Dick yearned for the first time in his life to do something heroic. He sweated to stand out the one man of the day; to be held up to the public gaze on the powerful pen of the reporter. He wanted to swagger into Mary Ellen’s little parlor covered and rustling with metaphorical wreaths, and with an actual disk of engraved metal on his broad chest, and thus extinguish Holtzer beyond doubt--not Carter’s doubt, nor Mary Ellen’s doubt, but Holtzer’s doubt. In this frame of mind he went to sleep one night, to be awakened in the early hours of the morning by a singular prescience born of long experience, which told him the gong was about to ring. For years the alarm had not wakened Dick. No matter how deep his slumber, he was always alert and strained to catch the first note of it. The metallic cry for help vibrated through the engine-house. It threw each inmate into action, like an electric shock. The dark winter morning was savagely cold, with a wind like an auger. The heroic cord was busted. “Damn the luck!” cried Dick as he took the pole; and it was no solo. The two most picturesque feats of civilization are the handling of a field-piece and the charge of a fire-engine. Very fine was the old-time chariot race, but what was the driver’s risk on the smooth hippodrome track compared to that of the man who guides a fire-engine through city streets? The chariot driver could, at least, see what was before him; the man who holds the lines on an engine little knows what’s around the corner. But it’s a tale told too often already. A rush, a clamor of hoofs, a roar, and they were rattling over the pavement, the stream of sparks from the engine stack and the constant lightnings from the horses’ shoes making one think of the old adage of fighting fire with fire. “I suppose,” said Dick, clinging tightly with one hand and waving the other in wild circles as he got into his coat--“I suppose some old lady has left the cat to play with the lamp.” “Yah,” assented Holtzer, “or else some Mick has taken his pipe to bed with him.” Then they cursed the old lady and the Mick or whoever it might be. “The worst of it is that I’m scart now,” confided Holtzer. “I didn’t ust to care much, except for the trouble, but now, when I think of Mary Ellen, I hate to go shinning around taking chances.” General Bonaparte, the worst-mannered conqueror in history, said that no man was courageous at three o’clock in the morning, an unmerited slight to the vanity of his soldiery. However it may be as to courage, certainly no man was ever philosophical when hauled from his bed at that hour. It was in Fireman Carter’s mind that a small movement of his foot would put his erstwhile friend in violent contact with the cold world below. However, civilization isn’t impotent. He restrained the action and replied: “You want to leave your girl at home--fires is no place for ’em.”