The Camp Fire Girls Go Motoring; Or, Along the Road That Leads the Way

by Hildegard G. Frey

I woke up with the strangest feeling I have ever had in my life. I remember dreaming that we had left the door open, and all the tobacco smoke from below had floated up into the room and was choking me. When I first awoke I thought that the racketers were still at it below, for from somewhere there came a horrible din. There was the sound of many voices shouting unintelligible things, when suddenly above the roar one voice shrieked out "Fire!" Then I knew. The room was filled with smoke, dense and choking.

"Wake up!" I shouted, shaking Sahwah, who was sleeping with me. I dragged her out of bed and we two ran into the other room where Nyoda and Nakwisi and Margery were sleeping. The smoke was still thicker there and I believe they must have been nearly suffocated. We had hard work rousing them. Above the shouts of the people in the street below we could hear an ominous crackling that increased every minute. At first I was so frightened I could hardly move. It was the first time I had ever been in a burning building. The time the tepee burned we were out of it in one jump, before we had realized what had happened. I shudder yet, when I hear crackling wood.

Nyoda's voice roused me to action. She had regained her wits and was cool-headed as usual. Margery clung to her and screamed and she shook her and told her to be quiet.

"Carry out your clothes if you can find them, girls," she said calmly, "but don't wait to put anything on."

We groped through the smoke and found our clothes on the chair beside the bed, and gathering them up went out into the hall. The hotel was old-fashioned, with a long, narrow wooden hallway running the entire length of the up-stairs, crossed in places by other halls. Somewhere along that hall was the stairway; we had a dim remembrance of the direction from which we had come up the night before. We had to grope our way along by keeping our hands on the wall, for the smoke was so thick that it was impossible to see a step before us. We reached the stairs at last. After one look we jumped back in alarm. The whole stairway was one mass of leaping flames. I have never seen such a dreadful sight. We groped our way back toward our rooms, which were at the front of the building, intending to lean out of the windows and shout for help from below. But we lost our way in the smoke and could not find the way back. There we were, caught like rats in a trap, with the flames beginning to come through the floor in places, and the smoke rolling around us in blinding, suffocating clouds. There was no escape, then. We were to perish in this hotel blaze. Would we ever be identified? How soon would they know at home? All these things flashed through my mind as we stood there in the midst of that awful nightmare.

Suddenly something appeared out of the smoke close beside us, something white and ghostlike. Then a voice spoke. "Follow me, girls," it said, and we knew that the ghost was a man with a towel tied over his face. "All of you get in line behind your mother," said the voice thickly, "and each one hold onto the one in front of you. Don't let go, or you'll be lost and I can't watch you."

We didn't even smile at his thinking Nyoda was our mother. With the military precision we have learned from long practice of doing things together, we formed in a goose line behind Nyoda, each one gripping tightly the hand of the one ahead of her, and thus we began to move forward. After what seemed a hundred years, but could not have been more than five minutes, we felt a gust of fresh air blowing on us, and knew that we were standing beside an open window.

"This window looks out on the roof of the second story at the back of the building," said the voice, "and it's an easy drop to the roof."

We had to take his word for it, for the smoke obscured everything so that we did not know whether we were going to drop three feet or thirty. The air coming in the window blew the smoke away from our faces for a moment and we got a breath, or otherwise I am afraid we would have strangled on the verge of being rescued. Without a moment's hesitation the hands that belonged to the towel and the voice seized Nyoda and swung her out of the window as if she had been a feather, and in a moment her "All right" told that she had landed safely on the roof. One by one he took us in the same manner. We were still in a dangerous position, for there was fire under us, although the worst blaze was at the front of the building, and as far as we could see there were no ladders anywhere around waiting to take us down.

"Confound these one-horse country towns, anyway", we heard the voice mutter, "that can't support a decent Fire Department.