Then the timbers holding up the hay collapsed and half-a-hundred tons of burning grass fell into the stables. The great stallion screamed once and then was still. Sarah came over to comfort Stud. "We've got each other and most of the stock," she said. "We'll make it somehow, Mother. We'll start all over." "I'll go to the house now and fix something for the firemen." "I guess you might as well." Hank Vetter, chief of the volunteers, left his engine and came over to where Stud was listening to the condolences of his neighbors. "How'd it start?" yelled Hank. "Darned if I know," said Stud, scratching his singed head. "I was tending a sick stallion and...." "Was you smoking?" asked Hank. "Never smoked around the barns in my life." "Didn't tip over the lantern?" "Lantern was hanging from a peg. Never touched the lantern." "Well, it couldn't have started by itself," said Hank. "Let's look around." They had taken less than a dozen steps down the lane when a figure started up from behind a stump, jumped the fence, crashed down the hill toward the lake, and began to skirt the bay. "It's Joe Valentine," shouted Early Ann. "This is my job," Stud cried, dashing after the fleeing figure. Hearing shouts, Joe Valentine decided to risk the shortest way to Lake House Point. He leaped onto the melting ice and ran and stumbled two hundred yards out from the shore. They saw him clearly in the light of the burning barn as he crashed through into the black water and went down; and although they watched the dark hole in the ice for twenty minutes he did not come up again. BOOK FIVE CHAPTER XV 1 _During the spring of 1914 Edith Cavell was going quietly about her civilian duties of mercy in Brussels. A Bolshevik agitator by the name of Lenin was hiding in Galicia sending anonymous articles to Russian newspapers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, attended the ceremonies which began construction of battleship number 39, "the greatest fighting machine in the universe." Villa had the federals on the run south of the Rio Grande. The veteran Joffre deep in Plan 17 eyed the aging but wily von Moltke across the Rhine. Aunt Martha in her Household Hints suggested putting ordinary glass marbles in the tea-kettle to keep the lime from gathering._ * * * * * But on the Brailsford farm they were building a new barn. For twenty-four hours the Brailsfords had been stunned by the loss. They had gone about their duties in a daze. No one had seen Sarah crying, but her eyes were rimmed with red, and Stanley silently mourned the loss of his big Percheron and the Jersey heifers.