With one bound Johnny was out of his chair and across the room. The next second found him aboard an elevator, dropping through space. Ten seconds from the time the alarm had sounded he was in a long, low built, powerful car, speeding westward.
It would have been difficult to guess Johnny’s age as he sat erect in the car which the city’s Fire Chief drove like mad. He might have been in his late teens. His small stature suggested that. He might have been twenty-two; his blue fireman’s uniform with its brass buttons would have seemed to prove this. But for all his uniform Johnny was not a fireman. The Chief had a very special reason for allowing him to wear that uniform.
For a week, night and day, Johnny had haunted the room he had just left. During all that time the powerful red car had waited below, parked outside the door.
That room of many odd noises and strange lights was the central fire station of a great city. Every fire alarm turned in night or day in this city of three million people came to this central station. The tickers told of fire-box calls. The telephone was ever ready for the call of some woman who had upset her grease can on the stove, or some person who had discovered a blaze coming from the sixteenth floor of a skyscraper. Tens of thousands of calls a year; yet this untiring ear, listening by day and night, hears and passes on every one. And it was in this central station that Johnny had waited so long. More than a thousand calls had come ticking and ringing in, yet he had turned a deaf ear to them all until the man at the phone had said quietly: “That’s one of yours. School at Fourteenth and Van Buren.” Then he had leaped to his duty. And now he was speeding westward.
Johnny was after a firebug. A firebug is a person who willfully sets fire to property, whether his own or another’s. They’re a desperate lot, these firebugs. Some are hired for a fee. Some work for themselves. All are bad, for who could be good who would willfully destroy that which cost men hundreds, perhaps thousands, of days of toil? Yet some are worse than others. Some burn for greed or gain, while others light the torch in the name of some mistaken idea of principle.
The firebug Johnny had been sent out to catch certainly had some strange bent to his nature. Two schools, a recreation center and a bathhouse had been destroyed, and here was another school fire at night. And in all these fires the firebug had neither been seen nor traced.
The police, fire inspectors and insurance detectives were all on his trail, yet all were baffled. And now the Fire Chief had called Johnny to his aid. “For,” he had said, “sometimes a youngster discovers things which we elders are blind to.”
So, with their clanging gong waking echoes in the deserted midnight streets, they sped westward to Fourteenth, then southward. Before they had gone two blocks in this direction they caught the light of the fire against the sky.
“It’s going to be a bad one,” said the Chief, increasing his speed. “In the very heart of the poorest tenement section—have to turn in the second alarm at once. We can’t afford to fool around with this one.”
These words were scarcely out of his mouth when they reached the edge of a throng drawn there by the fire.