As we turned out of Fourth Avenue into his street, a loud noise met us: a prolonged, hoarse sound, a clank of machinery in it somewhere, another sound as well that pulsed and throbbed. A dense crowd blocked the way. There was smoke. A fire engine was pumping water into a burning building--the one that Brodie lived in. These details I noticed in the first few seconds, but even before I had registered them Brodie uttered a queer cry and half-collapsed against me. He was speechless with terror, and at first something of his terror he communicated to me, too. My heart sank into my boots. The “rats” I understood instantly, had nothing to do with his eau de Cologne recipe. This was a far more serious matter. Fires were no new thing to me, and this evidently was only a small one, but, none the less, people might have been burned to death. Telling my companion to wait for me, and to keep his mouth shut whatever happened, I produced some paper and pushed my way through the crowd to the police cordon, saying I was from the _Evening Sun_. Though I had no fire-badge, the bluff worked. I ran up the steps of the familiar house. “Which floor is it? How did it start? Is it insured? Is anybody burned?” I asked a fireman. The answer came and I jotted it down; it was the top floor, how it started was unknown, nobody was hurt--it was heavily insured. It had been burning for four hours, the worst was over, the fire was out; only steam and smoke now filled the staircase and corridors. The street was covered with a litter of ruined furniture. The occupants of the lower floors stood about in various attire; I caught unpleasant remarks as I dashed upstairs to Brodie’s floor. Hoses, I found, were still at work; the room we had left six hours before was gutted; a gaping hole permitted a view of the room on the floor below, and this hole began immediately in front of the grate. A black woolly mat with long hair, I remembered, had lain on the floor just there. The unpleasant remarks, as I ran up, had reference to insurance; phrases such as “over-insured,” “too well insured” were audible. They were the usual phrases uttered at the scene of a New York fire, where arson was as common as picking pockets; I had heard them a hundred times; they had furnished clues for my newspaper stories. On this occasion they held a new significance. Brodie shared my folding-bed that night, but he did not sleep. He cried a good deal. He said very little. He referred neither to the loss of his stuff, nor to the fact of its being covered by insurance, nor to how and why the fire started. He was frightened to the bone.