In the middle of the night the fire bell rang out wildly. Three minutes
later Mark and Billy were flying down the street, with Tom McMertrie
and Jim Rafferty close after and a host of other tried and true, with
the minister on the other side of the street. The Fire Company of
Sabbath Valley held a proud record, and the minister was an active
member of it.
The fire was up in the plush mill and had already spread to a row of
shackley tenements that the owners of the mills had put up to house the
foreign labor that they had put in. They called them "apartment"
houses, but they were so much on the order of the city tenements of
several years back that it made Lynn's heart ache when she went there
to see a little sick child one day. Right in the midst of God's trees
and mountains, a man for money had built a death trap, tall, and
grim and dark, with small rooms and tiny windows, built it with timbers
too small for safety, and windows too few for ventilation, and here an
increasing number of families were herded, in spite of the complaints
of the town.
"I ben thenkin' it would coom," said Tom as he took long strides. "It's
the apartmints fer sure, Jimmy. We better beat it. There'll be only a
meenit er so to get the childer oot, before the whole thing's smoke!"
They were all there, the doctor, the blacksmith, the postmaster, the
men from the mills, and the banks, and the stores. Economy heard the
bells for Marilyn had hurried to the church and added the fire chime to
the call and came over with their little chemical engine. Monopoly
heard and hurried their brand new hook and ladder up the valley road,
but the fire had been eating long in the heart of the plush mill and
laughed at their puny streams of water forced up from the creek below,
laughed at the chemicals flung in its face like drops of rain on a
sizzling red hot stove. It licked its lips over the edge of the cliff
on which it was built, and cracked its jaws as it devoured the mill,
window by window, section by section, leaping across with an angry red
tongue to the first tall building by its side.
The fire had worked cunningly, for it had crept out of sight to the
lower floors all along the row, and unseen, unknown, had bitten a hold
on each of those doomed buildings till when the men arrived it went
roaring ghoulishly up the high narrow stairs cutting off all escape
from above, and making entrance below impossible. Up at the windows the
doomed people stood, crying, praying, wringing their hands, and some
losing their heads and trying to jump out.