em out easy, without such a terrible jerk on the rope. That was the chief's idea."
"Yes," said I, "but you helped. What's your name?"
"No, no," he smiled; "never mind me. I'm nobody. Let the chief have it all." And then he went on with the story, which interested me mainly as showing the kind of loyalty one finds among these firemen. Each man will tell of another man's achievements, not of his own. You could never find out what Bill Brown did from Brown himself.
The clock ticked on, some service calls rang on the telephone, and once the driver bounded up in the middle of a word and stood with coat half off, in strained attention, counting the strokes of the gong. No, it wasn't for them. They'd go, though, on the second call. Second calls usually came within twenty minutes of the first, so we'd soon see. Meantime, he told me about a fireman known as "Crazy" Banta.
"Talk about daredevils!" said he, "this man Banta beat the town. Why, I've known him to go up on a house with a line of men where they had to cross the ridge of a slate roof—you know, where the two sides slant up to a point. Well, the other men would straddle along careful, one leg on each side, but when Banta came he'd walk across straight up, just like he was down on the street. That's why we called him 'Crazy'—he'd do such crazy things.
"And funny? Well, sir, he'd swaller quarters as fast as you'd give 'em to him, and let you punch him in the stomach and hear 'em rattle around. Then he'd light a match, open his mouth, put the match 'way inside, and let you watch the quarters come up again. Had a double stomach, or something. He could swaller canes, too, same as a circus man. Said he'd learned all his tricks over in India, but some of the boys thought he lied. They said he'd prob'ly traveled with some show. He used to tell us how he could speak Burmese and Siamese and Hindu, all those lingoes, just perfect; so one day a battalion chief called his bluff when there were a lot of emigrants from those parts down at the Battery, and blamed if Banta didn't chin away to the whole crowd of 'em; you'd thought he was their long-lost brother. Was he a foreigner? No, sir; he was born in Hohokus, N. J.
"But the time Banta fixed his reputation all right was at a fire in Pell Street—some factory. After that he might have told us he could fly or eat glass or any old thing, and we'd have believed him. Tell ye what he did. This factory all smashed in after she'd burned a while, and one of the boys—Dave Soden—got wedged under the second floor, with all the other floors piled on top of him. It was a great big criss-cross of timbers, with Dave at the bottom, and the flames eating in fast. We could see the whole thing was going to make a fine bonfire in about three minutes, and it looked as if Dave would be in it.