CHAPTER III.

THE BURNING.

The fire must have eaten through the chimney, and had probably been burning in the walls along the staircase and in the floors of the rubbish chambers for some minutes before we had inkling of it. It was almost beyond imagining, the way it spread. But the steps of the staircase itself were firm underfoot, although inside the walls, and even to the roof, the roaring crackling flames were gutting the left wing of the house.

The doctor did not stop to help Mr. Edgerton find the key; he threw his weight against the door I pointed out again and again. It went open with a crash at last, after I had thought that the doctor would have stove his own side in first.

There was no smoke on this side of the house, but it followed us from the hallway, choking the throat and stinging the eyes. There was the box in the middle of the room.

Now we were all three encouraging one another and shouting for haste. Twice did the lawyer drop the bunch of keys as he tried to fit the lock.

"Take them, lad," he cried at last, looking over his shoulder; "your fingers are the nimbler. But make haste!" The tears were pouring down his face; he hurriedly rose from his knees, and, making a leap for the window, kicked out the glass and the shutter that had been nailed fast, and thrust his head to the air, coughing, struggling, and gagging as if his last day had come.

In the mean time the doctor was bending over, with his face close to mine, and whispering admonitions to be cool; but his hand on my shoulder shook as if the ague had possession of him. Upon my soul, I think I was the coolest of the three! Key after key I tried without success. Suddenly the doctor slipped his fingers into the handle at the end.

"Out the window with it!" he spluttered. "What jack-asses! What dunces! Bear a hand here, Edgerton!"

The lawyer turned back into the room. He took the other end of the box, and they heaved with all their strength, I, still on my knees, helping them. We might as well have tried to pull the big oak before the house up by the roots.

"It's nailed down!" roared the lawyer, running his fingers along the edge.

There was a crash in the lower hall, and a great tongue of flame, like a red thirsty blade, licked in at us through the doorway. There was such a roaring now in our ears that we could not make ourselves heard except by shouting.

"Out of the window for our lives!" cried the doctor. "The stairs have fallen!"

The lawyer bestowed some angry but useless kicks on the lid of the box, and we piled out of the window on the roof of the back piazza. The wind, blowing strongly from the eastward, had kept most of the smoke and the flame away from the north side of the building.

But it was a fearsome sight to see the way things were going. The whole of the west wing, and the south also, to the roof, was one red smooch of flame against the tree-tops. The dark smoke curled over and hung close to the damp earth. It was some twelve or fifteen feet from the piazza roof to the ground, but a chinaberry-tree grew close to hand, spreading to the eaves.

The lawyer made one leap of it into the tree and crashed through it; and just as the roof on which we were standing shook and sloughed away and the flames burst up from below, the doctor and I caught at a branch and swung off together; but the limb broke beneath our weight. Down we came by the run, I landing full and fair upon the doctor's chest, which almost did for him for good and all.

Scrambling to our feet, Mr. Edgerton and I hauled him away to some distance from the house, and the cool rain helped to revive him, although for some minutes he drew breath with difficulty.

Then the three of us sat there on the wet grass and watched the house burn. I shall never forget it or the mixture of feelings which filled my mind and bosom. A sense of unreality, an inability to grasp the idea that it was really _happening_ probably was uppermost.

The lawyer, whom I had always thought a cold-tempered person, was squatted cross-legged, Turk fashion, grasping the toes of his boots in either hand, and rocking himself to and fro, all the time muttering and scolding like a child, and, whether from the smoke or his anger and disappointment, the tears following one another down his cheeks.

The doctor, who had raised himself on his elbow, was the first to speak coherently.

"The burning of a mystery," he said. "Now what's to be done?"

A shrill, frightful scream, the like of which I had never heard before or since, roused us to our feet.

"In the name of all the powers, what's that?" cried the lawyer.

"The horses, man--we have forgotten them!" answered the doctor, starting on a run to the front of the house around the east wing.

The oak to which the two beasts had been made fast was close to the side of the house. One of them had broken loose, and had made off into the garden, towing the chain behind him. The other (the saddle-horse) had wound the halter around the trunk of the tree, and, half strangled, was snubbed close to it, backing away with all his might. As we saw this again he emitted the horrid cry of fright and agony. I had never known that such tones were in the voice of any animal. The heat had shrivelled the upper branches of the oak, and even the bark on the side toward the house was singed and smoking.

The lawyer drew out a knife, and hastening up, shielding his face, cut the poor beast adrift. He galloped away toward the swamp.

The wooden wing was completely eaten by this time, and the flames were pouring from every window of the brick portion of the older part of the dwelling. Soon the walls alone would be left standing. I turned away from the sight and looked out to the river. A long white row of wild swan swayed in the current. Their halloings and cries, like those of a crowd of school-children at recess, came down to us on the damp wind. The smoke had evidently been seen from one of the plantations up the Gunpowder, for a boat under a small sprit-sail was making out from the farther shore.

The doctor was now in the garden examining the chaise, which had been overturned in a patch of brushwood. He tried each wheel mechanically, and I could see he felt relieved that no damage had been done.

"Well, what are we going to do now?" I nervously asked of Mr. Edgerton, speaking for the first time, and repeating the doctor's words of a few minutes before.

The lawyer fumbled in his pockets and drew forth the miniature and the paper he had taken from the desk. I remembered having noticed also that the doctor had slipped the coins in his pocket.

"This is all we have to go by," he replied. "Lord only knows what you've lost, Master Hurdiss. Oh, confound the thought that made me light the fire!" he added, kicking and pawing at the soaked ground like an angry bull.

Well, to make a short story of a long one, we watched the house burn down to a mass of smouldering heated ashes, and then we started to drive back without speaking. On the return we met a number of men on foot and horseback, who had sighted the conflagration from the cross-roads and were coming down the lane, but it was too late to do anything, and in a few words we explained what had happened. That night we spent at the tavern, and the next day we returned to Marshwood, followed by many curious persons. We dug in the still warm ruins, and there, to show the heat of the fire, we discovered nothing of the strong-box but the hinges, melted out of shape, and two or three small bits of metal as large as bullets that had once been gold pieces. These were turned over to me as being my lawful possessions, and they made, with what the doctor had saved and the miniature and the paper, my sole inheritance. So now begins the time I must act for myself.