The Boy Scouts at the Panama Canal

by John Henry Goldfrap

Men had already unhitched the plunging horses and tied them to a tree. But it was soon evident that the engine must lie where it was for the present.

“Can’t do nawthin’ with her,” decided the foreman and Ed Blossom, after a necessarily hurried examination, “but say,” continued the foreman, enthusiastically, as if the breakage of the engine was only a secondary consideration, “that rescue of the little gal was as plucky a thing as I ever seen.”

And there was no one in that crowd who did not agree with him. But there was no time to linger by the engine. The thing to be done was to push on to the fire. The crowd rushed along and the foreman stopped to say to Rob aside:—

“You boys must help us keep the crowd back while we form a bucket line; it’s our only chance to save the place now—and a mighty slim one,” he added, as again a red tongue of flame slashed the dark firmament like a scarlet scimitar.

“There goes the last of the old ’cademy!” cried a man as he saw. “In an hour’s time there won’t be a stick of it left.”

Without the engine to pump a stream through the pipes, the hose cart was useless and was abandoned where it rested. Under the foreman’s directions the Boy Scouts invaded houses and borrowed and commandeered every bucket, pail or can they could find. Everything that would hold water was rushed to the scene.

There was a creek opposite the blazing Academy, and while the Boy Scouts held back the crowd the firemen formed a double line and passed the filled utensils rapidly from hand to hand. As fast as they were emptied they came back again to be refilled by those at the creek end of the line. With improvised staves, cut and broken from shrubs, the boys held the crowd back. The method was this: each lad held the ends of two staves, the other ends of which were grasped by his comrades on either side of him. This formed a sort of fence and to the credit of the Hampton citizens be it said they had too much respect for the good work of the Boy Scouts to try and press forward unduly.

The Boy Scouts were on duty now. Alert, watchful, aching to be taking part in the active scene before them, they schooled themselves into doing their best in the—by comparison—hum-drum task assigned to them.

The Academy, an aged brick building, was wreathed in flames. From the cupola on top, from which had sounded for so many years the morning summons to study, was spouting vivid fire. They could see Dr. Ezekiel Jones, the head of the school, and some of the other instructors running about in the brilliantly lighted grounds and saving armfuls of books and papers. The fire appeared to be on the middle floors. At any rate up to this time it had been possible for the men bent on saving what they could to dart in at the big front doors, reappearing with what they had been able to salvage from the flames.

With the pitifully inadequate means at their command, the firemen could do little more than work like fiends at passing buckets. It was necessary to be doing something, but even the stoutest hearted and most hopeful of the onlookers knew that the case was hopeless.