“Here she comes to answer for herself,” said Mason, as the second engine dashed up to the station, and the men were joined by their comrades.
“We’ve got it out,” said Dale, sitting down before the desk to enter the particulars in his diary; “it was a private house, and well alight when we got there, but the Paddington engine was playing on it, and we soon got it under.”
“Faix, it’s well them stutterers didn’t kape us longer, else the whole house would have bin burnt out intirely,” observed Joe Corney, binding up a slight wound in his thumb, which he had received from a splinter.
Most of the men were more or less begrimed with charcoal and smoke, and otherwise bore marks of their recent sharp though short skirmish, but none of them deemed it necessary to remove these evidences of devotion to duty until they had refreshed themselves with a pipe.
“Were there people in the house?” inquired Frank.
“Ay, but Pickford was there with the escape, an’ got ’em all out before we came up,” said one.
“Pickford said he couldn’t help laughing after he got ’em out, at the remembrance o’ their faces. When he first went in they was all sound asleep in the top floor, for the smoke was only beginnin’ to show there, an’ the surprise they got when he jump in among ’em an’ shouted was wonderful to behold.”
“Not so wonderful,” observed Bill Moxey, “as the surprise I seed a whole man-o’-war’s crew get by consequence o’ the shout o’ one of her own men.”
“When was that? Let’s hear about it, Bill,” said Corney, stuffing down the tobacco in his pipe, and firing a battery of cloudlets into the air.
“We was in the Red Sea at the time,” said Moxey, clearing his throat, “layin’ at anchor, and a precious hot time we had of it. There was never a cloud a’most in the sky, and the sun was nigh hot enough to fry the decks off the ship. Cook said he’d half a mind to try to roast a junk o’ beef at it, but I never heard that he managed that. We slep’ on deck o’ nights, ’cause you might as well have tried to sleep in a baker’s oven as sleep below. The thing that troubled us most at that time was a tiger we had on board. It did kick up such a shindy sometimes! We thought it would break its cage an make a quid o’ some of us. I forget who sent it to us—p’raps it was the Pasha of Egypt; anyhow we weren’t sorry when the order was given to put the tiger ashore.