Wilde paused a single instant to shout back:
"I leave you to your fate, my handsome doctor! Ha! ha! ha!"
But fate did not intend Jay Gardiner to die just then, even though he sunk back upon the flags with an awful groan and fully realized the horror of the situation.
That groan saved him. A fireman heard it, and in less time than it takes to tell it, a brawny, heroic fellow sprung through the iron door-way, which Wilde in his mad haste had not taken time to close.
A moment more, and the fireman had carried his burden up through the flames, and out into the pure air.
The fresh air revived the young doctor, as nothing else could have done.
"Give me your name and address," he said, faintly, to the fireman. "You shall hear from me again;" and the man good-naturedly complied, and then turned back the next instant to his duty.
In the excitement, he forgot to ask whose life it was he had saved.
The fire proved to be a fearful holocaust. Canal Street had never known a conflagration that equaled it.
Doctor Gardiner made superhuman efforts to enter the tenement-house, to save the life of the old basket-maker—Bernardine's hapless father—who stood paralyzed, incapable of action, at an upper window. But no human being could breast that sea of flame; and with a cry of horror, the young doctor saw the tenement collapse, and David Moore was buried in the ruins.