THE INCENDIARY.

BY W. A. LEAHY.

CHAPTER I.

FANFARE: THE PLAY BEGINS.

It was about half-past three in the afternoon when Bertha, the housemaid, came running down the steps, with a shrill cry of "Fire!" and fell plump into the arms of the bake-shop girl, who had seen the smoke curling from Prof. Arnold's window and was hastening across to warn the occupants of his house. The deep bark of a dog was heard within and presently Sire, the professor's old St. Bernard, rushed by the two young women and darted hither and thither, accosting the bystanders distractedly, as if burdened with a message he could not communicate.

"Ring the alarm!" cried Bertha and the bake-shop girl in a breath, as soon as they had recovered from the shock of their collision. Their cry was taken up by a knot of three boys, who, as usual, were the first on the spot; pa.s.sed along till it reached some loungers on the corner, whose inertia was more gradually overcome; and presently half the neighborhood, as if by a spontaneous impulse, came thronging into Cazenove street, each following his leader, like a flock of startled ewes. Bertha, caught in the middle of this ring of sight-seers, stood paralyzed a moment; then singling out the one man of action, she broke through the crowd and stopped him midway in his advance.

"For the love of heaven, will you ring the alarm?"

The postman turned and scudded to the box. There was an interval of suspense that seemed an age.

"Is there any one in the house?" was the first question of Patrolman Chandler, when he galloped up to the scene. He had been attracted at once by the barking of Sire.

"Mr. Robert," cried Bertha, wringing her hands. "Mr. Robert was in the study." The crowd looked up and measured the swift gains of the destructive element.

"Young Floyd?" said Chandler. Then he rushed into the house and up the first flight of winding stairs, the dog, as he did so, following him with a great fusillade of delighted barks.

"There's some one inside," said the crowd, and the rumor pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth.

"Fire! Fire!" called Chandler from the corridor window above. "Yell, you fellows, as you never yelled before!"

In response a cry of "Fire!" went up from man, woman and child, ba.s.s and treble intermingling, loud enough to have waked the seven sleepers from their trance. But no one stirred inside. Just at this moment the tardy bells rang out the number of the box, and almost immediately, as an engine came rounding a distant corner and the great gray horses bounded up the grade, the uproar began to subside. On, on, past the doomed house, now enveloped in flames, to the nearest hydrant, the driver lashed his pair. The hydrant cover had been thrown off and the first block of coal flung into the engine's furnace before Patrolman Chandler reissued from the door which he had entered.

"There is no one there," he gasped, as if choking with the smoke. But the dog continued to leap about, accosting the bystanders appealingly, until his barks and pawing became a nuisance to several and they spurned him pettishly away.

Now engines from many directions came clattering by and the air was full of clangor. Lines of hose were unraveled, ladders hoisted against the walls, and finally, amid hoa.r.s.e shouts that pierced the deep sighing of the flames within, a rubber-clad, helmeted fellow, with a nozzle strapped to his body, slowly led a line up to the second-story window, where the fire had apparently started. There was another interval of suspense, orders to and fro, and then a helpless pause. Something refused to work.

But the fire met no such impediment. Suddenly an explosion of uncertain origin shook the air, and the onlookers retreated in terror, as if the ground were yawning beneath them. Of a sudden one, two, three slack, snaky hose lines rounded out, and a burst of foam, battering in window-panes and sashes, inaugurated the great combat of elements--one angry, vindictive, as if ravening to sunder the bonds of control cast about it by the pigmy, its master, the other docile and benignant, but in the end the more puissant of the two.

"Exactly nine minutes from the start before a drop of water fell on that fire," said the bake-shop girl, who was noted for her accurate observation of time. By the "start" she meant the moment when Bertha and she collided on the doorsteps, but the fire must have gained a strong headway before that. For every timber in the house was flaming now. The heat scorched the firemen's cheeks and made frightened children in the windows opposite turn away. All the neighbors were packing up their valuables, preparing for the worst. Singed and blinded, the firemen had been driven back down their ladders and compelled to fight from the street. At 3:40 the district chief ordered a second alarm rung in, and, as this was followed by another explosion, a third alarm immediately after. Amid a great clanging of bells, engine after engine, with drivers standing at the reins and firemen riding backward, drove up and sought out positions of vantage.

With the arrival of Chief Federhen their plan of attack seemed to a.s.sume a definite shape at once. The ding, ding, ding, of his light carriage, riding over distended and bedraggled hose, told the impatience of the man on the seat. A tall, gaunt figure, wrapped in a cloak, which he threw off as the excitement grew on him, he first turned his attention to the police and the crowd.

"We want room to do this work in," he cried in a loud voice, and the bluecoats began vigorously routing the onlookers back until the fire was to them like something seen through an inverted opera gla.s.s, and the sagging ropes nearly broke under the black weight of humanity which they fended off.

Federhen's practiced eye saw the doom of the dwelling-house. So he called off his engines and threw up ladders against the great mercantile buildings to leeward and in the rear. It was from one of these, presumably the fireworks-room of Schnitzler Bros., that the second explosion, scattered and prolonged like an enfilading volley of musketry, had come, and already a thatch of flame had run around under the projecting roof of the structure. Against this the fire tower was slowly brought into position and sloped over, its tip just topping the eaves, but the axes of the squad sent up failed to make any impression on the solid sheathing of the roof. When the tower ladder itself began to take fire, and a stream had to be played on it constantly, the order was given, none too early, "Come down!" and the firemen's first ambition, to get above the enemy, had to be abandoned for less efficacious measures. Fountain jets, rising from the street, and level streams from the roofs of the dwelling-houses opposite, did their ineffectual best to quench the red thirst of the triumphing element.

"This is glorious!"

"Tristram!"

The girl pulled a dolman over her shoulders, fear simulating cold, before the savage dance of the flames. Their carriage had pa.s.sed through Broad street, in the rear of Cazenove, a few minutes before, and when the alarm sounded Tristram had ordered the coachman to turn and drive them back.

"Glorious, Rosalie!" he repeated, looking up at the red streamers and the swirling smoke.

"It was just here we met your friend, Harry Arnold," murmured Rosalie. "Did you notice he had only one glove on?"

"Glorious!" echoed her enraptured brother, as a section of the wall fell in, disclosing an oven view like the interior of a Bessemer blast furnace.

"See the horses pawing. The sparks will fall on them. Let us drive away."

"My palette!" was Tristram's answer. "Brush! Easel! Canvas! Oh, the lost chance of a lifetime!"

"Doesn't it make you shudder?"

"Certainly, my dear. That is the very deliciousness of it"

"But the danger!"

"Ah, you know I'm a perfect Bluebeard in the taste for horrors. I really envy Parrhasius his enjoyment in flaying the old slave--or did he flog him? But it's of no consequence which. He tortured him somehow, you remember, and chained him to a stake in his studio, so that he might paint Prometheus' writhings to the life."

But just here something happened which cut short his tirade of irony.

It was on the Broad street side of the Harmon building (such the great six-story structure was called), just where the Marches' coachman had halted their span, that the most pitiful incident of this memorable fire took place. By 4 o'clock everybody conceded that the Harmon building was lost. Occupied princ.i.p.ally by dry-goods firms, whose light wares, spread over the counters, were like so much hay to the flames, it needed scarcely more than the touch of a match to convert it into smoke. At the sound of the second explosion hundreds of salesgirls and male employes had rushed to the exits, barely outstripping the fire. It was supposed that all had been warned and escaped, and only a signal shriek from the top story in the rear notified the beholders that human lives were in peril. Looking up, they saw at the windows a dozen girls and half as many youths huddling together with the blanched faces of deadly fear. Thick smoke was already curling up and enveloping them and reflections of the flames, like an aurora rising in the north, were visible behind. The cries they made could not be understood, but their gestures were dumbly eloquent.

"Jump!" came the cry from a hundred throats below. A teamster pulled the rubber covers off the Protective company's wagon. Firemen and policemen improvised nets of canvas, which they tore from the awnings near by and spread under the shrinking group. Two or three of the girls, who leaped for a telegraph pole on the outer edge of the sidewalk, almost miraculously succeeded in scrambling down. Others climbed out on the ledge and made as if to jump, but drew back from the awful plunge. The fire was upon them now, and one could weep to see the men, brave fellows, coaxing their timid companions to take the leap. One woman of coa.r.s.er build ran along the dizzy ledge, which scarcely yielded footing for a sparrow, and sprang into the branches of a tree on the corner, her dress saving her at the cost of fearful laceration. Then a form came crashing down into the outspread nets, another and another, without pause, without certainty of aim. Two struck the sidewalk and were carried off shapeless and silent. One young girl's fall was broken by a policeman's brawny arms--no other than Patrolman Chandler. She picked herself up laughing, only to faint away, while her rescuer was borne off groaning. It was all over soon--a tragedy of five minutes--but those who witnessed it felt as if their hearts had been standing still for a century.

"Let us drive away," said Rosalie, a sickness seizing her.

"Yes," answered Tristram; "the people are beginning to stare at you." His sensitive lips were pale and he shut his eyes lest their film of pity should be seen. It was true, some of the bystanders had pointed out his companion to one another as Rosalie March. The face of this beautiful girl had become familiar since Manager Mapletree the season before had persuaded her to come out from the privacy of her home and a.s.sume two or three roles in his revival of Shakespeare's comedies. Perhaps they wondered who the gentleman beside her might be. Brother and sister bore each other little specific resemblance.

"What's that carriage halting here for? Do you think this is a procession? Pa.s.s on!" cried Federhen to the coachman, who whipped up his horses in a hurry. The police had not yet got around to this side of the block, but the fire chief seemed at all times to be where the crisis was. At a word from him ambulances arose from the very ground and the dead and injured were carried off to the hospital. His straggly gray beard confronted the fire-fighters everywhere, goading on the laggards, cheering the valiant. Indomitable, tireless, he sent them again and again at the ruined sh.e.l.l, drowning the neighboring dwelling-houses meanwhile in a flood of water. The calm air favored him. People said "him," for somehow the forces of salvation seemed to be embodied and centralized in one implacable form. But the wind created by the fire was carrying sparks and brands to a distance of half a mile. The awed spectators winced and scattered at these hot showers. It was still a speculation where the holocaust would end.

If the Southern depot caught, then the whole Bay quarter, a warren of tinder-box tenements, swarming densely with poor tenants, was in peril. To save the depot was to win the day. But special editions of the newspapers, appearing at 5 o'clock, were only able to announce, under half-column scare-heads, that the result was still in doubt; and when twilight came it was not the sunset glow (for a storm was gathering in the overcast sky) which burnished the factory windows across the harbor till they shone like plates of gold.

CHAPTER II.

MIDNIGHT--ALL'S WELL.

"Accident is out of the question, John Davidson." The hands of the clock were moving toward midnight in Klein's restaurant, but mugs were still clinking, dishes rattling and waiters hurriedly cleansing soiled tables with their towels. The freedom of the saloon had been extended to the victorious fire-fighters, who, after supping with Duke Humphrey, were not at all reluctant to lunch with Commoner Klein.

"A health to Carl Klein," shouted one, tossing a tumblerful high in air.

"Your health!" the place echoed, as the whole group stood up and shouted a rousing toast. They were tough, middle-sized fellows, all of them, of the true fireman's build, which is just a shade taller and broader than a sailor's. The smiling old German hovered near and bowed and rubbed his hands in appreciation. To judge from the girth under his ap.r.o.n, he was himself a worshiper of the worthy trinity, breakfast, dinner and supper, which he served. The two men chattering in low tones at a side table had not stood up or noticed the interruption.

"I can't believe it, McCausland," answered John Davidson, the fire marshal. "There is no motive. It's devilish. It's beneath flesh and blood. Four lives already and heaven knows how many more. It isn't in human kind to do that without a reason."

"Mankind is my kind, too," answered McCausland, pleasantly, but in such a manner as to convey the idea that he was a diver of some experience into the deep-sea depths of human turpitude. "But suppose we look at the status quo. Everybody--Wotherspoon, Chandler and all the others--agreed that the fire must have been going some time when the servant-girl ran out of the house. If her story is to be believed, and she never turned a hair under cross-questioning, you'll allow?"

"The girl's fair spoken, I admit that," answered the marshal.

"Then the blaze started in a room two flights above the only fire which was going in the house, and that one a low coal fire in the cook stove. The cook stove and the study-hearth get their drafts from different chimneys. No possible connection there?"

"No," answered the marshal, for McCausland's last inflection had been slightly interrogative.

"The cast-away cigar doesn't fit," continued his companion, telling off the thumb on his chubby left hand. "There was no tobacco allowed in the house. Mungovan, their last coachman, was discharged for smoking on the sly. The professor was eccentric, you know, and this was the stanchest of his dogmas."

"Well?"

"No boys with firecrackers playing around. It's the lull between the 17th of June and the Fourth."

"No."

"No phosph.o.r.escent rat-bane on the premises," went on McCausland, telling off finger after finger. "You heard what the domestic said?"

"Yes; she was positive about that."

"Because they were not troubled with mice. Another accidental cause removed. But if rodents were swarming like flies in a meat shop, I don't see what substance more combustible than the pasted bindings of old books they could have found in that library to nibble. The lucifers were all kept in a safe downstairs, excepting a few for the sleeping-rooms."

"That's true, but----"

"Number six," interrupted McCausland. "What shall it be? Cotton waste taking fire spontaneously? Benzine? Naphtha varnish? Celluloid? None of them about, according to Bertha. I'm at my rope's end. Where are you?"

"Do you suppose they have been as careful since the professor died?" asked the marshal.

"That was only four days ago and the study has been locked ever since. Only opened fifteen minutes before the fire."

"Aren't you done guzzling yet?" broke in a strident tone of command from the open door. Chief Federhen's face was haggard and sooty, and his voice, naturally harsh, had a ragged edge from shouting that grated on the ear like the squawking of a peac.o.c.k. But the firemen leaped immediately to attention. They did not resent their gray chief's reprimand, for they knew that he himself had gone without any supper at all and that he stood ready at that moment to lead wherever he ordered them to follow. In personal courage, as well as generalship, he was believed to be the foremost chief in the country, and, though not exactly popular personally, he was professionally adored. Only the insurance companies had ever ventured to criticise his bold methods, and they, as everybody knows, are simple-minded idealists, who expect an immunity from fire such as even the arctic regions can hardly enjoy.

"Take your machine alongside of fourteen, Tyrrell, and keep two lines on the Harmon building all night."

"All right, chief," answered Capt. Tyrrell, and his men followed him out through the curious crowd that stood peeking in on their collation.

"Impossible!" exclaimed the marshal, raising his voice, now that they were nearly alone.

"Impossible, that's what I say," smiled McCausland; "we're not living in fairyland. This is earth, where effects have causes."

"But who would have the heart to set it?"

McCausland shrugged his shoulders.

"If that's your impossible," he replied, "in the case of my own son, I'd rather his defense were a concrete alibi."

Inspector McCausland was a detective of the good old school, renowned in many states and not unknown to Scotland Yard and the keen Parisians. Nature had favored him with an exterior of deceptive smoothness. No vulpine contraction of the muzzle, such as would have suggested the sleuth and invited suspicion. Round, florid, pleasant-faced, a little sloping in the shoulders, decidedly suave of voice and genial in manner, he did not look the figure to be feared. Yet some, not easily frightened, would depart in haste from the neighborhood of Richard McCausland.

"The only living occupants of the room," he continued, unfolding his chain of reasoning to the still skeptical marshal, "at the time when Bertha went in, were the St. Bernard, Sire, whose barking had attracted her attention upstairs, and the canary bird, whose life she tried to save."

"Probably the delicate creature was dead when she opened the door," said the marshal.

"At any rate, it is impossible that an old dog, sleeping on the mat, or a golden-feathered songster, whistling in his cage, could be the author of this fire----"

"And loss of life."

"If the housemaid is telling the truth there was some other cause; and if she is lying," he concluded, arising to go, "it must be to cover up carelessness or guilt, either on her own part or on the part of some one in whom she takes an interest."

Intimate a.s.sociates found McCausland a rollicking companion; but, in the pursuit of crime, he was a practical believer in the doctrine of total depravity, or, rather, to be just, he knew the potential evil which is harbored in every human heart until some life-or-death temptation effects, perhaps, the wreck of honor and humanity.

"Well, this is another feather in Federhen's cap," said the marshal, cheerily, at the door.

"He must share it with Jupiter Pluvius," answered McCausland.

As dark came on there had been a heavy fall of rain, which dampened the roofs and stifled many a darting tongue and incipient blaze in the vicinity, though it appeared to have no more effect on the body of the fire than so much fuel thrown into its maw. But it had enabled Federhen to concentrate his streams, which before this had necessarily been scattered about, protecting exposed points of danger. In fact, one or two serious subsidiary fires had only been checked with the utmost difficulty. If either of them had extended, and the Bay quarter once fairly caught, 500 poor families might have been ruined and two hotels and one depot would have been included in the loss.

At 6:45 Federhen had issued an order to blow up the Columbia shoe store building. Against the frantic protest of the owners his oracular answer was "Necessity!" and a high-handed jostle of the remonstrants to one side. The magazines were promptly laid and a wide s.p.a.ce cleared. Precision and dispatch followed, like two leashed hounds, in the footsteps of the chief. At 7 o'clock, with a mammoth concussion, the middle of the building seemed lifted bodily into midair. Its walls caved in, and at once twenty lines of hose were wetting down the debris, while pickax men began widening still further the breach on the side toward the van of the approaching fire. This corner building laid low, the flames were sixty yards away from the depot, and all their surging and leaping failed to clear the gap. Confined at last, a.s.saulted from every side, drenched, smothered and confounded, they spent their rage in a blind, internal fuming.

Those who returned to visit the fire in the evening, attracted, perhaps, by the noise of the last concussion, witnessed a miraculous transformation. The black night made a s.p.a.cious and harmonious background for the flames, now a spectacle of sinister beauty, charging heavenward solidly to great heights only to flutter back and writhe at their manifest impotence. The streets below, flushed with rain, were glistening in the lamplight and the awestruck wonder of the crowd had subsided to a mere vulgar curiosity about details. Already the event was old to many, its solemn lesson and the revelation of underlying forces making only a shallow impress on shallow minds. Gangs of rowdies swung to and fro, elbowing respectable sight-seers into the puddles and rendering night hideous with their ill-timed pranks and depredations, like prowlers stripping the slain after battle.

The police were occupied guarding the ropes and ejecting without ceremony all intruders whose credentials were imperfect. Lines of hose lay about in inextricable confusion, half-buried in an amalgam of lake water, litter and mud, while at every corner the engines still sent up showers of sparks, the rhythm of their dull pumping resounding through the city like the labored beatings of some giant heart. Comments on the losses, the injuries, the probable hour when the flames would be conquered, beguiled the ranks of spectators who lined the ropes, those behind crushing forward as the front file yielded place, and drinking in all they could (not much at that distance), until the exhaustion of their interest in turn became evident by their repeated yawns. It was Sat.u.r.day night, the late night in America, but by 11 o'clock there were gaps in the solid phalanxes and the homeward-bound stream far outnumbered that flowing toward the still vigorous but dull-red and smoke-colored sheet of fire.

Eleven was just ringing when a young man rushed up to the lines stretched across Cazenove street at its junction with Meridian, and half by force, half by entreaty, breasted his way to the rope.

"I wish to pa.s.s, officer; my property is among those burned," he said.

"Your property?" echoed the policeman, a phlegmatic-looking fellow. The youth was not over 21 and Higgins had heard this story at least a dozen times within an hour. His orders were to throw the burden of proof in every case upon the pet.i.tioner.

"Yes; that is to say, not mine, but my uncle's. I am a nephew of Prof. Arnold and lived with him."

The slight correction which the young man made in his explanation evidently prejudiced his cause in the policeman's eyes--as if confusion were a mark peculiar to the glib kinsmen of Ananias. The youth had slipped under the rope and the crowd craned near, expecting an altercation.

"Get back there!" came the sharp rebuke, and a heavy hand was laid on the young man's breast, gathering up the lapels of his coat and half his vest bosom.

"But my uncle's house is burned, I tell you," he protested.

"Outside!"

"I am also a member of the press."

"Outside the ropes!"

"You're a bully," cried the young citizen, pushing st.u.r.dily on his own side and fairly holding his own. "Sergeant!"