Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 159: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

TEAKETTLE TEN. looked down, almost in panic for a second, then up, then far out across the pink snow. Sullivan winced under his grip. “Get your hands off!” His thin voice broke shrilly. McQuire held on, unrelent- ing. He went up swiftly, with the spring- ing motion of a cat on a ladder, straight toward the top of the wall. The swaying bricks spread their angle farther out. McQuire hoisted Stone Age Sullivan as he climbed. “Leave me be!” demanded Sullivan. ‘““And git yourself kilt?” Captain McQuire stood hazardously atop the wall. The fire whipped past him, mel- ted the rubber on his back, and forced tears streaming from his eyes. He held his breath—he knew what a breath up there would do. It would be his last, and he had hopes of living still. The wall swung in three feet. It hesitated, shook, and settled back. Then it tottered out. Firemen know the ways of such things, no man on the corner need tell them how. When a wail falls outward, as most walls do, there is only one hope for the reckless laborer hanging to a ladder along the side. That is to get to the top—where a man is flung clear of the wreckage—that and a prayer that he might land on something soft. The north wall went first. McQuire, crouching on the flame spitting sill of the east, heard the bricks as they rumbled down. Then his own slid out, two feet, three, five feet, moving a little faster. A floor collapsed somewhere inside and fanned fire out of the windows. The uprights leaned farther—seven feet, another inch. With a roar from McQuire and a shrill squeak from Sullivan, the hide ware- house slid tumultuously into ruin. A smashing rush of bricks drowned all sound of the flames. Electric wires, snapping, played blue and green. _The world seemed to rock, and two clinging bodies volcanoed high above the wreckage. It was a snow bank five feet high where they dropped, Sullivan kicking and weak of voice, McQuire pumping out epithets in a steady, grumbling, incoherent stream. The commander of Teakettle Ten rolled to 189 his feet, running first one way, then another. McQuire lay still. “Til be back and ’tend you later,” Sullivan’s voice grated senselessly: ‘““ where’s me nozzle?” It was Squad One found them, Sullivan raving, still running painfully up and down, and McQuire numb, sluggish, half con- scious, with a bump on his head. The old warehouse burned itself out, uninterrupted further by Tea kettle Ten or Thirty-Two. Lazy streams from other hose played on surrounding sheds to keep the fire within respectful limits. The snow fell on un- heeded. At a restaurant, far back in the white, drifting whirl, its windows steamy and its air sticky and warm, men laid the pair of them out on the counter. And when they stripped off the clotted mitten on Sullivan’s hard right hand, they found the places where three fingers should have been. Driver Malone explained. “It was Buck; he’s a devil, that horse! I see him nab the old man—habit of his. I always was for gettin’ rid of him, but the old man ’d rather burn up. We got to take gasoline if we get rid of Buck—he don’t trust gasoline.” An arriving doctor sinreciel the hospital. Stone Age Sullivan, whose spine was still good for its ounce of pain, heard the sug- gestion, and demanded that the medical man do his duty there and then and have it over; which the medical man did. The job was over when McQuire, rubbing his head, struggled to pull himself to an upright position. “Hello, Mac!” Sullivan spoke huskily, without giving sign of temper. “Hello, Sully!” Such was the fire at Box 816, except that Stone Age Sullivan called the department headquarters from Engine Ten’s barn the next day and asked fiercely for the mar- shal. “Big Boss? Say—this is Sullivan. When you goin’ to git rid of them measly nags and give me a gasoline pumper? Something I can trust.” “And,” said the marshal, telling it afterward, “‘ damned if I don’t believe he meant it!” GOmicdooks com