Great-uncle Gem, for all his injured leg, must have put some speed into his search for Pomp. For, as Lee sped down the woods path, he could hear the old darky somewhere behind him hallooing, “Help! Help!” and clanging the dinner bell as he headed across the village towards the open hay fields where everybody was cutting grass while the weather held.
With that racket Pomp would stir up somebody, never a doubt! But Lee wasn’t wasting time waiting on reinforcements. With that last insistent tap-tap call of the telegraph still beating in his ears, he stretched his long legs down the path.
Hurtling through bushes, dodging swishing limbs, he burst panting into the clearing of the Bobb hilltop. Here no human sound greeted him. Instead, the awful crackle of flames filled the air. Whorls of smoke curled up from almost every part of the old shingle roof. As he looked, the smoke whorls began to burst into tongues of flame.
Lee raced to the door and flung himself inside, shouting, “Jimmy, Jimmy, where are you?”
There was no answer.
The heat and smoke were nearly overpowering. Lee dropped to the floor and crawled across the room. Yes, here by the ticker was Jimmy’s chair, and Jimmy in it, slumped in a huddle. Lifting the limp form to his shoulder, Lee staggered back to the door and out into the fresh air.
As he laid Jimmy down in the shelter of the trees on the side off the wind, shouts greeted him. The whole woods seemed alive with people. Pomp and his dinner bell had done their work.
While Lee revived Jimmy Bobb, an impromptu water-line formed. Like magic, buckets and tubs and even gourds of water passed up from the spring under the hill to the flaming hell of the roof. Cove women, not being given to style, wore plenty of clothing. Here and there, a wide apron or a voluminous Balmoral was shed, wetted and wielded as a weapon to beat down the flames. Crews of howling small boys broke pine brush for brooms and swept out any creeping line of flame that caught from sparks and headed for the fence, the slab-sided chicken house, or the cow shed.
Then it was over. The fire was out. Blackened rafters and a pall of smoke told what a fight it had been. The roof was gone, but the cabin walls stood, and the meager homemade furniture was safe.
Sarah Ann Bobb, stirred for once out of her habitual calm, stood near Jimmy, waving her hands and weeping.