“You stop drenching my house with water, and go home!” said she.
Everybody began to hush and stare, but Tommy Gregg gave one squeaking cry of fire as if in defiance.
“There is no fire,” said Caroline Liscom. “My house is not on fire, and has not been on fire. I am getting tea, and the kitchen chimney always smokes when the wind is west. I don't thank you, any of you, for coming here and turning my house upside down and drenching it with water, and lugging my furniture out-of-doors. Now you can go home. I don't see what fool ever sent you here!”
The engine stopped playing, and you could hear the water dripping off the south end of the house. The windows were streaming as if there had been a shower. Everybody looked abashed, and the chief engineer of the fire department—who is a little nervous man who always works as if the river were on fire and he had started it—asked meekly if they shouldn't bring the furniture back.
“No,” said Caroline Liscom, “I want you to go home, and that is all I do want of you.”
Then the mother boarder spoke—she was evidently not easily put down. “I refuse to return to the house or to allow my family to do so unless I am officially notified by the fire department that the fire is extinguished,” said she.
“Then you can stay out-of-doors,” said Caroline Liscom, and we all gasped to hear her, though we secretly admired her for it.
The boarder glared at her in a curious kind of way, like a broadside of stoniness, but Caroline did not seem to mind it at all. Then the boarder changed her tactics like a general on the verge of defeat. She sidled up to Mr. Spear, the chief engineer, who was giving orders to drag home the engine, and said in an unexpectedly sweet voice, like a trickle of honey off the face of a rock: “My good man, am I to understand that I need apprehend no further danger from fire! I ask for the sake of my precious family.”
Mr. Spear looked at her as if she had spoken to him in Choctaw, and she was obliged to ask him over again. “My good man,” said she, “is the fire out?”
Mr. Spear looked at her as if he were half daft then, but he answered: “Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'am, certainly, ma'am, no danger at all, ma'am.” Then he went on ordering the men: “A leetle more to the right, boys! All together!”