"You want to get somewhere else as badly as I do," he remarked, just as they came back from taking in the pies to the dinner-table.
"I feel, sometimes, as if I could fly!" exclaimed Mary. Jack walked out through the hall to the front door, and stood there thinking, with a hard-boiled egg in one hand and a piece of toast in the other.
The street he looked into was silent and deserted, from the bridge to the hotel corner. He looked down to the creek, for a moment, and then he looked the other way.
"I believe Molly could do 'most anything I could do," he said to himself; "unless it was catching a runaway team. She couldn't ha' caught that wagon. Hullo, what's that? Jingo! The hotel cook must have made a regular bonfire to fry my trout!"
He wheeled as he spoke, and dashed back through the house, shouting:
"Father, the Washington Hotel's on fire!—over the kitchen!"
"Ladder, Jack. Rope. Bucket," cried the tall blacksmith, coolly rising from the table, and following. As for the rest, beginning with the editor of the Eagle, it was almost as if they had been told that they were themselves on fire. Even Aunt Melinda exclaimed: "He ought to have told us more about it! Where is it? How'd it ever catch? Oh, dear me! It's the oldest part of the hotel. It's as dry as a bone, and it'll burn like tinder!"
Everybody else was saying something as all jumped and ran, but Jack and his father were silent. Ladder, rope, water-pails, were caught up, as if they were going to work in the shop, but the moment they were in the street again it seemed as if John Ogden's lungs must be as deep as the bellows of his forge.
"Fire! Fire! Fire!" His full, resonant voice sent out the sudden warning.