They slept in different rooms. The morning was still young when one of them was wakened by the most appalling uproar on the stair. He rose and saw his window glowing; he looked from it, and over on the gables of the farther land he saw the dance of light from a fire. He wakened Jaunty Jock. “Get up,” said he, “the tenement’s in blazes.” They dressed in a hurry, and found that every one in the house but themselves had fled already. The door stood open; on the landing crushed the tenants from the flats above, men and women in a state of horror, fighting like brutes for their safety. The staircase rang with cries—the sobbing of women, the whimper of bairns, and at the foot a doorway jammed. Frantic to find themselves caught like rats, and the sound of the crackling fire behind them, the trapped ones elbowed and tore for escape, and only the narrowness of the passage kept the weaker ones from being trampled underfoot. All this Macdonald could define only by the evidence of his ears, for the stair was wholly in pitch darkness. “By God! we’ll burn alive!” said Jaunty Jock, every shred of his manhood gone, and trembling like a leaf. Their door was in a lobby recessed from the landing—an eddy wherein some folk almost naked drifted weeping to find themselves helpless of getting farther. “Where’s the fire?” asked Macdonald from one of them, and had to shake him before he got an answer. “Two landings farther up,” said the fellow, “in Lord Duthie’s flat.” “Lord Duthie’s flat!” cried Macdonald; “and is he safe?” “He’s never hame yet; at least, I never heard him skliffin’ on the stair, but his dochter cam’ back hersel’ frae the assembly.” “Is she safe?” asked Macdonald. “Wha’ kens that?” replied the man, and threw himself into the stair, the more able now to fight because of his rest in the eddy. “It looks gey bad for your runaway match, Jock,” said Macdonald. “Here’s a parcel of the most arrant cowards. My God, what a thin skin of custom lies between the burgess and the brute beast. That poor lass! It’s for you and me, Jock, to go up and see that she’s in no greater danger than the rest of us.” He spoke to deaf ears, for Jock was already fighting for his place among the crowd. His cousin did the same, but with another purpose: his object was to scale the stair. He pushed against the pressure of the panic, mountains were on his shoulders, and his ribs were squeezed into his body as if with falling rocks. His clothes were torn from his back, he lost his shoes, and a frantic woman struck him on the face with the heavy key of her door that with a housewife’s carefulness she treasured even when the door it was meant for was burned, and the blood streamed into his eyes.