"I'll stay, sir."
"Water's no use to windward of a fire; it's spreading straight up the church. We want to be on the other side to stop it."
"The aisle's not afire!"
"But they couldn't get the water to us, even if we got through alive. No; where the walls are down for the transepts—that's the place. Which side's boarded strongest?"
"Both the same, sir."
"Then we'll hack through the nearest! A saw and an axe, and we'll be through by the time the first bucketful's ready for us."
And, friends again, but both unconscious of the change, they rushed together to the shed of which Robert Carlton had so lately taken leave: in the fever of the moment even that leave-taking was forgotten.
It was the north transept which faced the shed. Already the walls were a dozen feet high, but a doorway had been left. The greater gap between transept and nave was vertically boarded over within the church, and on these boards fell the rector with his axe, to make an opening for Tom's saw. They had light enough for their work. The interstices between the boards were as the red-hot strings of a colossal harp; quickly a couple were cut, and the boards beaten in; and it was as though the wind had come down a smoking chimney. The pair fell back on either side of the black stream that gushed out like water. Then cried Carlton in his voice of command:
"Look here! you stay where you are, Tom."
"With you, sir?"