Outside the engine house, suspended from a heavy cross-bar, was a steel rail borrowed from a railroad track, and bent into a hoop. When hit with a sledge-hammer it proclaimed to Fairport that the "consuming element" was at large.
At the moment Winthrop asked his question, over the village of Fairport and over the bay and marshes, and far out across the Sound, the great steel bar sent forth a shuddering boom of warning.
From the room above came a wild tumult of joyous yells.
"Fire!" shrieked the vamps, "fire!"
The two men crouching by the cellar window heard the rush of feet, the engine banging and bumping across the sidewalk, its brass bell clanking crazily, the happy vamps shouting hoarse, incoherent orders.
Through the window Sam lowered a bag of tools he had taken from Winthrop's car.
"Can you open the lock with any of these?" he asked.
"I can kick it open!" yelled Winthrop joyfully. "Get to your sister, quick!"
He threw his shoulder against the door, and the staples flying before him sent him sprawling in the coal-dust. When he reached the head of the stairs, Beatrice Forbes was descending from the clubroom, and in front of the door the two cars, with their lamps unlit and numbers hidden, were panting to be free.
And in the North, reaching to the sky, rose a roaring column of flame, shameless in the pale moonlight, dragging into naked day the sleeping village, the shingled houses, the clock-face in the church steeple.