Life in the Red Brigade | Page 8

to squeeze past his comrade through the window.
At that moment a faint cry was heard. It appeared to come from an inner room.
"Some one there, Joe," said Bob Clazie in a grave tone, but without diverting his attention for an instant, from the duty in which he was engaged.
Joe made no reply, but at once leaped back into the room, and, a second time, felt his way round the walls. He came on another door. One blow of the ponderous axe dashed it in, and revealed a bed-room not quite so densely filled with smoke as the outer room. Observing a bed looming through the smoke, he ran towards it, and struck his head against one of the posts so violently that he staggered. Recovering he made a grasp at the clothes, and felt that there was a human being wrapped tightly up in them like a bundle. A female shriek followed. Joe Dashwood was not the man to stand on ceremony in such circumstances. He seized the bundle, straightened it out a little, so as to make it more portable, and throwing it over his shoulder, made a rush towards the window by which he had entered. All this the young fireman did with considerable energy and haste, because the density of the smoke was increasing, and his retreat might be cut off by the flames at any moment.
"Clear the way there!" he gasped, on reaching the window.
"All right," replied Bob Clazie, who was still presenting his branch with untiring energy at the flames.
Joe passed out, got on the head of the escape, and, holding the bundle on his shoulder with one hand, grasped the rounds of the ladder with the other. He descended amid the cheers of the vast multitude, which had by this time assembled to witness the fire.
As Joe hurried towards the open door of the nearest house, Betty, with the thumbs, rushed frantically out, screaming, "Missis! oh! my! she'll be burnt alive! gracious! help! fire! back room! first floor! oh, my!"
"Be easy, lass," cried Joe, catching the flying domestic firmly by the arm, and detaining her despite her struggles.
"Let me go; missis! I forgot her!"
"Here she is," cried Joe, interrupting, "all safe. You come and attend to her."
The reaction on poor Betty's feelings was so great that she went into fits a second time, and was carried with her mistress into the house, where the cook still lay in violent hysterics.
Joe laid the bundle gently on the bed, and looked quickly at the bystanders. Observing several cool and collected females among them, he pointed to the bundle, which had begun to exhibit symptoms of life, and said briefly, "She's all right, look after her," and vanished like a wreath of that smoke into which in another moment he plunged.
He was not a moment too soon, for he found Bob Clazie, despite his fortitude and resolution, on the point of abandoning the window, where the smoke had increased to such a degree as to render suffocation imminent.
"Can't stand it," gasped Bob, scrambling a few paces down the ladder.
"Give us the branch, Bob, I saw where it was in fetchin' out the old woman," said Joe in a stifled voice.
He grasped the copper tube from which the water spouted with such force as to cause it to quiver and recoil like a living thing, so that, being difficult to hold, it slipped aside and nearly fell. The misdirected water-spout went straight at the helmet of a policeman, which it knocked off with the apparent force of a cannon shot; plunged into the bosom of a stout collier, whom it washed whiter than he had ever been since the days of infancy, and scattered the multitude like chaff before the wind. Seeing this, the foreman ordered "Number 3" engine, (which supplied the particular branch in question), to cease pumping.
Joe recovered the erratic branch in a moment, and dragged it up the escape, Bob, who was now in a breatheable atmosphere, helping to pass up the hose. The foreman, who seemed to have acquired the power of being in several places at one and the same moment of time, and whose watchful eye was apparently everywhere, ordered Bob's brother David and another man named Ned Crashington, to go up and look after Joe Dashwood.
Meanwhile Joe shouted, "Down with Number 3;" by which he meant, "up with as much water as possible from Number 3, and as fast as you can!" and sprang into the room from which he had just rescued the old woman. In passing out with her he had observed a glimmer of flame through the door which he had first broken open, and which, he reflected while descending the escape, was just out of range of Bob Clazie's branch. It was the thought of this that