Homeburg Memories | Page 7

buying mining-stock in the West. And it's just
as big a swindle too. The returns from running to fires are marvelously
small. They tell me that a hundred million dollars a year goes up in
flames in this country. I don't believe it. If it does, I want to know who
gets to see all the fun. I don't.
I've run to fires all my life, until lately, and I've drawn about three
hundred and seventy-five blanks. Once I almost saw a big
grain-elevator burn in a Western town. That is, I would have seen it, if I
had looked out of my hotel window. But I'd run two miles to see a
burning haystack in the afternoon, and I was so dead tired that I slept
right through the performance that night. And once I did see a row of
stores burn, back in Homeburg--at the distance of a mile. I was in

school, and the teacher wouldn't dismiss us. By stretching my neck
several feet I could just see the flames leaping over the trees, but that
was all. Some of the bad boys sneaked out of the door, but I was a good
boy, and waited one thousand years until school was out and the fire
was ditto. I've never felt quite the same since toward either goodness or
education.
Some men run faithfully to fires year after year and view a fine
collection of burning beefsteaks and feverish chimneys and volcanic
wood-sheds, while others stroll out after dinner in a strange city and
spend a pleasant evening watching a burning oil-refinery make a
Vesuvius look pale and sickly in comparison. Luck is distributed in a
dastardly way, and as for myself I've quit trying. I don't run to fires at
all any more. The big cities have fooled me long enough by sending out
forty pieces of apparatus to smother a defective flue. I stay behind and
watch the crowd. It's more amusing and not half so much work.
Of course in Homeburg it's different. You city people don't realize what
a blessing the fire-fiend is to a small town. Fires mean a whole lot to us.
They keep us from petrifying altogether during the dull seasons. And
they don't have to be real fires, either. Any old alarm will do. Our
fire-bell sounds just as terrible for a little brush fire as it would for a
flaming powder-mill. It's an adventure merely to hear the thing. Take a
winter night in the dull season after Christmas, for instance. You have
begun to go to sleep right after supper. You've finished the job at nine
o'clock, and by two A.M. you're sailing placidly southwest of Australia
in a seagoing automobile.
Suddenly the pirate-ship in the rear, which you hadn't noticed before,
slips up and begins potting away at you with a dull metallic boom. The
auto slips its clutch, and the engine begins to clang and clatter, and
somebody off behind a red-hot mountain in the distance begins ringing
an enormous bell just as you slide downward into a crater of flame--and
then you wake up entirely, and the fire-bell is going
"clang-clang-clang-clang-clang," while below you hear the ringing
crunch of your neighbor's feet on the cold snow, and outside the north
window there is a red glare which may be either the end of the world or

another exploded lamp in 'Bige Brinton's chicken-incubator; you won't
know which until you have stabbed both feet into one pants-leg,
crawled all over the cold floor for a missing sock, and run half a mile,
double-reefing your nightshirt to keep it from trailing out from under
your overcoat. That's what a fire-alarm means in Homeburg.
It's just as interesting in the daytime too. Imagine a summer afternoon
in Homeburg about three o'clock. It's hotter than a simoon in the Sahara,
and the aggregate business being done along Front Street is nineteen
cents an hour. The nearest approach to life on the street is Sam
McAtaw sitting in a shady spot on the edge of the sidewalk and leaning
against a telephone-pole, sound asleep. You're sitting in your office
chair, with your feet on the desk, dozing, when suddenly you hear
footsteps outside. Whoever is making them is turning them out with
great rapidity, and that in itself is novel enough to be interesting. The
footsteps go by, and you look at their maker. It is Gibb Ogle surging up
the walk and yanking his ponderous feet this way and that with
tremendous energy. Nothing but a fire or a loose lion can make Gibb
run, and you don't take any stock in the lion theory; so you tumble out
after him.
By this time Sim Bone is on the street, and Harvey McMuggins is
coming up behind, while half a