huckling over the assault of the axes.

His situation had not much the advantage of that of the chief: his red
shirt might have been set with orange jewels, so studded it was with the
flying sparks; and, a large brand dropping upon his helmet, he threw up
his hand to dislodge it and lost the helmet. The great light fell
upon his fair hair and smiling face, and it was then that Miss Betty
recognized the Incroyable of her garden.

CHAPTER VI. The Ever Unpractical Feminine

It was an investigating negro child of tender years, who, possessed of
a petty sense of cause and effect, brought an illuminative simplicity to
bear upon the problem of the force-pump; and a multitudinous agitation
greeted his discovery that the engineers had forgotten to connect their
pipes with the river.

This naive omission was fatal to the second warehouse; the wall burst
into flame below Crailey Gray, who clung to the top of the ladder,
choking, stifled, and dizzily fighting the sparks that covered him, yet
still clutching the nozzle of the hose-line they had passed to him. When
the stream at last leaped forth, making the nozzle fight in his grasp,
he sent it straight up into the air and let the cataract fall back upon
himself and upon the two men beneath him on the ladder.

There came a moment of blessed relief; and he looked out over the broad
rosy blur of faces in the street, where no one wondered more than he
how the water was to reach the roof. Suddenly he started, wiped his eyes
with his wet sleeve, and peered intently down from under the shading
arm. His roving glance crossed the smoke and flame to rest upon a tall,
white figure that stood, full-length above the heads of the people, upon
a pedestal wrought with the grotesque images of boys: a girl's figure,
still as noon, enrapt, like the statue of some young goddess for whom
were made these sacrificial pyres. Mr. Gray recognized his opportunity.

A blackened and unrecognizable face peered down from the eaves, and the
voice belonging to it said, angrily: "Why didn't they send up that line
before they put the water through it?"

"Never mind, Tom," answered Crailey cheerfully, "I'll bring it up." "You
can't; I'll come down for it. Don't be every kind of a fool!"

"You want a monopoly, do you?" And Crailey, calling to Tappingham Marsh,
next below him, to come higher, left the writhing nozzle in the latter's
possession, swung himself out upon the grappling-ladder, imitating the
chie