Even as he spoke came the distant, insistent clang of bells, the blare and blast of many whistles, shrieking their warnings. It seemed but a second later when a belching fire-engine, followed by a stream of trucks, dashed perilously through the crowded street, while in their wake came a mob of hurrying people pouring from the dark doorways of the tenements. From a side street came a police patrol.
The boy climbed to the top of a stand and from that vantage point he saw a cloud of smoke issuing from a tenement building a couple of blocks away. As he looked a tongue of fire shot from one of its windows and licked its way up the side of the building.
“That’s down near where I live,” John Dean heard the boy say, as he leaped down from the box and started on a run. The rancher hastened after him, threading his way through the crowd. Back of them came another newsboy.
“Your house is burning up, Ted,” he shouted, but Ted had already seen the disaster that had come upon his home. It was a poor one indeed, but a home, nevertheless, that sheltered his mother. Ted wondered where she was. He knew that Helen at least was not there.
The cattleman had never seen a city fire. Before they arrived at the burning building, the police had driven back the fighting crowds and had drawn ropes across the street, past which no one dared go. Helmeted firemen rushed through doorways, drawing long lines of hose, while now and then, through the smoke and fire pouring from the windows, heroic men could be seen clinging to the face of the dingy building, pushing upward from ledge to ledge with their line of ladders.
Some of the men entered through the broken windows, only to appear again suffocated and choking from the smoke and flames, then returning to risk life and limb for those who might still be in the house, cut off from escape.
John Dean saw little of this, however. Back and forth he tramped through the crowds, never losing sight of his little newsboy friend. Ted’s face was white and tense.
“Has anybody seen Mrs. Marsh? Anybody seen mother?” he inquired on every hand, and the man took up the question, “Has anyone seen Mrs. Marsh?” But no one had.
They pressed their way to the rope, searching the faces of the long line of spectators.
“Move back there!” commanded the officer, and pushed the crowd from the straining rope. Ted scarcely heard the warning. He was standing gazing at a certain curling line of flame eating its way up the casement of a fourth floor window, and as the heated pane cracked and fell shattered to the pavement below, a sob broke from his lips. An instant later he darted beneath the rope, past the officer and toward the burning building.