“That’s twelve o’clock that’s just sounded,” exclaimed Chief Trask, “and the horses always jump into their places every time the gong sounds. It wouldn’t do to leave it to their judgment whether they should turn out or not, and besides, frequent alarms keep them from getting rusty. If they only turned out when there was a regular alarm, they would stay here sometimes two to three days at a time and that wouldn’t be good for men or horses either. It’s only by constant practice that we can be kept always on the alert. You know that at sea they often ring a false fire alarm, just for the sake of keeping the ship’s fire brigade in practice. Now Captain Murphy will show you the tender, or hose wagon as they used to call it.”
Accordingly the captain showed Bruce the two great coils of hose, and the different nozzles fitted for different emergencies, and he told him how the hook and ladder truck served at a fire very much in the same capacity as the sapper and miner corps in the army.
“The hook and ladder company carries the picks and axes, scaling ladders, net and all that sort of thing, while all we do is to turn a stream of water on and put the fire out. There’s a good deal of competition between the different companies and there’s nothing we hate more than to get to a fire and find that another company has got its stream on first. A few years ago, when the Duke of Sutherland was here, the fire commissioners determined to show him what the New York department could do in the way of getting to a fire in quick time. You see, the Duke used to belong to the London brigade, and has been what we call a ‘fire crank’ all his life. They came down to this engine house one night, and when they went away we knew that the chances were that we’d be called out before long. As they went up the street I heard the commissioner say to the Duke ‘We’ll go over to Twelfth street and Fifth avenue and ring the alarm there.’ So I determined to have my men all ready so that at the very first stroke of the gong we could get out without waiting to get the number of the station. I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to be beaten by any other company that night, so I had everything ready with the driver in his seat, and before the gong had struck twice, we were off. And we made such time getting over there, that we came up to where the party was standing and found the Duke with his hands still on the alarm box. You never saw a man more astonished in your life than he was.”
On their way back the chief again impressed upon the boy’s mind the enormous value of time. “It is necessary,” he said, “first of all, to have everything in apple-pie order and ready to start at a moment’s notice. Then when the alarm comes we must be ready and able to go without a second’s delay. Each man has his own place to fill and if a man neglects to snap a horse’s collar or the engineer fails to get to his place on the ash-pan in time, the chief of the battalion knows whom to blame.”
Chapter IV.
One bright afternoon in May, Bruce found himself riding beside the chief up Fifth avenue, and as they rode the elder pointed out to him the principal public buildings, gave brief histories of some of the well-known landmarks and explained how the great fortunes had been rolled up which enabled some men to live in Fifth avenue palaces with practically unlimited incomes.
Bruce wondered how it was that his guide should happen to know so much about the fashionable part of the city, even more in fact than he seemed to know about the poorer quarters. It may have been that Chief Trask saw what was uppermost in the boy’s mind, for he said, as if in answer to a question, “I have to know about every part of the city, and it is particularly valuable for me to keep the run of what we call the brown stone district. The men who live here own property all over the city—factories, apartment houses, tenement houses and private dwellings—besides what they live in themselves. If there is ever a riot in the city, and I hope there will never be another one, the mob will make a rush for Fifth avenue. There are the Vanderbilt houses, those big brown buildings opposite the Cathedral. If fire were to consume them it would be a loss to the whole city, because they’ve got pictures and statues and books in them that could never be replaced. And my idea is that in time those valuable things will find their way into the Metropolitan Museum or some other public institution where they will be safe from fire and thieves, and can be seen by everybody.”
“Do they often have fires in these big brown stone houses?” asked Bruce.
“Not very often,” replied Mr. Trask, “but they have them sometimes in the hotels and fashionable apartment houses, and perfect death traps some of those places are. There was one fire in a dwelling-house not long ago that came near proving fatal, and would have if it hadn’t been for our hook and ladder company getting there in time. It wasn’t much of a fire either, just what you might call a little blaze and a good deal of smoke in the third story, but it came near costing a lady her life all the same.”
“How was that?” inquired the boy eagerly.