ng it hang before her face like a veil. She caught a
fold of it between her teeth.

And so, opening the doors between whose cracks the pent-up smoke was
curling, she passed through, crouching down, and crawled along the end
of the chamber, toward the great rope in the opposite corner.

The fire was creeping thitherward, also, to meet her. Along from the
front, down the chamber on the opposite side, the quick flames sprang
and flashed, momently higher, catching already, here and there, from
point to point, where an oiled belt or an unfinished web of cloth
attracted their hungry tongues.

As yet, they were like separate skirmishers, sent out in advance; their
mighty force not yet gathered and rolled together in such terrible sheet
and volume as raged beneath.

She reached the corner where hung the rope.

Close by, was the faucet in the main pipe fed by the force pump.
Underneath it, lay a coil of hose, attached and ready.

She turned the faucet, and laid hold of the long rope. A few pulls, and
she heard the dashing of the water far below. The wheel was turning.

The pipes filled. She lifted the end of the coiled hose, and directed it
toward the forward part of the chamber, where flames were wreathing,
climbing, flashing. An impetuous column of water rushed, eager, hissing,
upon blazing wood and heated iron.

Still keeping the hose in her grasp, she crawled back again, half
stifled, yet a new hope of life aroused within her, to the double doors.
Before these, with the little countingroom behind her, as her last
refuge, she took her stand.

How long could she fight off death? Till help came?

All this had been done and thought quickly. There had been less time
than she would have believed, since she first woke to the knowledge of
this, her horrible peril.

The flames were already repulsed. The mill was being flooded. Down the
belt holes the water poured upon the fiercer blaze below, that swept
across the forward and central part of the great spinning room, from
side to side.

At this moment, a cry, close at hand.

"Fire!"

A man was swaying by a rope, down from a third-story window.

"Fire!" came again, instantly, from without, upon another side.

It was a voice hoarse, excited, strained. A tone Faith had never heard
before; yet she knew, by a mysterious intuition, from whom it came. She
dropped the hose, still pouring out its torrent, to the floor, and
sprang back, through the doors, to the countingroom