There was a crash in the lower hall, and a great tongue of flame, like a red thirsty blade, licked in at us through the doorway. There was such a roaring now in our ears that we could not make ourselves heard except by shouting.
"Out of the window for our lives!" cried the doctor. "The stairs have fallen!"
The lawyer bestowed some angry but useless kicks on the lid of the box, and we piled out of the window on the roof of the back piazza. The wind, blowing strongly from the eastward, had kept most of the smoke and the flame away from the north side of the building.
But it was a fearsome sight to see the way things were going. The whole of the west wing, and the south also, to the roof, was one red smooch of flame against the tree-tops. The dark smoke curled over and hung close to the damp earth. It was some twelve or fifteen feet from the piazza roof to the ground, but a chinaberry-tree grew close to hand, spreading to the eaves.
The lawyer made one leap of it into the tree and crashed through it; and just as the roof on which we were standing shook and sloughed away and the flames burst up from below, the doctor and I caught at a branch and swung off together; but the limb broke beneath our weight. Down we came by the run, I landing full and fair upon the doctor's chest, which almost did for him for good and all.
Scrambling to our feet, Mr. Edgerton and I hauled him away to some distance from the house, and the cool rain helped to revive him, although for some minutes he drew breath with difficulty.
Then the three of us sat there on the wet grass and watched the house burn. I shall never forget it or the mixture of feelings which filled my mind and bosom. A sense of unreality, an inability to grasp the idea that it was really happening probably was uppermost.
The lawyer, whom I had always thought a cold-tempered person, was squatted cross-legged, Turk fashion, grasping the toes of his boots in either hand, and rocking himself to and fro, all the time muttering and scolding like a child, and, whether from the smoke or his anger and disappointment, the tears following one another down his cheeks.
The doctor, who had raised himself on his elbow, was the first to speak coherently.
"The burning of a mystery," he said. "Now what's to be done?"