The people below watched in breathless excitement. At length he passed the boundary between the two houses. The houses were old, and the party-wall did not come through the roof. The smoke was dense, almost suffocating. He had to dodge his head this way and that to try and get a breath of air. At last the crowd shouted, "Far enough."
He paused, and, resting on his knees and toes, raised the iron bar high and brought it down with a mighty crash on the slates. They rose in a shower of fragments; and, when he could see, the laths were exposed in two or three places. Seizing hold of the laths he drew himself up, and, standing upon the laths, which gave him a firm foothold, he thrust the bar down--as one uses a pavior--until he had made a hole big enough to allow his body through.
Into this hole he dropped, and found himself in an unboarded cockloft over the room in which he had seen Marion. Between two of the joists he now thrust his bar. Already the smoke was thick in the cockloft, but when the hole was made in the ceiling the smoke rushed up in a dense column.
Not a moment was to be lost. Perhaps it was already too late.
He smashed down the ceiling, and in a few seconds had cleared a space large enough to allow his body to pass between the joists. He threw away the bar and dropped his legs through the hole and lowered himself until he hung at full length from the joists by his hands. Then he let go.
The room was so full of smoke he could not see anything distinctly. One thing was clear, Marion was no longer standing at the window. Six minutes had passed since he left the street--only six minutes! She was then standing at the window, but in those six minutes what might not have happened?
Meantime, the firemen had not been idle. They had got their comrade up out of the area, and were busy with a long rope. One of the men got upon the stump of the escape, and having secured the end of the rope to a hammer and coiled twenty or thirty yards of the rope in his left hand, he swung the hammer round his head three or four times, and then let go.
The hammer flew upward towards the roof next that of the burning house; the coil ran out of the man's left hand--the hammer disappeared over the roof. Another fireman now rushed into the house over which the line lay, and in a few seconds the rope was hauled a little from the back of the house. Then the fireman who had gone into the adjoining house came to a window on the top-floor, and cried out:
"Pull in!"
Just as this man cried "Pull in!" Cheyne saw, through the smoke, something lying on the ground near the window. He could feel, by his unshod feet, that the floor of the room was already hot; the smoke was stifling. Everything depended on the haste he made.