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brought not a sound, and we slept the peaceful sleep of a country inn. We had our bread and coffee at an indolent hour, and the boys of Seventeen voted us mascots. When, infected, the nervous strain of waiting came on us too, we at last began to understand the first duty of that life of killing waiting and killing work. It had turned sharply cold in the night. The men were moody and restless, biting hard on their pipes; the horses were stamping irritably. And still there was not a sign of fire among New York's four million people. We fell to speculating on the doctrine of chances. Again we talked of roulette. And again we seemed to wait for the declaring of the next in a series of the ineluctably written procession of numbers. The blackboard bore the past sequence of time and place, and to the newest recruit there seemed a fixed order in these strokes of fire-something that a man could calculate if he had a little more wit. There were those six nights before Christmas when the call rang regularly at 8:55. Last week there were those five successive early morning bells that Keeley-rashest and surest of drivers-loved for his "breakfast gong." And as we talked this folly, the engineer, who was smearing putz-paste over the nickel of his smoke-stack, nodded his head at us: "You hear me! There's an alarm coming now. See if we don't get it within an hour and have a hard after noon and night of it." It was then 11:38 A.M.

We patted the horses whose backs were woefully spattered with spark-scars; kicked our heels to a warming beside the engine as we listened to the steam bird chirping in the boiler; tramped a dozen times round the spick-and-span order of the equipment. "The Monk" brought us a sandwich, and we were just biting into the gray of the rye bread, when there came the rattling clanging of One Hundred. There was an instant hammering of hoofs, a headlong rushing of men, for which there stands in the memory only a marvelous blur of thunderous sound and of electrically moving bodies. We, too, were caught by the whirlwind-one to the engine, one to the hose-cart.

I

But with the engine was the wondrous life: "Sheridan and the engineer grappled me and thrust me into my coat. seized the rubber-wound holding-bar. My legs stiffened as we bounded ahead, furiously rolling over the broken pavement. At first I saw nothing but the great gleaming round of the smoke-stack before me. But when I got into the joy of finding myself a part of the terrific speed, my ears blasted by whistle and bell, I leaned far to the right and caught glimpses of Keeley, like a Roman charioteer, stooping over the pole, his hands far apart, his curving whip flying through the air lashing his plunging horses to a fury of speed. Behind, the hose-cart was lost in the streaming, descending clouds of our steam and smoke. Our speed, with a power of lightning, painted life motionless, and as we tore in the parching cold through the very heart of Jewry, a thousand phantasmagoric pictures flew by us: a patriarch of Israel, posed in a doorway, oblivious of our clangorous race, his pipe smoke hanging still in the air; the white teeth and the smile of a red-cheeked mädchen, fixed like the beauty of a Frans Hals painting; a boy jumping out of our way, poised on the edge of the curb, painfully on one toe, like a weathercock goddess."

And so, rolling uproariously along the littered and ash-strewn streets of the Ghetto, nearly colliding with a trolley, turning three perilous corners, we made our half-mile. The horses were suddenly wheeled and thrown on their haunches, and the engine was shot to its exact place at the hydrant. Before us, but a hundred feet away, our fire was blazing -a shop on the ground floor at the corner of a seven-story tenement. The crackling flames were flying to the third story. The police had already formed their "fire lines" and driven back the swarming, curious Sunday crowd-it was as if we were in the center of a cleared stage in a great theater. While we were rushing forward, with eyes for nothing but that wind-fanned sheet of flames, in a small fraction of a minute, by some miracle of rapid work unseen by us, the hose was laid. At the order "Stretch in," we seized hold of our great limp pipe and stood from the nozzle numbers

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"DRENCHED GROUPS OF MEN, SHINING IN BLACK RUEBER COATS AND HELMETS

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Three and Five, before and behind Sheridan. As we waited a short second for water, we watched, aye, felt, the growing power and height of the flames; saw the fire

tine, they seemed to feel no stirring of the blood in their wonderful feats. But for us were the keen sensations. Always the action of men and horses seemed quicker than our sight. And not our eyes only, but our hands, arms, legs, were leaden dull and heavy-moving. We thought it a marve! that we ever caught engine or truck, and at the next alarm, at 2:52, it was a triumph of observation that one of us dared affirm that he saw the suspended harness drop upon the horses when the driver pulled his reins. Again the engineer touched his flaming oiled torch to the excelsior, the flames roared from the smoke-stack as we boomed over the gutter plank within eleven seconds, and again the earth shook beneath our five tons of vibrant metal as we whirled along Ludlow Street. Sheridan leaned to the driver, croaking his cautions. The rhythmical, plunging flight of the wheels began to get into the head, and the novice knew at last why even the mascot dog of a company "rolls" to a fire. It was a curtain blaze, out before our coming. Yet we dashed up the eight half-flights of stairs, erupted into the singed apartment, and were met with sad Oriental patience and disregard by a half-dozen Russian Jews squatting in the disorder.

leap like a cat to
the wooden coping
of the shop window
next door. Then the
hose became rigid
as a post with the
might of the water;
the frosted gray col-
umn slapped against
the stone portico,
there was a prelim
inary swish at the
blaze without, and
Sheridan's hoarse
profanity hurled us
into the fire. As we
drove through the
door, to our right lay
twisted masses of
red-hot iron glowing dully in the smoke.
We could see the man before us a foot
away on the other side of the hose, but
we could see nothing else in the blinding
smart and the darkness, and we never
knew how the man at the nozzle found
the living heart of the fire. Water
slopped and spattered everywhere. The
heat surged at us scorching. The smoke
was intolerable, and we bent down for air.
We choked and spluttered and wept. At
the last minute of our strength came the
prayed-for order to back out. We were
dripping, our faces grimed, streaming.
The smoke soon cleared. The water was
shut off. Axes and picks tore out still
steaming woodwork. There was a hasty,
careful search for further fire. With the
quick order "Take up," the hose was
rapidly thrown back, folded into the
truck, and back to quarters we rolled,
clanging, to answer the next alarm,
which might already have sounded.

COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY DE WITT C. WHEELER
THE CHIEF

We arrived at 12:52. The stopped clock marked 12:26. It was unimaginably quick work-the hard work, dulled into habit, of a fast trade. So the men thought it, and, drilled in the swift rou

With a rush we were back to listen, hour after hour, to the gongs clamoring for engines in distant streets of the ever-burning city. And with tempered impatience we idled. We made a strange dinner of grilled liver, bitter pickles, and the unleavened matzoths; and it was not till 8:36 that we were again summoned, and the engineer rejoiced in the honor of a prophet. The horses vaulted over

we were whooping on our way to see the smoldering remains of a sofa.

the sill with us into the darkness. We made a roaring course of a mile, tumbled off, hurried with lanterns and pikes up dark hallways swarming with silent, slow people. There had been a minute's flare from an overturned lamp. At 9:26 we were off again to a minor blaze in Grand Street, where a woman had been hideously burned. Within another half-hour we were rushing towards the river-a swift fight with a lumber-yard fireperilous for its swaying piles and treacherous footing. At 11:27 One-EightNine stormed out, and before Headquarters could repeat the signal on the larger gong, with a glazed and icicled engine wild soprano over the curb when, hatless

Six fires within eleven hours stood the tally in glaring chalk on the blackboard. The horses were worn to dropping; the men, if they had not been firemen, would have sworn they were dead. At midnight we crawled to the soft beds. Yet one of us slept not. His cot was nearest the first of the brass poles, but he was so dulled with exhaustion that he was the last of the men on a new alarm at 1:30 to take the silent, sliding drop to the rubber-cushioned mat below, and the engine was shrieking its whistle in a

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