The men that lived in the cars were trying to scrabble out their poor belongings. They were shouting queer, throaty cries that we didn't understand, but some of the folks from the Flats were answering them. I think that it seemed queer to some of us that those men of the bunk cars should be having a fire right there in our town. "Don't let's get too near," says somebody. "They might have small-pox or something." It was Mis' Sykes, with Silas, her husband, and him carrying that bright red little boy. And the baby, kind of scared at all the noise and the difference, was beginning to straighten out and cry words in that heathen tongue of his. "Mercy," says Mis' Sykes, "I can't find Berta. He's going," she says, "to yell." Just then I saw something that excited me more than the baby. There was one car near the middle that was burning hard when the stream of water struck it. And I saw that car had a little rag of lace curtain at its window, and a tin can with a flower in it. And when the blaze died for a minute, and the roof showed all burned, but not the lower part of the car or the steps, I saw somebody in blue overalls jump up the steps, and then an arm tearing down that rag of lace curtain and catching up the tin can. "Well," I says pitiful, "ain't that funny? Some man down there in a bunk car, with a lace curtain and a posy." I started down that way, and Mis' Toplady, Mis' Holcomb and the Sykeses come too, the Sykeses more to see if walking wouldn't keep the baby still. It wouldn't. That baby yelled louder than I'd ever heard one, which is saying lots but not too much. When we all got down nearer, we came on Mis' Swenson and Mis' Amachi, counting up. "We can take in two," says Mis' Swenson, "by four of the children sleeping on the floor that'll never wake up to know it." "One can sleep on our lounge," says Mis' Amachi. "We can put a couple or two in our barn," says a Flats man. "Oh, we'll find 'em room--no trouble to that." Mis' Toplady and me looked at each other. Always before, in a Friendship Village catastrophe, her and me had been among the planners. But here we were, it seemed, left out, and the whole thing being seen to by the Flats. "Say," says Mis' Toplady all of a sudden, "it's a woman!" We were down in front by now, and I saw her too. The blue overalls, as I had called them, were a blue dress. And the woman, a little dark thing with earrings, stood there with her poor, torn lace curtain and her tin can with a geranium all wilted down. "Mercy!" says Mis' Sykes, shuddering. "A woman down here!" But I was looking at that woman. And I saw she wasn't listening to what some of the Flat women were saying to her. She had her head up and back as if she was listening to something else. And now she began moving through the crowd, and now she began running, straight to where all of us stood and Mis' Sykes was trying to hush the crying child.