“You forget—baby—ba–i–by!” roared the husband.
A wild shriek was Mrs Twitter’s reply.
The quiet man with the brass helmet had run up the Escape quite regardless of these explanations. At the same time top windows were opened up, and little night-dressed figures appeared at them all, apparently making faces, for their cries were drowned in the shouts below.
From these upper windows smoke was issuing, but not yet in dense, suffocating volumes. The quiet man of the Escape entered a second floor window through smoke and flames as though he were a salamander.
The crowd below gave him a lusty cheer, for it was a great surging crowd by that time; nevertheless it surged within bounds, for a powerful body of police kept it back, leaving free space for the firemen to work.
A moment or two after the quiet fireman had entered, the night-dressed little ones disappeared from the other windows and congregated, as if by magic, at the window just above the head of the Escape. Almost simultaneously the fly-ladder of the Escape—used for upper windows—was swung out, and when the quiet fireman had got out on the window-sill with little Lucy in his arms and little Alice held by her dress in his teeth, its upper rounds touched his knees, as if with a kiss of recognition!
He descended the fly-ladder, and shoved the two terrified little ones somewhat promptly into the canvas shoot, where a brother fireman was ready to pilot them together xxx to the ground. Molly being big had to be carried by herself, but Willie and Fred went together.
During all this time poor Mrs Frog had given herself over to the one idea of screaming “baby! bai–e–by!” and struggling to get free from the two policemen, who had come to the relief of Sir Richard, and who tenderly restrained her.
In like manner Mr and Mrs Twitter, although not absolutely in need of restraint, went about wringing their hands and making such confused and contradictory statements that no one could understand what they meant, and the firemen quietly went on with their work quite regardless of their existence.
“Policeman!” said Sam Twitter, looking up in the face of Number 666, with a piteous expression, and almost weeping with vexation, “nobody will listen to me. I would go up myself, but the firemen won’t let me, and my dear wife has such an idea of sticking to truth that when they ask her, ‘Is your baby up there?’ she yells ‘No, not our baby,’ and before she can explain she gasps, and then I try to explain, and that so bamboozles—”