smoke and tossing out
clothing and other belongings, stood Mr. Lanier. Some men went searching
for ladders up the line of back yards, the post hook and ladder truck
being, of course, on the far side of the garrison. There being no
extension and sheds to this little box, as to the larger quarters up the
line, other men began shouting, and Lieutenant Grayson imploring Mr.
Lanier to jump, for already the flames had burst through the windows
below. Then came the episode the regiment laughed over, swore over,
talked over, many a long year thereafter. To Grayson's appeal Bob's only
answer was a calm and deliberate:

"Give my compliments to the colonel, will you, and tell him that, my
quarters being all ablaze, I'd like an extension of arrest?"

Then Sumter and Stannard came in, tumultuous, and _ordered_ him down,
and Blake and Curbit, and the rest of the card party, came tearing after
them, and berated him for an absurdity, and implored him not to be an
ass. And then a bright tongue of flame licked in through the transom
behind him, and the door panels burst from the heat, and all the room at
his back suddenly blazed with fire, and then went up the cry from that
agonized girl, at sound of which Lanier started and strove to climb to
the little window-sill, with a lurid sheet lapping down about his head,
and then a brace of young Irishmen, Cassidy foremost, came scrambling up
a human pyramid, smoking and singeing below them. They reached the
blazing eaves and burst through the fringe of flame, dragging Bob forth
and on to the edge, and then tottered all together into that blessed
mound of snow beneath, fast melting in the glare of that fiery furnace.

Then came the commander, and the swift running soldiers, and all the
antiquated fire apparatus, and most of the families. Soon the hooks were
locked in the blazing framework, and speedily the little bachelor den
was torn into hissing and smoking fragments. Meantime Lanier and
Cassidy, Blake, Horton, and nearly a dozen daring fellows who had risked
their skins to save their lieutenant, had been led over to hospital to
be cooled off and lotioned and bandaged and variously put to bed, and
when at last not a spark could be found in the black, unsightly ruins,
and even they had been buried under bushels of snow, the colonel and his
men-at-arms went back to quarters, and many of the officers to the
store, to talk it all over, especially what Bobby had said to Button.

And thus were w