The Third Alarm: A Story of the New York Fire Department

by James L. Ford

And throughout the storm Bruce slept as calmly as a child, knowing nothing of all that that window-curtain meant for him. A gust fiercer than the others tore the light band which held the curtain to the wall and sent it fluttering against the gas jet. It blazed up and caught the woodwork about the window and then another gust of wind, pausing in its swift flight to the far north, scattered the blazing particles about the room, and fanned the flames that were eating their way through the handsome woodwork. Outside, beneath the window where the curtain had flapped for a moment before, the snow lay in huge untrodden drifts. There was no one there to note the blaze which had started in the room on the fifth floor, nor was there any chance watcher in the silent houses over the way to give the alarm.

It was twenty minutes after one when the idle wind blew the curtain against the flame, and at precisely twenty-five minutes of two a servant rushed, bareheaded, into the street, and, breaking for himself a path through the heavy drifts of snow, made straight for a lamp-post with red glass in its lamp that stood two blocks away. There was a red box on this lamp-post, and, although his fingers were numb with cold, the servant had it open in a jiffy, and in another second had pulled down the hook which he found inside. Before he had removed his hand from the box the number of the station had been received at headquarters and the night operator had sent the alarm to the companies in the immediate vicinity of the fire. A few seconds later half a dozen truck and engine companies, warned by the electric current, had started from their quarters and were on their way through the fierce, pelting storm. The men were buttoning their coats and pulling their fire-helmets well down over their heads as they were borne on truck and engine through the silent streets. There was no time for ceremony or roll-call in the houses into which the electricity had come with its dread warning. Not one of those men against whose stern, set faces the wind blew the keen flakes of snow, knew what awaited him at the end of this midnight journey. They were actuated by but one purpose, and that was to be at the fire as soon as possible.

And as the firemen bore down in swift flight from the four points of the compass upon the doomed structure, servants went hurrying through the corridors, knocking on every door and arousing the sleeping guests with shrill cries of “Fire!” Men, women, and children were emerging from their rooms, some calm and cool, others stricken with an awful terror, some in their night-clothes, and others partly dressed, and all hurrying as fast as they could to the staircase or elevator.

And then a cry went up in every corridor, “The elevator’s afire! Make for the staircase!”

It was indeed true. The elevator shaft, acting as a draft like the tall chimney of a manufactory, had drawn the flames toward itself with resistless force, and the fire was now roaring and raving up the square shaft, burning the woodwork and spreading destruction from floor to floor.

A stranger, seeing the awful conflagration that had broken out so suddenly on that night of storm and snow, would have said, without hesitation, that the city was doomed to a repetition of that hurricane of smoke and flames that swept through Chicago years ago, and left of that fair city nothing but a waste of smoking ashes. The most destructive of all elements had begun its deadly work, and who could say what limit there would be to the destruction of life and property which would result?

But, happily for the sleeping city, there was arrayed that night against the devouring flames, the Fire Department of New York—the bravest and brainiest of men, armed with the finest appliances that modern science could produce—and it was with a knowledge of that fact and with a confidence in the courage, skill and fidelity of this branch of the municipal government, that men and women throughout the snow-covered town slept on peacefully throughout the storm.

“The horses bounded to their places.”—Page [343].

And the electricity flashing along the wire from the headquarters up-town entered the silent truck house ruled by Chief Trask, and with one stroke of the gong transformed it into a scene of activity. The men who were on watch on the ground floor, sprang from their seats by the stove, and the horses, released by the electric current, bounded to their places, three in front of the heavy truck, and one between the shafts of the chief’s red wagon.