If I had been disposed to make any objection, I had no opportunity, for Phaeton immediately made a dive for a place where there was a longer interval than usual between the men, and seized the rope. Not to follow him would have seemed like desertion, and I thought if I was ever to be a boy of spirit, this was the time to begin.
When a boy for the first time laid his hand upon the drag-rope of an engine under swift motion, he experienced a thrill of mingled joy and fear to which nothing else in boy-life is comparable. If he missed his hold, or tired too soon, he would almost certainly be thrown to the ground and run over. If he could hang on, and make his legs fly fast enough, he might consider himself as sharing in the glory when the machine rolled proudly up in the light of the burning building, and was welcomed with a shout.
There comes to most men, in early manhood, a single moment which perhaps equals this in its delicious blending of fear and rapture—but let us leave that to the poets.
Phaeton and I hung on with a good grip, while the inspiration of the fire in sight, and the enthusiasm of our company, seemed to lend us more than our usual strength and speed. But before we reached the fire, a noise was heard on a street that ran into ours at an angle some distance ahead. The foreman's ear caught it instantly, and he knew it was Cataract Eight doing her best in order to strike into the main road ahead of us.
"Jump her, men! jump her!" he shouted, and pounded on the brakes with his tin trumpet.
The eighty legs and four wheels on which Red Rover Three was making her way to the fire each doubled its speed, while forty mouths yelled "Ki yi!" and the excited foreman repeated his admonition to "Jump her, boys! jump her!"
| "JUMP HER, BOYS! JUMP HER!" |
Phaeton and I hung on for dear life, though I expected every moment to find myself unable to hang on any longer. Sometimes we measured the ground in a sort of seven-league-boot style, and again we seemed to be only as rags fastened to the rope and fluttering in the wind. The men at the tongue were tossed about in all sorts of ways. Sometimes one would be lying on his breast on the end of it where it curved up like a horse's neck, and the next minute one or both of them would be thrown almost under it. Whenever a wheel struck an uneven paving-stone, these men would be jerked violently to one side, and we could feel the shock all along the rope. It seemed sometimes as if the engine was simply being hurled through the air, occasionally swooping down enough in its flight to touch the ground and rebound again. All the while the church-bells of the city, in the hands of sextons doubly excited by fire and fees, kept up a direful clang. I doubt whether the celebrated clang of Apollo's silver bow could at all compare with it.
As we neared the forks of the road, the foreman yelled and pounded yet more vociferously, and through the din we could hear that Cataract Eight was doing the same thing. At last we shot by the corner just in time to compel our rival to fall in behind us, and a minute or two later we burst through the great ring of people that surrounded the fire, and made our entrance, as it were, upon the stage, with the roaring, crackling flames of three tall buildings for our mighty foot-lights.