HE WASN'T what you'd call a handsome guy, but many was the woman to look at him twice and have her eyes light up bright. Duffy had a four-alarm head of hair, red as a lumber yard fire, and he went to the barber so seldom that when he did get a cut it was hard to recognize him. He wasn't a tall man, but he was a big one and a sound one with chest enough for two firemen. From driving Number Twenty-nine's big team his muscles were bunched up behind his shoulders and his biceps were as big as two cocoanuts.

       When a steamer as big as Number Twenty-nine, with three horses as powerful as ours, begins to eat up the asphalt of Chambers Street the man in the driver's seat finds it easier to get along without a hat or coat. So when Duffy leaned over the big white buttocks of our team, his blue flannel shirt open at the throat, his sleeves rolled up to give his muscles full and easy play and his red hair flowing straight back from his coco he was some sight to see, take it from me, the captain of Twenty-nine.

       Three years ago that Tad was as cheerful a fellow as ever swapped a joke in an engine house. I was a lieutenant then and had just taken my examination for promotion. I remember the change when it come over him. He had a week's vacation, for sickness and death had cut into the company and he had been working overtime like a Trojan. He left the house rigged up in a dandy new suit and laughing and joking with the fellows as he told them good-by. After his week off he come back and got on the job without saying a word to a man of us. After that he minded his own business strictly, kept to himself, and when things were dull and the men were all skylarking he would sit in a chair in a corner, silent, smoking, and peering out at nothing with his keen little blue eyes.

       Everybody liked Duffy and that's why we noticed it so much. Blue spells come to the best of us, but when a thing like that runs into a month and then into two months and finally into two years, by cripes, it's awful!

       No captain ever loved his men better than I loved mine, and Duffy was the best in my crew. He was clean, straight as a string, powerful as Jim Jeffries in his best year, and gentle as a girl. He loved his job so that I saw him cry like a child once when I ordered him to quarters because his lungs was caked with smoke and cinders and he was breathing like an elephant with the croup. During the first year of this change I argued with him every now and then to forget his grouch but he would just sit still, smoke, and say nothing.

       Then he got to sticking around quarters when he was off duty. He would have worked twenty-four hours a day, but the regulations wouldn't permit that. If he was hanging around this way when we rolled he would close up after we got away and stay in that empty house without horse, dog, man, or cat, and sit and smoke, and think God only knows what. When we would come in he would open up for us and go over to his corner.

       "Duffy," I said to him one Thanksgiving Day, "my Mamie has got a turkey that would make the glummest of the holy martyrs mighty glad to see. It's a fat hen turkey and it cost so much around in Washington Market that the old girl asked the poultryman if he thought she was Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. I want you to come over to the flat for the big eats."

       It was more of an order than an invitation. He gave a little grin, one of those poor little grins that makes you think it hurts a man all over to part with. I felt like asking him to take half of it back; he was too generous.

       "I'm with you," he said, without taking his pipe from his face.
 

WE WENT over to the flat. My Mamie just laid herself out to put the heart back in that Mick. My Mamie can stand up with any girl for looks. Her hair is nice and brown and there is plenty of it that never saw the inside of a store. She's got big blue eyes with a laugh in them for every minute of the day, and she is as husky as she is pretty. We've been married four years and we've got four young ones. That's my Mamie, and there ain't a wrinkle in her face.

       The turkey was ready for us, brown and steaming and stuffed with things that smelled so good that both Mamie and I put it down right there that if the Lord took us both into heaven we'd ask Saint Peter to give us a little flat around on the real Pearl Street and credit at the butcher's until I could learn to play a harp and get a regular job in the choir. I give the old girl a good squeeze that made her turn rosy as she kissed me. I was teasing with her and the two oldest kids were pulling at her apron when my eye fell on Duffy. His back was turned to us and he was staring out the window at the clothes-line just as if it was some new piece of fire apparatus. I dropped Mamie just as he begins feeling in his pockets for his pipe and tobacco, and started to wrestle with the turkey.

       "Sit in, Mr. Duffy, please," says Mamie, pulling up his chair.

       Duffy put his pipe and tobacco back in his pocket and sat in. Little Mamie and little Michael sat on either side of him. They ducked their heads and my Mamie and Duffy ducked theirs as I made the sign of the Cross.

       Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which from Thy bounty we are about to receive through Christ our Lord. Amen.

       I didn't miss a word of it, although I don't get to say it every day, being a fireman.

       "You got 'em already, Captain," said Duffy as Mamie passed him his plate.

       "Got what?" I asked him.

       "You done received 'em," he replied.

       "Received what?" I didn't get him at all.

       "The gifts of God."

       It sounded solemn as it came from his lips. I didn't know what to say, but Mamie was there to save me.

       "You're right, Mr. Duffy," she says. "There ain't anything else God could give Mike and me except strength to bear any affliction He might send us."

       We didn't have any more time for conversation. Mamie had to watch the new baby, and the one that come just before him was crawling on the floor upsetting furniture. She had to pass plates at the same time and keep the two kids at the table from choking to death.

       Duffy might have had all the sins and sorrows of the world on his conscience, but he never knew what a real potato was until he ate one of my Mamie's. She cooks them so that they're nice and flaky and fall to pieces the moment you pick up your fork. And her biscuits! They were that light we had to put the windows down to keep them from blowing off the table.

       When we had that turkey looking like the washed down shell of the old Equitable Building me and Mamie took Duffy into the bedroom to see the new kid.

       Duffy looked at it like a horse would look at a piece of paper that had been blown from the street into his stall. I was afraid he would stampede.

       "He's two months old," Mamie told him. "Gee, just feel his heft!" With that the woman dumps the kid in Duffy's arms.

       "Take 'im back, for the love of Mike!" yells Duffy. "I might squash him."

       We had a big laugh, and when Duffy finally got over his scare and lit his pipe he chuckled, and I felt that I had made a start in getting him away from his trouble.

       After one pipe it was time to beat it, so we shouted good-by to Mamie, who was nursing the infant, and started for quarters.

       When we got to the engine house Duffy says, "Thank you, Captain," and goes up-stairs to the dormitory. I was talking to the lieutenant about some trouble with the supplies department when Mrs. Doherty, who tidies up for the men, come hurrying down-stairs out of breath and whispers to me that she thinks Duffy is sick. I ran up to the dormitory and found him lying on his bed, face down. The big muscles on his shoulders seemed to be quivering a little.

       "What's the matter?" I asked.

       For a half minute he struggled with himself and his shoulder muscles bunched tight and hard.

       "Nothing," he said.

       I was worried but went away. "Was that big Jim Jeffries of a man crying?" I wondered.

       "No," I said to myself; "he had too much turkey; it's indigestion."
 

II

I DID all that a captain could do for a fireman in trouble, but I didn't make any headway with Duffy. I tried to get him to eat with us the Christmas following his Thanksgiving visit, but he made an excuse and I couldn't bully him into accepting the invitation.

       Springtime and summer come again and all of us working hard and studying for promotion. Duffy refused to take any examinations for promotion although the Board of Merit had tabbed him with a medal after two heroic rescues. He was satisfied with his three white horses and the big steamer and he was always busy keeping them glossy and bright. When there wasn't a hair left to comb or an inch of brass or nickel to polish he would sit in his corner and smoke.

       There were changes in the company — death and promotion — and one day my battalion chief notified me he was sending me a good man to fill in the last place made vacant by the usual course of events in the department.

       "He's a ten-thousand-dollar beauty," the chief informed me.

       "I give a laugh to him right now," I told the chief. "This ain't any company for pretty people. What we want is a monkey like Finnegan or a Ajax like Duffy."

       "You'll change your mind," said the chief. "He's handsome, but there isn't anything can beat him at a fire."

       "Is he Irish?"

       "No; his name is Graham and he come from out West. He's been in the department two years and is married and sober. If you get to guying him look out for his right. He's got the punch although he is a quiet fellow. I'll send him around to-morrow afternoon so he can begin on the night trick."

       I was waiting at the door for him the next afternoon about five o'clock when up Chambers Street from the Sixth Avenue "L" there comes at a fast walk as handsome and trim a lad as I ever saw in the uniform. He looked like one of those silky guys you see in the pictures about the Four Hundred doings, but from the stride of him I knew him to be a man and no mouse. He was six foot and built so evenly that it did my eyes good to take him in all over. His cheek bones were high, his nose straight and he had a jaw with a purpose, believe me. His eyes were gray under straight brows and as he come up to me and touched his cap he looked at me full on the level.

       "The first battalion chief sent me to report, sir," he said.

       "Report for what?" I asked him, sharp, just to rag him a bit.

       "For duty, Captain."

       "Oh, is that so?" I asked him. "What's your name?"

       "Graham."

       "What's the rest of your name?"

       "John."

       That fine, handsome face of his sort of broke into ripples for he knew I was stringing him along.

       "Johnny Graham is my name in quarters, Captain," he said.

       "Not the famous Johnny Graham that saved the Zinnsmeinder family in the Chrystie Street fire a year ago?" I asked him.

       His reply was a grin, not a poor, sickly little grin like the one Duffy gives but a broad, real grin that would start anybody smiling in spite of themselves.

       It was a beautiful, clear, crisp late summer afternoon and I looked up to the patch of blue over Chambers Street as if trying to decide whether I would take him or send him back to the chief.

       "Do you happen to know anything about fighting a fire?" I asked him.

       "I finished my probation period a year ago," he said.

       "Come in, Johnny," I told him as I dropped under the chain and stepped in the house. "There's two alarms sent in already from Mulberry Bend and we roll if there is a third. Maybe I can tell more about you in the next hour."

       Just as Johnny ducked under the chain Duffy come from behind the steamer and the two faced each other.

       "Hello, Duffy," said the new man, holding out his right hand.
 

DUFFY'S little eyes spit out two streaks of white flame, his jaw dropped, and his body stiffened. His red hair seemed to rise in the back like the feathers of a fighting cock. He kept his right hand close to his side and I saw his fist double slowly and tightly.

       In a second I realized that this handsome young fellow was the cause of the change that had come over Duffy three years before.

       Johnny's face turned red when he dropped his hand to his side and I saw his right foot move back as if he was getting ready for attack or defense.

       I stepped between them.

       "Look here," I says, "you men can settle your troubles outside this engine house, but the first crack either one of you makes under this roof up he goes for trial."

       Graham saluted me and nodded his head as Duffy turned on his heel and went behind the engine again.

       I followed the new man up-stairs, pretending to show him the layout of his new quarters but meaning to get at the bottom of this row.

       "I may just as well tell you all about it now, Captain," said Johnny Graham when we reached my room. "Duffy is a one-girl man. There ain't many of them, I guess; but it couldn't be blamed on me if we fell in love with the same girl and I won her."

       "Oho!" says I to myself.

       "It was easy sailing for Duffy before I met her," he went on, "and I understand he had bought the ring and had time off. She hadn't exactly promised him but she was close to it, and then I met her. She took me and we are married."

       "It's a wonder he didn't kill you," I said.

       "He had his chance," replied Graham. "We fought for an hour and a half back of a stable in Greenwich Street one Sunday afternoon. There weren't any seconds, no referee, and no rounds."

       "Who won?"

       "It was a draw, Captain."

       Zing!

       It was the third alarm.

Zing! It was the third alarm

 

       We bounced from the room and jumped for the pole. We shot down to the rubber mat with Johnny's heels just touching my head, the other men piling after us.

       Nick, the center horse, was at the pole with the harness snapped on him. Duffy snapped in Bill and Pete and sprang into the seat. As he gathered the reins the team did little rocking-horse stunts to get the feel of the floor for the big lunge into the street. Cinders, the mascot, was already outside clearing a way for us. Johnny Graham piled in the hose tender with the men.

       Duffy's ears were cocked as I jumped to my place on the ash pan beside the engineer.

       "Go!" I shouted.
 

III

WE WERE rolling at full speed when we crossed Church Street and went on for the Broadway and Chambers Street crossing. There was a swarm of Jersey commuters bound west for the Erie ferry and another stream of people bound east for the Bridge and Brooklyn. Trolley cars, automobiles, and trucks were tangled up in a very little space at the crossing because of the overhead wooden structure above the new subway excavation. But there was a canary in the middle of the crossing, and as soon as that Cossack-cop heard Cinders yelp at his heels he made that tangle straighten out. We went through a slit in it with a shriek and a bang.

       Passing Broadway, we took Centre Street on the bias and headed north to Franklin. We turned into Franklin and reached the Bend. A battalion chief, looking like he was glad to see us, waved us over to the south to Worth Street, where we coupled in record time. Duffy covered his team and turned them over to the engineer and a cop to look after, for he knew that every man of the company would be needed for hard labor.

       A great ramshackle building, a half block wide and five stories high, was one huge bonfire. I could tell in a minute that it was a paper box factory and that it would burn right down to the foundations. We stretched in through the door of a six-story tenement adjoining, our job being to save as much of that building as we could.

       The roof of the factory had blown off and as ugly a pillar of flames and sparks as I ever saw was shooting a good one hundred and fifty feet in the air and bending over under a good breeze from the northeast. The buildings in the block were jammed together and laid out so that the owners would grab every cent's worth of rent space. Only a little square patch was left open in the center of the block, and I knew we could do no fire-fighting from that kind of a death trap. We would be lucky if we saved half of the block.

       I heard somebody say that all the girls in the factory were safe at home, as the blaze started just after the whistle blew. I thanked God for that as we pushed through the narrow hall of the tenement, dragging with us the first stretch of hose.

       We reached the top floor and found that the flames from the factory had chewed a hole in the tin cornice of the tenement and were biting away at the rafters under the roof. The wood-lined dumb waiters were giving all the oxygen and tinder the fire above us needed, and the plaster ceilings on the top floor were cracking and falling in sheets on our helmets. The walls were too hot to touch with the naked hand, for the fire in the rafters had already begun to mushroom downward. I put two men with axes and two with picks to rip a hole big enough for us to get a start with the water. A second and third bright nozzle came up to us through the gloom of the stairway and in a minute I had them all going in good shape.

       It was only a question of a few minutes when we would have to retreat to the fifth floor and attack the fire from there, for I could get a flash of flame every now and then from beneath the wainscoting, and smoke was curling from under the carpet of the room from which I was directing my company.
 

IN THE tenement districts there is always danger of some sick old man or woman being left behind in the first panic that comes with a fire. A beehive hasn't got anything on a Mulberry Bend tenement. I've seen old people sleeping in bathtubs, and babies in soap boxes on the fire escapes. Duffy and Johnny Graham were near me holding a nozzle between them. I had two men relieve them and ordered them to go with me in a search of all the rooms on the floor.

       It was pretty hot by this time and the last one of us had turned his helmet. The smoke was so thick that we had to feel with our hands as we groped from room to room in the four little cubbyhole flats on the floor. We found nobody and worked our way to a rear window for a breath of air. The window we reached overlooked the little space in the center of the block. The rear wall of the factory had fallen and all the contents of the building had spewed into the court, setting fire to the abutting tenements. The court was a patch taken right out of the middle of hell, and we breathed fire instead of air as we looked out of the window.

       "Flooey!" I whispered to myself. "This is sure a nasty one."

       Suddenly I heard Johnny give a cry at my elbow.

       "Holy Virgin!" he yelled as I turned to see what was the matter. One of his long arms was outstretched and he was pointing to a window across the pit of fire. A young woman was standing on the outside of the window sill, holding to the sash with one hand and clinging to a baby that was kicking and clawing on her breast.

       "They'll look out for her on the other street," I shouted to him and Duffy above the roar and crackling of the fire in the court and in the rafters above us.

       "Like hell they will!" he shouted back. "That's my flat over there, and that's my Annie and my baby!"

       He pushed me aside and leaned out of the window, looking up. I knew he was measuring the distance to the cornice of the tenement we were in. Then he pulled back in the room and banged down the sashes. The frames creaked as he crawled over them and finally worked himself to a standing position. He balanced himself and then leaped outward and upward for the cornice, catching it. The next minute he disappeared over the edge of the roof leaving me wondering whether he had burned off his hands on the hot tin.

       The roofs of the tenements on three sides of the block were level and I knew his plan was to make his way to the roof of his own flat house and above the top story window where his wife and baby were caught. I looked and saw smoke pouring out of the scuttle and knew that the way to the roof was cut off for Annie Graham and her kid.

       "The son of a salamander, I hope he finds a rope on the way!" I shouted to Duffy, when I'm brushed by the second time and my red-headed engine driver wriggles up that window like a boa constrictor, balances himself and leaps up ward and outward. I thought my heart had stopped, but he made the cornice and was out of sight.

       My business was with my company, so I beat it back to the front and ordered the retreat to the fifth floor.
 

IV

WE GOT three more stretches of hose and a full crew of axmen on the fifth floor, and I knew that the fourth alarm had been sent in. With the reinforcement I knew that we would check our fire, and I hurried to the back to look for my two men who had gone to the roof. I got to a window just in time to see Graham reach the roof above his wife and baby. He was running about like a lost dog trying to get the scent of his owner and I knew that he was hunting for a rope; but it wasn't wash day in the Bend and poor folks don't leave their clothes-lines out to tempt other people. He gave up the rope hunt and went to the cornice and leaned so far over toward his wife and baby that I thought his balance would be lost any second and he would drop to his death. He tried to reach them but he couldn't do it by three feet or more. She was still holding to the sash with the baby. Johnny wriggled back to the roof just as Duffy come running up to him.

       I saw the two of them begin to talk, both jawing at once, and Duffy looked desperate.

       "Suffering Tammany!" I thought; "if they try to settle that old row now it will cost four lives."

       But there wasn't any fight. My driver seemed to win the argument on its merits and dropped on his belly to the roof. He flattened out and wriggled to the cornice and over it. His shoulders went over the edge, then the whole trunk of his body, and finally his knees came heaving over and I saw Johnny's handsome face at his heels. He was holding his enemy by the heels over the brink of a red-hot entrance to eternity. He had spread himself out flat on the roof and the two of them had gone this far like a broken backed snake.

       "Johnny Graham is a strong man," I said to myself uneasily. "I see he's got his elbows braced right against the sheet metal and he can hold the weight that way — but can he pull them up?"

       By this time Duffy's face was close against that of Johnny's wife. She was crying, but if he was saying anything to her I don't know. Anyhow, she got her nerve back in a few seconds and give Duffy the baby. He caught it by its two fat wrists and I could hear it bawl as it swung out from the window.

       "Now," I says to myself, "can Johnny Graham, the ten-thousand-dollar beauty of Number Twenty-nine, yank up my Mick and the kid? I believe he is going to do it, but it will be different when the woman gets on the far end of the line."

       With a mighty tug Johnny got one of Duffy's feet to a shoulder and Duffy made fast with a toe-hold. Then Johnny got the other foot up and they were braced good and fast to the sheet-metal work. Then, instead of trying to crawl back and drag up Duffy and the kid, Johnny begins to roll on his belly and Duffy begins to swing like a pendulum. There ain't many men with the nerve and the strength to get away with the human pendulum, but it has been done before.

       The arc widened as Duffy and the baby swung from side to side, until both men give a shout and Duffy tossed the kid safely over his shoulder to the roof and caught hold himself. He skinned over.
 

BETWEEN smoke clouds and sheets of cinders I could get glimpses of Annie Graham on the window sill. The poor thing didn't have any too much time, for the fire was coming out of the window below and reaching up for a grip on her skirts. She kept making the sign of the Cross and I knew she was saying the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

       On the roof Graham and Duffy didn't take much time to rest. I saw Graham examine his baby and then tuck it close to a chimney. He stretched his arms and Duffy did a little clog to get the kinks out of his knees. They talked for a moment and Duffy seemed to be bossing the job. Then the two of them unbuckled their waist straps and I saw as fine a piece of life-saving strategy as ever was pulled off by two smoke-eaters in New York. They both squatted on the roof and with the belts and buckles Johnny made fast his wrists to the ankles of Duffy, his enemy. Tied together, they wriggled to the cornice, and over went my driver.

       In a minute two links of real man was stretched from the roof to the one girl the two of them loved.

       My lieutenant came and reported that the men had the fire driven back and I told him to send what men he could spare to report to the battalion chief. I turned again to the window, and the heat from below was so fierce that I wondered that my driver, hanging head down, could breathe. I saw his face come close to the face of Johnny's wife again and her arms outstretched to his shoulders. They stayed that way for a few seconds that seemed hours. And — they were kissing!

       Then I noticed that there wasn't so much red hair on my driver's head and I knew that the heat from below was singeing it. How he stood it no human being could tell. He caught hold of Johnny's wife's wrists and she took hold of his. My big Mick lifted her up by the strength of his biceps and shoulder muscles until she was clear of the sill, lifted her until her face was against his again, and then lowered her and the pendulum begun to swing once more.

I held my breath. There ain’t many men with the nerve and the strength to get away with the human pendulum

 

       This time instead of a baby at the end of the pendulum there was a good one hundred and twenty-five pounds of girl. I held my breath. The whole strain was on Johnny's backbone, his elbows and wrists, distributed over the angle made by the elbow brace on the sheet metal.

       Annie Graham's skirts flapped as she swung farther and farther on each side, the arc widening. Now it would be up to Duffy when he would try to heave her over the edge of the roof. If anything broke the three of them would plunge into the white-hot pit, the men strapped together.

       I could see blood trickling from Duffy's nose and a big gout of it struck the uplifted face of the woman he was trying to save. I thought it was all over — when I heard both men shout and Duffy's great shoulder muscles swelled up like they'd pop, and over the edge went Annie Graham. Duffy's hands snapped for and caught the tin cornice. There was a savage yank from Johnny and my driver was on the roof lying flat with the man he was tied to.

       Just then two streams of water shot through the windows of the Graham flat and I knew a company had beaten out the fire in that building just as we had beaten out the one in ours. I turned my command over to the lieutenant and ran around the block to Park Street and up a ladder to the top floor and then to the roof over the Graham flat. Three firemen had already reached the roof and had cut the straps that held Duffy and Johnny together. Johnny staggered to his feet but Duffy lay still. Half of his fine red hair was singed off and his eye brows were gone.

       I got down on my knees.

       "How's it, old man?" I asked in his blistered ear.

       There was a slow choking sound from deep down in his great chest.

       He tried to lift his hand, and I lifted it for him and he groped for his heart.

"Somethin' broke, Cap," he whispered. "Somethin' broke — Cap. Good-by."

 

       "Somethin' broke, Cap," he whispered. "Somethin' broke — Cap. Good-by."

       His face come gray like the gray that fills the streets when a company's washing down a ruin after an all-night fight. The hand over his heart fell to the tin roof and the big biceps flattened out.

       A fireman was taking Annie and the baby to the ladder, for there was fire still burning below, when Duffy shuddered and died.

       I heard a strange whimper behind me and turned from the body of the bravest and finest laddie that ever wore the blue. Johnny Graham was on his knees with his face hidden in his hands and his body was trembling all over.

(THE END)