For the crackling, blistering heat that parched the flooring underfoot, with the sudden volume of smoke that rolled upward, betrayed the condition of things no less than the thin tongues of flame that licked upward between the boards. In the regions under the stage the conflagration had broken out; they heard the shouts of the stage-hands, the crash of glass fire-bombs breaking one after another, and next moment a solitary man, smoke-blackened and red-faced, burst upward from the regions below, and, rushing to the fire-hose, coiled like a brown snake against the bare masonry of the wall, began to haul it down. As the man tugged and swore at the hose, other voices shouted and other feet clattered, and half a dozen other men, singed and blackened like so many demons, emerged as the first had done, from those conjectural lower depths.
“It’s no use—no use!� they shouted as they ran, and the fireman dropped the hose and ran with them. They did not have to cross the charring, blistering stage, for they were on the right side for the passage-way. They fought and struggled, shrieking, in the narrow exit, blocked by their terrified bodies.
“Come! Didn’t you hear?� shouted Mr. Lanter. He caught Miss Minota by the skirt and tugged at it like a faithful terrier. “Run!� he shouted again. But a choking volume of smoke, a blast of fiercer heat fanned up from below. The boards of the stage were now in flames. And the flames were of beautiful, ravishingly-delicate shades of blue and hyacinth and orange-red. And they devoured where they licked with a deadly greed and a purring, crackling kind of satisfaction.... “Come!� Mr. Lanter shouted again. The giantess had sunk upon her knees, he shook her violently by the shoulder, and she lifted her large, terrified face and staring blue eyes, now for the first time upon a level with his own.
“I dasn’t!� she cried. “The floor wouldn’t bear me—I should never git across! Save yourself while you have time!� As she sobbed and shuddered, Mr. Lanter put his arm round her, as though she had been quite an ordinary-sized girl.
“Pluck up!� he shouted, for the fire roared as triumphantly as though Kneeman’s Star Musée were the choicest morsel in the world. “I’ll get you out of this or burn with you, by—thunder!� and he kissed her. The kiss seemed to revive Miss Minota, for she gasped, and struggled to her feet, and looked with him upon a wall of rejoicing flame that soared upward between them and the passage-way. “These doors behind us—where do they lead?� Mr. Lanter shouted, and Miss Minota shouted back, “To the dressing-rooms!�
There was no way of escape before them; the iron curtain walled them in. As the slim greedy tongues of fire began to lick the boards on which they stood, they retreated to the back of the stage. But the stifling smoke and the greedy fire followed them, and the end of things seemed not far off.... It seemed quite natural now that they should be holding hands. They were blackened both, and smoke-begrimed, parched and giddy with the terrific heat, and the incandescent air fanned on their smirched faces as though the wings of Azrael had stirred it; but they were a comfort to each other. To be heard by each other in that fiendish tumult of insentient things was impossible; but they pressed close to one another like children in the smoky dark, and held one another’s hands.
“I don’t know as I’d choose to have things different,� said a grip of Mr. Lanter’s; and the answering squeeze of Miss Minota’s large hand said, “Thank you for helping me to die so like an ordinary-sized girl!� But the hand she pressed seemed to melt in hers and slip away, and, groping downward in the dun-colored smother, the giantess touched the senseless body of Mr. Lanter lying at her feet. And then she gave a cry of love and grief and anger mingled, as an ordinary-sized woman might have done—and lifted her lover from the blistering floor as though he had been a baby. The smoke seemed less dense a few feet beyond where she stood, and, moving forward with Mr. Lanter held upon one arm, the other outstretched gropingly, Miss Minota bruised her knuckles against a wooden door. It was the high, narrow door of solid, iron-clamped timber (usually situated at the back of the scene-dock), by which scenery and the more bulky properties were hoisted up to or removed from the stage of Kneeman’s Musée. In the joy of the discovery Miss Minota cried out. Then she laid down Mr. Lanter very gently on the floor, and fumbled for the door-bolts. But the door opened by a winch and lever, and Miss Minota fumbled in vain. A chill despair seized her. He lay so helpless and inert at her feet that he might have been dead! “O Lord!� Miss Minota prayed, “where’s the use in You havin’ made me so much bigger than other folk if I can’t save him? Help me to do it, and I’ll never go back on You by grumblin’ at my size any more!�
A dizziness overcame her, she reeled and staggered against the side wall of the scene-dock, bruising her knee against something that fell with a dull, reverberating crash. It was a solid bar of iron used by a professional athlete in a weight-lifting exhibition, and it might have weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. The crash of its fall brought Miss Minota to herself. She stooped, and found and lifted it, and exultant, for the first time, in the stature and the strength that marked her out and set her apart from her ordinary-sized sisters, the giantess attacked the door. One battering blow from the weapon wielded by those tremendous arms, and the hinges started and the stout planks split; a second, and a plank crashed splintering outward; a third, and a shout went up from the crowd assembled in the street below, as, amid volumes of escaping smoke, the begrimed and fire-scorched figure of Miss Minota appeared, carrying the insensible body of Mr. Lanter in her arms.
“Well,� said Madame Lanter, the Colossal American Marvel, some months later, to an interviewer specially despatched from the office of the Boston Magpie, “I guess you know what happened after that!� She blushed a little, being yet a bride, and coyly turned her wedding ring, a golden circlet of the dimensions of a baby’s bracelet, upon her colossal finger. “We brought him to, and then he brought it off. Flesh an’ blood is flesh an’ blood, an’ we all have our weak p’ints!—and if I did lay out never to marry a man as I couldn’t look up to—I guess it would take half a dozen of my size, standing on each other’s heads, to equal the loftiness of Mr. Lanter’s mind!�