“Heaven save us!” ejaculated Billings wildly. “It’s my house!”
He dashed into the store, and through to the back room, where he saw at once what had happened. His wife had put kerosene on the kitchen range, and there had been an explosion which meant destruction for the house.
Billings lifted his unconscious wife from the floor and ran out to the street. Then he went back to save what few pieces of furniture he might hope to get back before the fire took everything its own way.
The only hope lay in the fact that it was a brick structure, and not a frame one. The house had been built after the fire laws had forbidden the putting up of wooden buildings in that area. But there had been many brick houses put up before the era of iron-frame skyscrapers, and this was one of them.
An alarm had been turned in, and already members of the fire department were dashing up with their machines. It looked as if the fire would soon be overcome, when somebody shouted:
“Look! There’s somebody up top!”
The firemen, with their ladders, had already rescued a woman and two children from another window. But these people who were shouting for help from an attic were in the next house, which also had caught fire.
The firemen—efficient and cool-nerved, as all New York firemen are—put their ladders up. But owing to the formation of the house, it was impossible to get at the attic quickly.
Nick Carter had seen that it was a young girl at the window, and his wonderful memory carried him back to that night at Maple, where he had seen the girl they called Bessie Silvius, with her father, Roscoe Silvius, who had played and sung in the garden of the Savoy.
“That only confirms my belief that Howard Milmarsh is here,” he told himself. “It would be likely for them to live in the same house in New York if they could, after being friends in the wilds of Canada.”