So Dick, safe, looked down at Holtzer, for whom it was a question of seconds, while the roar of pity from the crowd buzzed in his ears. He might well have done nothing. No man could go down the steep slant unsupported. Nothing was to be seen of Holtzer but his hands, lighted by the flames; hands that could not clench even, as to grip would be to force loose, but which could only make stiff angles of themselves. It would all be over in ten heart-beats, for to take it as we are doing is like examining the moving pictures one by one at leisure, instead of as they live upon the screen. Then Dick moved. He ripped off his coat, soaked the arm of it in the hose stream, pressed it to the roof, where it froze fast on touching, and slid down his improvised cloth ladder, held only by the strength of the ice-film that bound the sleeve to the tin. Before his frantic fellow-firemen below could scale the fence with the jumping-sheet he had hold of Holtzer’s wrist with one strong hand. The strain was terrible; he felt the coat yield with a soft, tearing sound, his head spun, yet somehow he managed it, and there they stood on the cornice together. Then, while the crowd that had been as silent as death cracked their throats with applause, Dick spoke to Holtzer on a private matter. It so happened that a young man who did “space” for a morning paper lived on the top floor of the flat-house opposite, and saw the whole thing through an opera-glass. He hustled into his clothes and got down to the street, working a talk out of Dick by the plea that he needed the money. The reporter was delighted. The incident had the two elements of daring and mother-wit that can be made into the long story of profit. “How did you ever come to think of using your coat like that?” he asked. “Why, a feller I knew when I was a kid in the country saved himself from drownding that way,” replied Carter. “He fell through the ice miles from anybody, and if he hadn’t froze the end of his muffler fast, and so anchored himself, he’d ’a’ been a gone gosling all right. That thing come back to me on the minute.”