nrevel raised his
arms, took a hard grip upon the lowest rung of the grappling-ladder and
tried it with his weight; the iron hooks bit deeper into the roof; they
held. He swung himself out into the air with nothing beneath him, caught
the rung under his knee, and for a moment hung there while the crowd
withheld from breathing; then a cloud of smoke, swirling that way, made
him the mere ghostly nucleus of himself, blotted him out altogether,
and, as it rose slowly upward, showed the ladder free and empty, so that
at first there was an instant when they thought that he had fallen. But,
as the smoke cleared, there was the tall figure on the roof.

It was an agile and daring thing to do, and the man who did it was
mightily applauded. The cheering bothered him, however, for he was
trying to make them understand, below, what would happen to the "Engine
Company" in case the water was not sent through the lines directly; and
what he said should be done to the engineers included things that would
have blanched the cheek of the most inventive Spanish Inquisitor that
ever lived.

Miss Betty made a gesture as if to a person within whispering distance.
"Your coat is on fire," she said in an ordinary conversational tone,
without knowing she had spoken aloud, and Mr. Vanrevel, more than one
hundred feet away, seemed particularly conscious of the pertinence of
her remark. He removed the garment with alacrity, and, for the lack
of the tardy water, began to use it as a flail upon the firebrands and
little flames about him; the sheer desperate best of a man in a rage,
doing what he could when others failed him. Showers of sparks fell upon
him; the smoke was rising everywhere from the roof and the walls below;
and, growing denser and denser, shrouded him in heavy veils, so that, as
he ran hither and thither, now visible, now unseen, stamping and beating
and sweeping away the brands that fell, he seemed but the red and
ghostly caricature of a Xerxes, ineffectually lashing the sea. They were
calling to him imploringly to come down, in heaven's name to come down!

The second man had followed to the top of the ladder against the wall,
and there he paused, waiting to pass up the line of hose when the
word should come that the force-pump had been repaired; but the people
thought that he waited because he was afraid to trust himself to the
grappling-ladder. He was afraid, exceedingly afraid; though that was not
why he waited; and he was still c