It was mighty hot, because the house next door was all afire, but the firemen were keeping all their hose on the side of Swatty's father's shop, trying to keep it from burning. We crouched down and kept our backs to the fire so the heat wouldn't shrivel us, and we got to the back door and it wasn't locked. We went in. It was hot—like an oven—inside, and the noise of all the water on the side of the house was like thunder, only louder. The inside of the shop was like under a waterfall. You wouldn't think anything so wet could burn, but it did. Before we were halfway to the front window the fire began to eat into the shop along the floor. The water on that side just turned to steam and dried as fast as it ran down.
Bony began to cry, but we hadn't any time to stop. Swatty took him by the hand and jerked him along, and we got to the window and I grabbed the fashion plate. Then we couldn't go back because the shop was mostly afire and we would have been burned up. So then Bony got real scared and ran to the front door and threw it open, and a stream from a hose caught him and sent him head over heels back into the shop where it was burning; he was knocked unconscious because his head hit a table leg.
So I didn't know what to do. I guess I began to cry. I crouched down in the window because I couldn't get out at the door on account of the stream of water that was coming in there a hundred miles a minute, and I couldn't go back because the back of the shop was all afire now. But Swatty crawled on his hands and knees under the table where Bony was, where the fire was beginning to burn harder, and he grabbed Bony and yanked him along the floor back to the window. I guess I helped him jerk Bony onto the window shelf, but just then another stream of water busted the window in. The glass fell all around us and one piece cut Swatty on the hand, but he only said, “Jump! Jump!”
Maybe we would have jumped, but we didn't. The firemen had got to the back of the building and had turned the hose in at the back window, and just when Swatty said, “Jump!” the stream of water hit us like a board. It took us as if we were pieces of paper and slammed us out of the broken window and halfway across the street, and threw us head over heels in the mud, and the fashion plate, with Mamie Little's father, came flying with us.
So I crawled over to where the fashion plate was and took hold of it and began to drag it to where Mamie Little was. A policeman came and took me by the shoulder and lifted me up, but I couldn't stand, and that was the first I knew my ankle was sprained. But Swatty got up himself and sassed the policeman that came to get him. He told him he had a right to go into his father's own shop if he wanted to, and that if the policeman said much more he would go back again.
I guess the whiskey exploded all right. Three more houses burned before they stopped the fire, but we didn't see that because Bony ran all the way home, and somebody carried me to a wagon, and drove home with me, and Swatty's father got him and took him up the main street and waled him on the hotel corner with a half-burned shingle that had blown from the lumber fire.
The next day my ankle hurt pretty bad and I stayed in bed with linament on it and after school Lucy came up to see me. “Come on up in my room and play,” I told her.