“Standart!” echoed Leon wonderingly.
Two firemen brushed past him and began the ascent, while the throng grew. “Easy, Jack! This ladder’s weak from the feelin’. All right, feller! We’ll take him in a sec! Ready, Jack? Here he comes! Got him? Lower away. Good work, kid! How’d you happen to be up here? Easy now, Jack!”
They brought the unconscious form of Alvin Standart cautiously down the ladder. Willing hands accepted the burden as an anxious silence fell over the crowd and bore it away. Then one of the firemen sprang up the ladder again.
“Wait till I give you a hand, lad!” he called to Monty.
“I’m all right, thanks,” was the answer. Monty crawled across the sill, found the ladder with his foot and began the descent. But he came very slowly, pausing between each step, and after watching a moment the fireman, who had paused halfway up, hurried to meet him. “Give me your feet,” he said. “Hold to the rungs with your hands and lower yourself slow. Jack, give us a hand up here. This feller’s all in!”
“I can manage,” said Monty faintly. But the fireman paid no heed to him. Instead, he was plucked bodily in arms and handed from one to the other and finally set on his feet on the turf.
“Thanks, partner,” he said. “The smoke got in my——”
Then his legs crumpled up and he fell into Leon’s arms.
Monty awoke some six hours later amidst strange surroundings. A boy whom he knew only by sight was standing across the room in front of a chiffonier. There was a second bed near by. The pictures on the gray paper were utterly unfamiliar.
Monty, conscious of being very tired and very sore as to throat and lungs, tried to puzzle things out. Before he had succeeded, however, the boy at the chiffonier caught his bewildered look in the mirror and turned.