The startled hen fluttered out of her arms, ran straight into the hen-house, shed the oil-soaked, blazing rag with most of her tail feathers, and ran out of the hen-house into the high weeds. But the burning rag left in the hen-house got busy with the loose straw and the other dry trash, and in a moment the whole house was in a blaze! Ginny was famous for the noise she could make with her throat. Her very name was a perversion of the word for that noisy hen the guinea, and from her earliest childhood this word had been indicative of her chief faculty. But on this occasion she broke all previous records for racket. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” she began. What she said after that and the noises she made cannot enter into this narrative because they cannot be reproduced in print. The dry grass, the straw, the inflammable trash, the dusty accumulations of years, due to Ginny’s idea that the way to clean up her yard was to sweep everything inside the hen-house--all was afire and blazing merrily. Skeeter and Dainty heard her wails and ran around the house. Then Skeeter grabbed a tree with both hands, spread his alligator mouth to its utmost limit, and laughed himself into hysterics. The portion of Tickfall occupied by the whites had water-works, and adequate fire protection. The negro settlement known as Dirty-Six had no water, but was protected from fire by a chemical engine. There was a fire-engine house, a pole beside it with a bell on top, and a rope suspended from the bell within reach of the hand. When the engine-house was first erected four years before, the negroes had waited rather impatiently for some one’s house to catch on fire. They wanted to see their new engine in operation. Nothing caught fire, not even a chicken-coop. For four years the bell at the engine-house had not been rung. Then, on some occasion which called for a celebration on the part of the negroes, they had asked and had been given permission to take the chemical wagon out, attach the hose, and sprinkle the street, merely to show that the hose would actually squirt water and the engine pump it. After the celebration the apparatus was dragged back and placed in the engine-house, and the inhabitants of Dirty-Six resumed their watchful waiting. Now the cry of “Fire!” echoed through the settlement. It was caught up on every corner. Negroes seized their shotguns and pistols and ran down the street, firing them into the air--the fire-signal in all Southern villages. Vinegar Atts, standing in the pulpit of the Shoofly Church, paused in the midst of a fiery exhortation, listened to the cry of “Fire!” ringing through the settlement. “Fire!” Vinegar bellowed, and started in a lope for the street, leading all the congregation in the race. They, with the other inhabitants of Dirty-Six, gladly assembled, not at the scene of the fire, but at the engine-house! “Ring de bell!” a hundred voices bawled.