A moment passes; another, and another. Then a sickening odor penetrates to his nostrils, like the burning of some foul-smelling thing. Crackle, crackle, crackle! Ah! he comprehends now! The fiends have fired the closet! They have left him there to perish in the flames--the hungry flames that will wipe out all traces of their guilt! Oh, the unutterable horror that sweeps over him! To die thus: fettered, blinded, powerless to cry for aid! A frenzied madness courses through his veins. Crackle, hiss, roar! The flames rise and spread. The door of the closet has fallen in, and now he feels their hot breath. They are closing around him; he is suffocating. He tugs at his fetters with the strength of despair. All is in vain. Hiss! hiss! hiss! His brain reels. He is falling, falling, falling. There is a horrible sound in his ears; his eyes see hideous visions; his breath is strangled; he shudders convulsively, and resigns his hold upon life! CHAPTER XXXII. "A BRAND FROM THE BURNING." There is a cry of alarm in the street below. The fire has broken through the roof, and so revealed itself to some late passer-by. "Fire! fire! fire!" Soon the space before the doomed building is swarming with people running, vociferating, cursing, jesting. Drunken men are there, haggard women, dirty, ragged children, who clap their hands and shout excitedly at this splendid spectacle. [Illustration: "The flames rise and spread; the door of the closet has fallen in, and now he feels their hot breath."--page 234.] It is useless to attempt to save the old tenement; they realize that. But its occupants--They have heard the alarm, and they come out hurriedly, _en deshabille_, pushing and dragging the children, screaming, and cursing each other and the world. All on the lower floor are then safe. But the upper floor, and its occupants? "Fire! fire! fire!" No signs of life above stairs. No terrified faces at the windows. No flying forms down the rickety stairway. No cries for help from among the fast-spreading flames. "Fire! fire! fire!" They hear the tinkle of bells, the gallop of speeding hoofs upon the pavement. "Ah!" cries an on-looker, "the fire boys are coming!" "Too late, they are," growls another; "too late, as usual." The engine approaches; and from the opposite direction comes a man, running swiftly, panting heavily, almost breathless. The roof is all ablaze now; in a moment the rafters will have fallen in. The panting new-comer stops suddenly before the door of the burning tenement, and glances sharply about. Near him is a half-dazed woman who has rushed to the rescue, as frightened women will, with a pail of water in her unsteady hand. The man leaps toward her, seizes the pail, dashes its contents over his head and shoulders, and plunging through the doorway, disappears up the stairs. "Stop! Come back!" "What a fool!" "That's the end of _him_!"