HE WAS the son of Smoke and the great-grandson of Blaze. That's enough to identify Cinders in the fire department of the City of New York, except that there was never a mascot loved his driver and the pole horse of his team as he did Donohue and old King. Lots of dogs get so sentimental at times that they go plumb fool and Cinders was one of them, although it didn't hurt his capacity as a mascot, for he had the lungs and legs of a deer and could clear the way for our company over the longest run ever made by a big steamer.

       When Donahue was laid up for a week while the doctors uncaked the smoke that had settled in his chest during the warehouse blaze, Cinders was a lost dog, until he got the scent to the hospital. He wouldn't eat or run to a fire, or even wag his tail when the captain's little girl would come around to the house of a pleasant afternoon. He just sat in a corner with his nose touching the ground, and we were all thinking that he was going to make a croak of it, when the captain came in one day with the scent of Donohue on his hands and clothes after visiting him at the hospital. Then Cinders knew that his boss wasn't dead, and he went over to the captain and wagged himself so hard that I thought he would break in half. Having expressed his thanks for the important information, he walked out of the engine house and followed the captain's back trail until he reached the Hudson Street hospital, not many blocks away.

       Sure there was trouble at the hospital! Cinders got in between the legs of an ambulance surgeon, but lost the captain's scent on the first floor. The attendants tried to rush him out, but Cinders showed his fine teeth and his hair stood up on his spine when they came so close to him that they bothered him in his investigation. He took a peek into every corner of the first floor and then trotted up the stairs to the second.
 

THE superintendent got sore and he sicked a dozen men and boys after the brute with broomsticks and floor mops. Some of the nurses thought the dog was mad, and made a rush for safety, screaming like so many engines in need of more coal at a big fire. A couple of souse patients thought they had 'em again and howled for the needle. Cinders was getting warm on the trail, however, and was so busy that he didn't bother about the excitement and failed to see an old party hobbling down the hall on a pair of crutches. He knocked one of the pins from under him and the old party went down like a scaffold in a March storm.

       The only time in all its history when the hospital was as noisy in one afternoon was when Garry McLaughlin had two broken legs set after refusing to take ether for fear that some young doctor might get interested and cut 'em off.

       Cinders ducked a cuspidor and a dozen wild pitches with brooms, floor mops, books, and chairs and trotted up to the third floor. He no sooner hit the top of the flight of stairs then he got Donohue's scent good and strong, and he announced it with his familiar voice.

       "Whut you doing here, ye hound of heaven!" yelled Donohue from the sheets. "Hi! Hi! Over here, ye hellion!" He was as glad as the dog was. Cinders was snouting out the terrified patients in the ward when he got sight of the face of his boss. Then he cleared two cots with one spring and hopped in bed with him.

       The rest of the time Donohue was in the hospital Cinders gave the engine house only four hours a day and four hours a night. When he would fail to make a successful sneak into the hospital he would get under his driver's window and serenade him with a voice that had John McCormick, the great Irish tenor, sounding like a whistle on a peanut stand. When he came to the engine house he spent his time in smelling around old King's stall, just to make sure that his other special friend was all right. King would nose the dog all over and nibble at him as if he were a fine piece of chocolate. No man in our company ever saw a man, a dog, and a horse stick together so close as Donohue, Cinders, and King.
 

WE ALWAYS had trouble when Donohue was away from the job, especially from King. The big white pole horse had the blood of an Arab stallion in him, the contractor who sold him to the city having picked him up at a sale of circus horses. He looked his name more and more as he grew older and heavier. He was white as a bank of snow in the country, with a proud arch to his neck and his long tail stood out clear from his buttocks, falling like a cascade of silver.

       Donohue didn't care for dominoes and the other games the men played in the engine house, and so he had plenty of time in which to groom the favorite of his three horses. King had the nerves that a steed of the desert is supposed to have, and he had fidelity to only one friend, and that one friend was Donohue. Cinders was more than a friend of King's. He was like a blood relation. With the love and devotion of his two dumb friends and his own love for his job, Donohue was about as happy a driver as ever leaned over a seat with the reins playing between his fingers.
 

"WHUT is there in mankind," he said one day after all the smoke had been cleared out of his deep chest, "whut is there in mankind that approaches the fidelity of his dumb friend the dog and the dog's friend, the horse? If I was to croak to-night Cinders would starve himself to death, and ye'd have to shoot King in a week, for he would have none of ye trying to drive him and groom him. He would give somebody one bite or one kick that would end somebody's 'arthly career. He understands me every word and mood. Don't ye, ye big wall-eyed ton of sausage? Shake hands wid me." King held up his right hoof. "And wid the other fut, ye divil," and the brute did as he was ordered. "And if there's a lump of sugar in me coat pocket, ye're welcome to it, ye big slob." King nosed into Donohue's pockets for the sugar. It was uncanny, for the devil of a brute had inherited all the circus stunts of his father, and Donohue, who went to his duties on the first Friday of every month, being a member of the Sodality of the Sacred Heart, never let the beast roll over on his bedding at night without making him kneel down and say his prayers.

       "It's sacrilegious to make a horse pray every night," the captain objected one evening. "If he was in vaudeville and doing it for a salary it would be all right," says he, "but you're treating him too much like a human being, Donohue."

       "Begging your pardon, Captain," speaks up Donohue, "but if a good dumb beast can be grateful to a human being there's no reason why he can't be grateful to the God that made him and all the rest of us."

       "You're bugs," says the captain. "I heard once that the bug doctors call it 'zoöphil-psychosis'."

       Donohue laughed, but he had his reply ready. "I may be bugs, Captain," says he, "but if Cinders and King and myself didn't all work together and do it gladly many's the time the big steamer would have gone to pieces against an elevated pillar or trolley with all of us having our heads cracked. It's the team work we have that puts us on the street in six seconds after the bell taps and puts us answering every call in faster time than any company can boast, and we have the company medal in the house to prove it. Am I right?"

       "You're right," the captain admitted. "I been along time in the department," continues Donohue, as he began combing King's forelock again, "and I'm getting ready to back up to the pension list and live in a little Staten Island cottage I'm after buying for the old woman and the two gran'children. There's only one thing I'm worrying about, and it's that something might happen to take either of me good dumb friends away from me."

II

OUR engine house is south of Division Street and just east of Park Row, where the streets are chopped up like confetti because some cow in the days of the Dutch wandered around the island south of Canal and made a path that later turned out to be Pearl Street. There are all kinds of gore strips on which are little tobacco stores and "fences," showing noses as sharp as razors, for every inch of the land is covered. Down in our section, every now and then, when you think you are on Rose Street you'll find yourself standing where four streets butt into each other, New Chambers popping up where Chambers got lost, Duane Street somewhere in the discard and Oak or Roosevelt shaving the corners to a point suddenly. It's a regular spider's web and with the heaviest kind of traffic, for the great trucks loaded with print paper for the "Journal" and the "World" and the unpopular down-town papers crowd the streets day and night.

       It takes a dog to clear a way for a fire company in that section. Just an ordinary animal with four legs and a bark couldn't get away with it at all. And it takes a pole horse who knows and loves his master and is close pals with the dog ahead to get a big engine safely through that traffic without killing anybody. Cinders's father, Smoke, was famous for knocking kids out of the road, and one time I saw him — but that's an old story. I just mention it because there are some people who don't believe that blood tells.

       It was in the spring of 1911 that we were notified that the old engine house we had been in for more than twenty years was to be pulled down and a real engine house built for us on the same site. There was only one way to shelter us while the new building was under construction. We stayed in the old place until the workmen were ripping out the ceiling of the ground floor and we just had to move for the horses were getting restless. A board shack had been put up for us in the space west of the Newsboys' Home where Duane and New Chambers streets bump into each other. It would do for a summer home. The contractors promised to have the new engine house ready for us before winter, and to the surprise of every man in the company and the aldermanic committee overlooking the job the contractors delivered the goods.
 

THERE weren't any ceremonies about opening our new home. The doors swung open, the chain dropped, and we rolled in backward with Donohue guiding the team just as if we'd come back from a one-alarm. It was November and the chill was in the air, and so you can make an easy guess that we were all pretty well pleased when we found the new engine house steam-heated, snug, cozy, clean, and with all the modern conveniences you read about in the advertisements on the real estate page. We had shower-baths, big lockers, a loafing room with plenty of tables and chairs, and there were electric reading lights for those of us who couldn't read fast enough to finish the report of the ball game before night fell. And there was a new brass pole so slick and firm that all you had to do was to weave your arms around it and find yourself on a soft cushion of rubber at the bottom. There were never such luxuries provided for man or beast. Even Cinders wasn't forgotten. There was a box for him, raised from the floor on struts so he wouldn't get the draft and catch a cold — only it happened that Cinders always slept with King, cuddled up against the big horse's white belly, and no beating or other argument could get him to sleep in any other place.

       "Now, whut in heaven's name is this?" I heard Donohue shout suddenly while we were looking over the modern improvements. He roared out the question as if he had been insulted, and his square, clean-shaven face showed a look of puzzlement. In his eyes there was a flash of anger, too. He pointed with a big, powerful, bony hand at the side of King's new stall.

       I took a second look at the stall and noticed that the side was screwed to the floor and that it seemed to be a temporary arrangement. There was no solid work about it. A carpenter could clear the house of that stall and all the other stalls in a half hour, using only a screwdriver.

       King was nibbling on Donohue's big red neck with little love bites, for the big Arabian loved the ground his driver walked on.

       "Suppose I'm sick or dead or retired," snorts Donohue, "and the beast gets sore because I'm not around. Why, he'd kick that thing into the tinder heap with one small shake of his left hind leg."
 

THE captain, who was wise to the inside doings of the department, shrugged his shoulders and turned away. As he started up-stairs to look over his new room he said, "Don't be borrowing trouble, Mike Donohue. We're living in a different and a faster age, old boy. What was good eighteen years ago when you come in here on probation, thinkin' ye'd set the world afire while puttin' out fires, a lot of people don't think good enough for to-day."

       Donohue scowled until his face was as black as a County Sligo man paying his ground rent to a Sassenach.

       "G'long wid their new fandangles of gasoline," he muttered. "Whut was good eighteen years ago is good to-day." Then he laughed and patted King on the nose and rubbed his heavy jowl on his neck. Cinders came over and tucked between the front hoofs of the big Arabian, looking up at his boss. "I guess we've showed 'em for eighteen years whut we can do," says Donohue to his pole horse and his dog. But the dog whimpered, for it was a different kind of stall from the one he was used to and he knew that something was wrong.

III

IT BEGAN to snow about the end of December. Then it snowed harder when January come in, and about the middle of January it snowed. It was like the Lord had said: "I'll show you people how it can snow, and when you get it good and deep you'll have to give jobs to the two hundred thousand people of Mine in your town you call bums!"

       It was a bad winter, even for those who had jobs, but it was a worse winter for those who didn't have jobs. In February the snow froze, and many is the time I saw old men picking at heaps of it, desperate-like, but not getting results. The Municipal Lodging House was taking care of twelve hundred of the homeless, and the Morgue was opened so that those who were perishing from cold might die handy to the nice marble lockers where they stick the stiffs at the end of Misery Lane.

       Big Bill Edwards was on the job, giving out interviews to the papers and cleaning the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue and Wall Street. The newspapers were proud of Bill, for he cleared the streets for their delivery wagons and all went merry as a false alarm. The mayor's sidewalk was clear, the poets were throwing the bull about "the beautiful," and east of Park Row and the Bowery there were garbage cans stuck twenty feet in the air on snow piles that the Tammany snow removal contractors were leaving for a warm spell. Any hardy explorer like Doctor Cook, used to swigging whale oil and eating fried blubber, could have stood it, but plain, ordinary East Side folks who never get farther north than Twenty-third Street began wishing they were back in Italy, Russia, Greece, Poland, Scandinavia and other countries where New Yorkers first see the light of day.

       There was a high record for fires during February, for the going was terrible and business was bad for a lot of merchants and manufacturers. We kept the rough shoes on the horses, of course, but plowing through frozen snow made them as smooth as glass after a very few minutes. Every thing depended on the driver and the sense of the pole horse, while an intelligent mascot's guidance meant a lot.
 

I WAS the engineer of the company that winter and, as the regulations required, the captain always swung alongside of me on the ash pan. On many of these terrible February runs he'd lean far over on his side, looking ahead, and I would on my side. We could see the team working away like Trojans through the black smoke that swept down across our faces, and we could hear Donohue talking to King just as if the big Arabian at the pole were a living human being. Sometimes the wind would whip back flakes of foam from the mouthing jaws of the horses as they tore at the bits as if they were trying to get a hold with their teeth as well as with their hoofs. It would slap us in the eyes, and I know the captain felt as I did — that a good fire-horse does more work and braver work than a good fireman.

       Off in the distance ahead we always heard the yelp of Cinders, clearing the crossings for us and warning the kids of the poor with their soap-box sleds. It was a lesson for any human being the way those brutes plugged through the frozen mire day after day, and there wasn't a time when we'd come in from a run that a dozen men didn't volunteer to help Donohue rub down the team and give them the chin and the petting that dumb brutes like. He attended to King himself — none of us wanted to, knowing the nature of the beast — and Cinders always looked out for himself, snuggling to the radiator and posing as a stove hound.

       Springtime came again and the Tammany contractors gathered in their large graft. A lot of firebugs were on trial and crooked insurance adjusters were committing suicide or turning state's evidence. The number of fires decreased and we had a long spell of laziness. Donohue, however, never let his team get lazy. At stated intervals, prescribed in the regulations, he would take the horses out for a jog, riding King and leading his team mates on either side. He not only kept the team in fine condition but his harness as well, and he didn't neglect himself either, for as old as he was he would spend an hour a day wrestling with the toughest and youngest of our company who yearned for excitement on the mat.

       He was one grand fireman and solid citizen, was Donohue. He had no care for the booze, or the other sports that those who draw city money have a leaning for. He had only one child, a daughter, married and with two little ones. Her husband was a cop, and he was killed in the performance of his duty before the second baby was born. His name in bronze is on one of the tablets in the rotunda of the new police headquarters building. Donohue loved his memory and cared for his kids. Some of these people who write stories about firemen could have put him in a book — he was that fine. But Donohue was old and had gray in his hair. Younger people said he was behind the times. He was. I'll tell you about that.
 

THE first real warm day of summer came and the breeze from the East River was welcome as it came with whirling clouds of dust up the street. I remember that it was late on a Friday afternoon, for the orthodox families of Baxter Street were all trooping to synagogue, the old whiskered merchants and peddlers in their shiny frock coats and second-hand beaver hats; their wives lumbering beside them with their glossy hair and fat faces framed in dark shawls and the little Abies and Rachels running at their heels. The captain and I were watching them pass when Donohue came up.

       "Captain," he said, "I guess there won't be any kick on our record for last winter."

       "How's that?" asked the captain.

       Donohue fished a little book from a hind pocket, squinched his eyes and cleared his throat.

       "The reports of the battalion chief will show," he said, and his voice was a little shaky, "that this company trimmed the new motorized company in this same battalion for eighteen out of twenty fires during January, February, and March."

       "Is that so?" says the captain. "But did ye allow for the big bunch of fires we had this side of Park Row?"

       "I did that," says Donohue. "I even measured off the stretches and give them elapsed time for busy crossings. Our horses just killed them dead when it came to getting through the snow."

       "I know how they worked," the captain told Donohue, putting an arm over the old driver's shoulders. "They're wonders, and old King seemed stronger than he was twelve years ago when he first got in the business."

       "Didn't the old fellow work, Captain?" cried Donohue. "But didn't he show the stuff in him! Did yuh ever hear of a fire-horse that could stand up the way he did last winter wid the streets like they was?" Some of the dust from the outside got in his eyes, for they got leaky. Cinders, always snouting at his heels, coiled up with a whine, with one paw over his master's shoe.

       "He is a horse, Donohue," said the captain.

       Then Donohue reeled off his figures, showing how his team had trimmed the big auto-engine and auto-truck on the other side of Park Row.

       "It's a fine showing for all of us, Donohue," said the captain; "but we don't have much snow any more in New York and ten out of twelve months the gasoline will beat out the hay."

       The captain was trying to break it to him easy. I saw Donohue turn away from him without another word, as if the handwriting had been flashed on the wall. He went over to King's stall, pretended to be fixing something about his bit, and then he and Cinders walked up the stairs slowly. The dog's tail was tucked low and his ears hung over his nose.

       One month afterward a department carpenter came and unscrewed the new-fangled stalls and carted them out. The feed bags, the blankets, the whips, the extra harness, extra horseshoes, the curry combs, water pails and brushes were all carried off to the lumber room. Donohue placed King at the pole and his white mates on either side; snapped on the harness; crawled up to his seat and drove out with Cinders barking ahead and, as they cleared the entrance, the new big motor engine and the motor hose wagon backed in.

IV

IT WAS well into August before we could get used to the change. The men complained that they couldn't sleep on account of the smell of gasoline, and all of us missed the sounds of the horses in their stalls and the pleasant smell of hay and oats and straw. Donohue had put in his application to be retired on pension, for his time had passed and he was out of the running forever. Just what happened in other motorized companies happened in ours — the mascot refused to run ahead of the apparatus. For quite a while Cinders would bounce to his feet and dart through the door at the tap of the bell, but there was no clatter of hoofs or whinnying of eagerness from his old friends. There was a roar from the exhaust, the bitter stench of burnt gasoline and then a sudden realization on the part of Cinders that his time, too, had gone, and that he also was out of the running. He would stop suddenly in the middle of a whirling jump and slink back into the house.

       But Donohue was faithful to the end. It was a bitter dose for a charioteer like him to turn chauffeur in his old age, but he had taken the necessary instructions and was at the wheel, his eyes and hands steady but his mouth shut tight, for there's nothing in a gasoline engine to gain the heart-interest of a man. He couldn't talk to it like he used to talk to his big, snow-white friend who said his prayers in his stall every night.

       Our old apparatus had been taken to a company far down near the East River in the Corlears Hook section and the horses had been turned over to the city to be sold to the highest bidder. One of the men at the Hook came over on his day off soon afterward and told us that the big Arabian looked sick when Donohue told him good-by and that poor Cinders had howled his head off as if calling to him to follow when he went away at the heels of his boss. It must have been awful tough for the old man. There were stories floating around that he had tried to buy King, but the price went too high for him and he couldn't get the money together because he had just paid an instalment on his little Staten Island farm.
 

IT WAS during August that Cinders began to cut us out. He would disappear for hours and frequently stay away all night, and all the beatings that Donohue would give him didn't change him a bit. He was turning bum, not a hard thing for a fire mascot who knows all the streets and corners of the city to accomplish. Sometimes we'd get telephone calls from points two miles away saying that someone had picked him up and was holding him for us. We always sent for him, of course, for we felt sorry for him, as we did for Donohue, and for ourselves for that matter. None of us were crazy about gasoline.

       One day Cinders came in after a long stretch of bumming the streets and began to jump on Donohue, barking his head off. The old driver couldn't make him go to his corner. The brute was frantic, and kept bouncing up in the air and yelping until the water poured from his jaws and his tongue hung down on his throat. That very day Donohue had received his notice of retirement and he was to leave the house and the service of the department at midnight. His few things were packed and the boys had taken up a collection amounting to fifty dollars to present him as a testimonial of affection. The plan was for the whole company to come down the pole at the stroke of midnight, crowd around Donohue, give him three cheers, surprise him with the money, and then three cheers more as he went out of the door for the last time.

       We were all wondering whether Cinders had gone crazy with the heat when Donohue ripped out an oath and picked up the dog and held him to his shoulder.

       "Captain Jim! Mike! Barney! Johnny!" he cried. "Cinders has found King, as sure as I have me pension papers in me pocket! He's found at last, glory be! He never come back from one of these tramps like this before, and he's found King! I'd stake my life on it."

       Then things began to happen. It was about five o'clock in the afternoon and toward bridges, ferries, subway and elevated stations the hundreds of thousands of men and women packed in the great down-town skyscrapers began to move in the rush hour lockstep.

       Zing!

       It was our call, and it came from the old Beekman Swamp section filled with old ramshackle buildings stored with hides, tallow, paint, printers' ink, and drugs and chemicals.
 

EVERY man bounced for his place on the apparatus and we were out in three seconds, just half the time we used to make with the horses. Cinders ran ahead of us this time and performed his duty as a real mascot born in the business and descended from mascots should perform it. We headed south with the siren shrieking all the time and the bell going, the cops waving back vehicles and streams of people and Cinders lengthening his lead as we crossed New Chambers and headed down William Street.

       Some distance ahead of us I saw a big truck piled high with tons of print paper in great rolls for the "World's" press room being drawn over to one side. Two of the big horses were chestnut, but the center horse was pure white and he was restless. Cinders cut over in front of him and began his jumping and barking before the team. I felt the engine slow a bit as Donohue took in the situation, and saw the peril of it.

Off went that truckload of paper in a wild runaway

 

       The big white brute tore himself free of the driver, gave a lunge that carried his two frightened mates along with him, and off went that towering, tottering truckload of paper in a wild runaway, the wildest and most dangerous that ever coursed through the streets of New York. No one man or two men or ten men could have stopped it, but Cinders was on the job, clearing the way, and Donohue put on speed and moved up close, running a terrible chance of being wrecked, for if one of the great white rolls fell in our course we would sure turn turtle. The shriek of our siren so close behind them made the truck team work all the harder, but it was necessary for us to stick close so as to warn the crowds ahead. Cinders might have been wild with joy at being in the running once more, but at the same time he did his work as neatly as any fire dog that ever coursed a street during the rush hour.

       I was expecting the worst to happen any moment, and was ready for a flying jump when the crash came. A mounted cop joined in the race at Beekman Street, putting the spurs into his mount and helping Cinders get people out of the reach of trouble. One thing all of us, except Donohue perhaps, had overlooked, and that was the long years of training that King — the pole horse of the runaways — had in our favor. The great Arabian could use his brain as well as his great muscles. After five blocks of flirting with death there loomed ahead of us a cop in the middle of the street waving his club while from the windows of a four story building there poured clouds of black smoke. Cinders slowed up until the runaway team was almost on him. Then King began pulling back. Fortunately we were then on a slight upgrade, and the fine old fire horse's fight to bring his crazy team mates to a stop at the first hydrant near the fire was won. The mounted cop was on the job in a minute and a bunch of truck drivers helped him. The three big brutes were held, trembling and exhausted in their tracks, with the heavy load of paper still safe in the truck.

       The fire was an easy one to squelch and we squelched it in less than fifteen minutes. When I got back to the street and company roll call I found Donohue standing by King with Cinders at his heels. The three of them had wound up their services to the city of New York in grand fashion, and Donohue was grinning from ear to ear as a big citizen with a diamond the size of a chestnut in his bosom was lifting up his voice and swearing and raging in broken Italian.

       "Whut's the trouble?" says I to the big galoot, not knowing whether he needed to be tapped on the coco' or just turned over to a cop.

       "Deesa dam' horse — da bigga fel', he shouted. "I buy-a heem from-a da cit' — me, Caselli, da truckman. I pay one hundred dol' and he bite-a two fel' in da stable, kick da whole-dam' place in small piece, kick ma brotha Giovanni Caselli out da window and now he run away with two good-a horse and da pape'."

       King, who didn't seem to like Mr. Caselli, straightened out his neck and nipped at him, ripping his coat sleeve wide open.

       Caselli let out a yell of terror as he jumped back, and began to cry like a baby.

       "Meesta fireman, signor," he begged, "take heem back. I sell-a heem for fifty dol' right now. You pay me one dol' a week. I trust you, signor."

       Donohue stroked King's big white, sweaty neck and the brute nibbled at one of his freckled ears, to the horror of the truckman.
 

IT WAS night before all the excitement was over and the police had secured evidence for a complaint against Caselli for using a dangerous horse in the streets. The captain left his lieutenant in charge of the company while he conferred with various persons, among them Caselli.

       There were no calls during the first part of the night and the men were all up in the dormitory pretending to be asleep after each had told old Donohue good-by. At midnight the bell sounded and down came the whole crew all ready for a run but all grinning and muttering to each other. The door flew open and the new chauffeur was at the wheel of the big auto-engine, but we did not roll. Instead, in walked the captain with King following in halter and Cinders whooping it up and waking up the neighbors. The electric lights were switched on and showed Donohue standing with his clothes packed in a bundle and on his shoulder. In his left hand was the exercise bridle he had used on King for so many years and which he had kept as a souvenir.

       "Whut's all this?" he demanded, wondering why the company did not roll in answer to the alarm which we had arranged with headquarters to fake.

       Then King's big hoofs hit the cement floor and Donohue turned and saw his two dumb friends waiting for him.

       Donohue," said the captain, "the boys asked me to give you this testimonial." He handed the halter strap to him. "There'll be lots of fun for the two of ye on the little farm, and if the dog should happen to follow you, why there ain't any of us can stop him."

       Donohue was a man of few words. He did his best to get two or three of them together in a way that might sound like something but he couldn't manage it, so he shook hands all around. Then he gave a sign to King and the big son of a circus stallion dropped on his knees and bowed his head until his forelock swept the floor.

       "Git up," said Donohue, and he swung over the sleek white back, grabbing his pack as the captain slung it to him.

       "Good-by, fellers, and God bless you," he called, and we gave him the three cheers as Cinders darted out ahead of him. Then we all got out on the sidewalk and gave him three more and the tiger as King became just a patch of white far down the starlit street on the way to Staten Island ferry.

       We could hear the yelp of the son of Smoke getting fainter and fainter in the distance long after we could see the patch of white that represented King. When the voice of the dog died off into the distant hum of the ferryboats and only the city's sounds were left to our weatherbeaten and fire-frazzled ears we drifted back into the engine house with a good part of the fun of fire-fighting gone from us forever.

       "I'm glad it happened," said the captain. His eyes were hazy. "I'm glad it happened," says he. "Donohue has got the best of us all; he's got his old friends and his true friends. Get up to bed, ye tarriers."

(THE END)