Once in the kitchen an exclamation of terror burst from his lips.
The room was illumined by a line of fire, seemingly extending entirely across the floor, which was fringed by a dense smoke that rose nearly to the ceiling, and, beside the table, where she had evidently fallen, lay Aunt Hannah, struggling to smother with bare hands the yellow, dancing flames that had fastened upon her clothing.
It needed not the fragments of glass and brass to tell Seth that the little woman had accidentally fallen, breaking the lamp she carried, and that the fire was fed by oil.
Like a flash there came into his mind the memory of that night when Dud Wilson overturned a lamp on the floor of his news-stand, and he had heard it said then that the property might have been saved if the boys had smothered the flames with their coats, or any fabric of woollen, instead of trying to drown it out with water.
He pulled off his coat in a twinkling, threw it over the prostrate woman, and added to the covering rag rugs from the floor, pressing them down firmly as he said, in a trembling voice, much as though speaking to a child:
“Don’t get scared! We can’t put the fire out with water; but I’ll soon smother it.”
“You needn’t bother about me, my child; but attend to the house! It would be dreadful if we should lose the dear old home!”
“I’ll get the best of this business in a jiffy; but it won’t do to give you a chance of bein’ burned.”
“There is no fire here now.” And Aunt Hannah threw back the rugs, despite Seth’s hold upon them, to show that the flames were really quenched. “For mercy’s sake, save the house! It’s the only home I ever knew, an’ my heart would be wellnigh broken if I lost it!”
Before she had ceased speaking Seth was flinging rug after rug on the burning oil, for Aunt Hannah, like many another woman living in the country, had an ample supply of such floor coverings.