"Mr. Robert," cried Bertha, wringing her hands. "Mr. Robert was in the study." The crowd looked up and measured the swift gains of the destructive element.
"Young Floyd?" said Chandler. Then he rushed into the house and up the first flight of winding stairs, the dog, as he did so, following him with a great fusillade of delighted barks.
"There's some one inside," said the crowd, and the rumor passed from mouth to mouth.
"Fire! Fire!" called Chandler from the corridor window above. "Yell, you fellows, as you never yelled before!"
In response a cry of "Fire!" went up from man, woman and child, bass and treble intermingling, loud enough to have waked the seven sleepers from their trance. But no one stirred inside. Just at this moment the tardy bells rang out the number of the box, and almost immediately, as an engine came rounding a distant corner and the great gray horses bounded up the grade, the uproar began to subside. On, on, past the doomed house, now enveloped in flames, to the nearest hydrant, the driver lashed his pair. The hydrant cover had been thrown off and the first block of coal flung into the engine's furnace before Patrolman Chandler reissued from the door which he had entered.
"There is no one there," he gasped, as if choking with the smoke. But the dog continued to leap about, accosting the bystanders appealingly, until his barks and pawing became a nuisance to several and they spurned him pettishly away.
Now engines from many directions came clattering by and the air was full of clangor. Lines of hose were unraveled, ladders hoisted against the walls, and finally, amid hoarse shouts that pierced the deep sighing of the flames within, a rubber-clad, helmeted fellow, with a nozzle strapped to his body, slowly led a line up to the second-story window, where the fire had apparently started. There was another interval of suspense, orders to and fro, and then a helpless pause. Something refused to work.
But the fire met no such impediment. Suddenly an explosion of uncertain origin shook the air, and the onlookers retreated in terror, as if the ground were yawning beneath them. Of a sudden one, two, three slack, snaky hose lines rounded out, and a burst of foam, battering in window-panes and sashes, inaugurated the great combat of elements—one angry, vindictive, as if ravening to sunder the bonds of control cast about it by the pigmy, its master, the other docile and benignant, but in the end the more puissant of the two.
"Exactly nine minutes from the start before a drop of water fell on that fire," said the bake-shop girl, who was noted for her accurate observation of time. By the "start" she meant the moment when Bertha and she collided on the doorsteps, but the fire must have gained a strong headway before that. For every timber in the house was flaming now. The heat scorched the firemen's cheeks and made frightened children in the windows opposite turn away. All the neighbors were packing up their valuables, preparing for the worst. Singed and blinded, the firemen had been driven back down their ladders and compelled to fight from the street. At 3:40 the district chief ordered a second alarm rung in, and, as this was followed by another explosion, a third alarm immediately after. Amid a great clanging of bells, engine after engine, with drivers standing at the reins and firemen riding backward, drove up and sought out positions of vantage.
With the arrival of Chief Federhen their plan of attack seemed to assume a definite shape at once. The ding, ding, ding, of his light carriage, riding over distended and bedraggled hose, told the impatience of the man on the seat. A tall, gaunt figure, wrapped in a cloak, which he threw off as the excitement grew on him, he first turned his attention to the police and the crowd.