“It’s the garret,” muttered the fireman. “There’s a garret running the length of the building. There’s a company coming against the fire from up there. We can probably stop it here, but this place is doomed. Unless we can get ’em out, every monkey of the lot will burn.”
There had been times when, in her dreams, Mazie had seen human faces distorted with fear, peering down from windows where flames reached out to grip them. But nothing she had ever dreamed of could be as bad as the sight of hundreds of monkeys, baboons, apes and chimpanzees, clinging to their cages and uttering plaintive cries and wild shrieks while their man-like faces were shrunken with fear.
In vain did their keepers attempt to call them down to the doors through which they might escape.
It seemed that they, like the birds, must meet a terrible death. But just when matters were at the worst, Mazie felt a tearing at the shoulder of her coat and turned to see Jerry snatched from his place there. To her surprise and consternation, she saw that the man who held the mascot tightly in his right hand was none other than the pink-eyed man whom she and Johnny suspected of being the firebug.
“Stop him!” she fairly screamed.
But she was too late. The man was already well away and up to the side of the great cage of monkeys. In his left hand he held a fireman’s axe.
The thing Mazie witnessed in the next three minutes impressed a picture on the sensitized film of her brain that she will never forget.
Holding Jerry up to the cage, the pink-eyed man allowed him to cling there for a full half minute. During that entire time the strange little creature kept up an incessant chatter that could be heard even above the screams of the frightened prisoners.
What it was he said, Mazie could not tell. She did realize that this monkey speech of his had an extraordinary effect upon the other monkeys. By the time his half minute speech was up, the screams had died down nearly to a whisper.
It was at this psychological moment that the pink-eyed man made his next move. With a single stroke of his axe he cut a perpendicular gash four feet long in the heavy wire screening of the cage. A second slash made a horizontal one quite as long. By turning out the ragged corners he made a large hole there. On the edge of this hole he placed Jerry.