CHAPTER XIX.

A WELL OF FIRE.

“So you are living in this brick house, and running the delicatessen store as well?” said Nick the next evening, as he and his two assistants stood outside Bonesy Billings’ home. “This is better than being in a flat house downtown.”

“You bet it is,” assented Bonesy. “Besides, my work is up here in this section, and I’ve no reason to go downtown to live. There’s plenty of these old brick houses up here that can be rented for about what you’d pay for a flat around Ninety-seventh Street, and it’s much more airy and nice here. Then we have some roomers, that help out.”

“Who are they? Anybody I know, I wonder?” ventured Nick.

“Not likely. There’s a musician and his daughter—a nice young girl, and I have another one—that fellow the gang was trying to do up at Partrom’s last night. His name’s Gordon.”

“All!” remarked Carter, trying to be calm. “I’d like to see him again.”

“Well, I guess you can. I think he’s up in his room now. He isn’t working to-night. The superintendent of the mill has laid him off until inquiries are made into that fuss where you took a hand. It’s a rotten shame! Gordon wasn’t to blame for that. The others jumped on him, and he had to hold ’em off. He’s told me often that nothing can make him fight—and he ain’t no coward, either.”

“Look, chief. What’s that?” shouted Patsy Garvan excitedly, running toward the house. “Fire!”

“Heaven save us!” ejaculated Billings wildly. “It’s my house!”

He dashed into the store, and through to the back room, where he saw at once what had happened. His wife had put kerosene on the kitchen range, and there had been an explosion which meant destruction for the house.

Billings lifted his unconscious wife from the floor and ran out to the street. Then he went back to save what few pieces of furniture he might hope to get back before the fire took everything its own way.

The only hope lay in the fact that it was a brick structure, and not a frame one. The house had been built after the fire laws had forbidden the putting up of wooden buildings in that area. But there had been many brick houses put up before the era of iron-frame skyscrapers, and this was one of them.

An alarm had been turned in, and already members of the fire department were dashing up with their machines. It looked as if the fire would soon be overcome, when somebody shouted:

“Look! There’s somebody up top!”

The firemen, with their ladders, had already rescued a woman and two children from another window. But these people who were shouting for help from an attic were in the next house, which also had caught fire.

The firemen—efficient and cool-nerved, as all New York firemen are—put their ladders up. But owing to the formation of the house, it was impossible to get at the attic quickly.

Nick Carter had seen that it was a young girl at the window, and his wonderful memory carried him back to that night at Maple, where he had seen the girl they called Bessie Silvius, with her father, Roscoe Silvius, who had played and sung in the garden of the Savoy.

“That only confirms my belief that Howard Milmarsh is here,” he told himself. “It would be likely for them to live in the same house in New York if they could, after being friends in the wilds of Canada.”

This passed his mind like a flash as he looked to see how they might be rescued. He had seen that the firemen could not do it from the outside, and he made up his mind to a desperate undertaking.

Fortunately, Nick was known to all the battalion chiefs of the fire department, and to most of the other men. They all recognized him as a wonderful detective, and he was allowed privileges that ordinary citizens do not possess, even though they may have influence and great wealth.

It is not an easy thing to get inside the fire lines and be permitted to move about freely—unless you happen to be a newspaper man.

“Keep back, Patsy!” shouted Nick, as he dashed into the house, amid a shower of sparks and through a flood of water pouring from two or three lines of hose. “I’m going alone!”

“Come back!” bellowed a battalion chief. “You can’t get through there!”

Patsy and Chick would both have followed their chief, but firemen held them back, and they were obliged to yield.

As they looked up, they saw a man lean from the attic window of Billings’ house and Patsy yelled that it was Potter.

“It’s either Potter or Howard Milmarsh,” called out Chick. “I don’t know one from the other these days.”

“He’s going to try and save that girl!” said Patsy.

“Sure enough!” assented Chick. “But where’s the chief?” he added, in a tone of agony. “That’s what he went into that house for. I wish we’d never heard of this Milmarsh case!”

“Come down out of that attic!” roared a chief through his megaphone at Potter or Milmarsh, whichever it was. “You can’t reach the girl. Hurry down, and you may save yourself. Another moment will be too late!”

But the man at the attic window paid no heed. His eyes were on the girl, who still leaned from the other window, and who was uttering scream after scream of despairing terror.

The roar of the fire, the hissing of the water, and the thud of the fire engines all made up a deafening confusion of sounds. But, through it all, Chick heard the man at the other window call out cheerfully:

“Don’t give way, Bessie! I’m coming to save you by the roof!”

“Oh, Howard! Howard!” responded the girl, shrill with horror. “My father is here, and he’s helpless!”

“Keep up your heart!” responded the man. “I’m coming!”

“Say, Patsy, she called him ‘Howard.’ Did you hear it?”

“Sure!”

“Then that looks as if he is the real thing, doesn’t it?”

But Patsy did not reply. He was wondering whether the man would reappear. He had vanished from the window, and he might have fallen back, exhausted, into the awful caldron of flame and smoke behind him.

“We’ll have to get a ladder up there!” cried a fire chief. “Up with her, boys! The third house is on fire now. We must get this fellow out somehow. There’s a better chance with the ladder at this house than either of the others.”

It was Bonesy Billings’ house in which the young man called “Howard” by the girl had just disappeared from the attic window. It was not burning so fiercely as the other two.

Whether the firemen succeeded in getting the ladder to the window where the young man was believed to be, neither Chick nor Patsy could see for the smoke. Besides, their attention was distracted from it in their anxiety for their beloved chief.

Meanwhile, Nick was bounding, head down, up the flaming stairs. As he reached—barely reached—the landing of the second floor, the whole staircase collapsed behind him. As it did so, it sent a great gush of flame and burning embers far upward and out of the front door. Several firemen, who had been trying to follow him, tumbled out, half suffocated, into the arms of their comrades outside!

Nick glanced over his shoulder as he heard the crash. He saw the well of fire where the stairs had been, and he knew that death in its most appalling form had missed him by only a few inches!

He pressed on still upward, with smoke and sparks around him, and death—almost certain, as it seemed—ahead!