A West Point Treasure; Or, Mark Mallory's Strange Find

by Upton Sinclair

Perhaps you think to be told it was a mouse who fired that gun and saved Mark. Well, in a sense it was true.

The mouse who is our hero lived in the West Point Hotel, situated a very short way beyond the camp. And the tale of his deed, unlike the mouse’s tail, is a very short one. It was simply that some one left a box of matches upon a table in the kitchen, and that the mouse got after those matches. There you have it.

Some of them fell to the floor, and the mouse went after them. He bit one, after the fashion of inquisitive mice; then, scared at the result, turned and scampered off in haste. Inquisitive persons sometimes make no end of trouble.

There was a piece of paper near the match, and then more paper, and the leg of the table. There was also plenty of time and no one to interfere. Every one who was in that building, except the clerks and the watchman in the office, was sleeping soundly by that time of night, and so the small crackling fire was in no hurry. It crept up the leg of the table, its bright forked tongues dancing about gayly as it did so. Then it leaped over to a curtain at the window, and then still more swiftly to the window frame, and still there was no one to see it.

Quietly at rest in that hotel, and unsuspecting, were some dozens of guests, including one that interests us above all others, Grace Fuller. Her room was now on the top floor of the hotel, and in the corner of the building that was fast getting warm and choking.

It is a horrible thing, the progress of a fire through the still watches of the night. Creeping ahead and crackling it goes, so slowly and yet with such deadly and inevitable purpose. It has been called a devouring fiend; it has greedy tongues that steal on and lick up everything, and grow hungrier and more savage as they feed. And it breathes forth volumes of deep black poison that stupefy its victims till it comes to seize them.

The unguarded kitchen of the hotel was soon a roaring furnace, and then the fire crept out into the hall, and as the glass of the windows cracked and a rush of fresh air fanned in, the flames leaped up the staircase as if it had been the chimney, and then spread through the parlor, and on upward, farther and farther still. And how were people to get down those stairs if they did not hurry about it?

The people were not thinking of that; they were not even beginning to have bad dreams until the smoke got just a little thicker, until the halls outside got just a little hotter, until the fire had moved on from the basement to the ground floor, and from the ground floor to the next above. And even then they were not destined to discover it. That task was left to some one else.

It was a sentry, a sentry of the regular army, facing the walk called Professor’s Row. That sentry had no business to leave his post, but he did it none the less, and dashed across the street to look, as he caught sight of that unusual glare from the windows of the old hotel. An instant later he had swung up his musket to his shoulder, snapped back the trigger, and then came the roar of the gun that the startled cadets had heard from the deep recesses of the fort.

The sentry, the instant he had fired, lowered the gun, snapped out the cartridge, and slid in another to fire again. Before the camp had gotten its eyes open a third report had come also, the dreaded signal of fire. The sentry had done his duty then, and he set out once more to march back and forth upon his post.