“No, squire. Better leave them and the fish-houses and work on Boughton’s store and the cottages. They’re right in the path of the wind. It’ll be tough on Nailor and Thomas to lose their stand and houses, but you know what will happen if the fire gets into the dwellings.”
“I thought so all along––curse me if I didn’t!” yelled the judge, and then, turning toward a crowd of men who were looking apprehensively here and there, he shouted:
“All hands with the buckets now, lively!”
Suddenly the basement doors of Boughton’s store were thrown open and a huge, black-bearded man with a great voice appeared there.
“Buckets this way!” he bellowed, in a tone that rose clearly above the roar and crackle of the fire. As the men reached him he handed out the implements from great stacks at his feet––rubber buckets, wooden buckets, tin and iron buckets, new, old, rusty and galvanized. It was Pete Ellinwood, the fire marshal of the village and custodian of the apparatus.
Because in the hundred or more years of its existence there has never been water pressure in Grande Mignon, the fighting of a fire there with primitive means has become an exact and beautiful science.
A few bold spirits had disputed the wisdom of Squire Hardy’s orders to let the wharf and fish-house burn, and had attempted to give them a dousing. In 16 less than five minutes they had retreated, singed and hairless, due to a sudden explosion of a drum of oil.
“Play on Bill Boughton’s store!” came the order.
Already an iron ladder reached to the eaves of the building. Two men galloped up its length, dragging behind them another ladder with a pair of huge hooks at the end.