Finnegan

TWO firemen carrying chemical apparatus strapped to their shoulders and two carrying axes were started from the house of Engine Company No. 72 to the new Intercontinental Syndicate Building, three blocks away, to answer a still alarm transmitted through fire headquarters. They hurried, but it was the perfunctory haste of firemen devoid of anxiety of any sort. They knew that the building they were to enter was unsurpassed in modern fireproof construction.

       The Intercontinental reared hundreds of feet above the sidewalk of Broadway. Below the surface were luxurious baths with a great marble swimming pool, a restaurant, beneath which spread a superb modern kitchen equipped to provide food for three thousand and more people, and, still deeper down, engine rooms, furnaces, hot water boilers, electric light plant, ventilating equipment, repair shop, and dark caverns for storing fuel, dumping ashes and baling waste paper and refuse.

       The hour was three in the afternoon, and the time of the year was October, the month when the first gales of approaching winter on the North Atlantic coast lift their shrill voices in the masonry interstices of Manhattan's skyline.

       A long, black cloud lay over the tight little island, and its under side was torn, black plumes with reddish-brown edges having been ripped from the body of vapor by the violent gusts of wind coughed upward from the slitlike streets. From the Brooklyn side of the East River the skyline showed under this pall like the lower jaw of a shark, many-toothed. The new Intercontinental made one of the highest and sharpest of the fangs.

       The four firemen hurried through the Broadway entrance of the building to the information desk in the center of the street floor. They found the superintendent of the building waiting for them there, and he called a porter to serve them as a guide.

       "There is some trouble below the engine room," he told the firemen. The men disappeared behind the porter, and the superintendent turned to the chief elevator starter, who was waiting to make a report of the building's daily population. The little counting machines used by each elevator operator showed that a total of 9,721 people had been taken aloft, during the course of the day, to occupy the 2,000 rented offices in the great structure, which, because of its convenience, was attractive to busy men.

       The report was a gratifying one, and one that would vastly please the directors of the company which had been formed to erect the building. There had been invested one dollar for every one of the 9,000,000 cubic feet of space offered for rent within the tapering walls of the structure.

       "Your office wants you, Mr. Blake," said a telephone clerk at the information desk.

       The superintendent took the receiver from the clerk's hand and listened to a message.

       "I am looking after the matter," he said finally. "Telephone them that the annoyance is only slight and that it will cease very shortly. How's that? No; just a little trouble below the engine room."

       The complaint had come from the restaurant. Kitchen employes had complained of smelling smoke. The odor was also noticeable in the baths.

       Far from the annoyance being eliminated in a few minutes, the managers of the restaurants and the baths complained within half that time that the electric lights had gone out. Lamps and candles were demanded.

       The superintendent was telephoning his supply department for candles and lamps when there staggered to the daylight of the street floor one of the firemen who had been sent from Engine Company No. 1. His face was black with smoke and his eyes were like two holes burned in a blanket.

       He turned to the right and then to the left in a bewildered manner.

       "What's the matter?" demanded the superintendent, his voice still possessing that calm of the New Yorker who always takes it for granted that his safety is assured.

       "Telephone! Telephone!" the fireman gasped. At the same moment he saw the instrument on the information desk and jumped for it.

       "Fire headquarters!" he grunted huskily into the mouthpiece. He writhed with impatience as he waited the few seconds necessary to make the connection.

       "This is O'Brien, of Engine Company No. 1," he said, when he heard the crisp "Hello" of the operator at headquarters. "I'm at the still alarm in the Intercontinental Building. Start them rolling!"

       In less than thirty seconds — well within the average time of a good New York fire company — the engines, trucks, and hose wagons of the First Battalion were "rolling" with a thrilling clamor of bells and shrieks of sirens through the cluttered streets of down-town Manhattan.

       The high pressure hose was stretched in through the crowds of people entering and leaving this one building with a population of nearly ten thousand. A company of fire fighters trooped below the surface and was lost to sight.

       With a constantly rattling gong, the Battalion Chief pulled up before the entrance to the skyscraper, jumped from his light buggy and disappeared, following the hose downward.

       The smell of smoke was now succeeded by the smoke itself as an iron door at the head of the stairway leading to the vitals of the building was opened and made fast for the men with the hose. Occupants of the luxurious lounges of the baths complained bitterly, and then hurriedly dressed and departed for the street above. Waiters, cooks, scullions, and patrons of the restaurant below began beating a retreat, the proprietor bringing up the rear, coughing and sneezing, but holding fast to two money bags containing the receipts for the day.

       Five minutes after, the apparatus of the First Battalion reached the Intercontinental there arose a fresh clamor in the downtown streets, and the four companies of the Second Battalion arrived in response to a second alarm.

       From far up-town the chief of the fire department came in his high-powered machine, came like a flash of blood whipped through the air and with a never-faltering shriek of the red car's siren. He arrived in time to see half a dozen men dragged to the air from the deep pit extending beneath the building to the tops of the caissons. No human being could live down there, for the place was now not only a furnace of flames, but also a pit of rapidly forming poisonous gases.

       Had there been immediately available a map of the construction of the sub-surface section of the skyscraper, many precious moments would have been saved and the peril of a catastrophe even more appalling than that which sent an "unsinkable" ship to the bottom of the ocean might not have come about. The chief found the firemen working at the sole entrance below which they had been able to discover. The smoke pouring up from this iron stairway was getting hotter and hotter, and coming with the increasing speed of a blast in process of gathering.

       In a structure of less modern design, the picks of the attacking crews of the fire department could have ripped holes in the floors and their axes could have smashed down walls. But in this modern fire-trap all was steel, finely tested for lasting strength, stone, and asphaltum. There was only one weapon with which such barriers could be removed, oxyacetylene blow-pipes, and only yeggmen kept those handy and in shape for use. The fire department possessed none, and not a man in New York fire fighting force was capable of handling one if it had been placed in his hands. The department had remained nobly efficient in stamping out fires in old buildings. Here was a fire in a forty-story building that was getting away from the fire laddies before it had reached within forty feet of the surface of the earth.

II

A THIRD, a fourth, and then the final fifth alarm was sent in by the Chief, bringing fire apparatus and additional fire fighters from far distant sections of the city. The bridges spanning the East River were cleared by the police, and high above the leaden waters and under a leaden, sky the great spans of horses dashed with titanic clatter as Brooklyn and Queens boroughs replied to the fifth alarm.

       To fight the flames in the deep pit under the Intercontinental, the chief of the department sought an additional entrance for the high-pressure streams. With an order made more imperative because of a crackling oath, he sent two companies of miners and sappers to the subway station beside the underground walls of the skyscraper. On the floor of the station was a heavy framework of iron, checkered with small patches of very tough and thick glass. These bits of glass, cemented into the iron frame, were glowing opalescently and with little streaks of red, like the eyes of the insane possessed of fear and desperation. The fire had crept from the engine-room to the restaurant's extensive storerooms, packed with barrels of liquors and crates of food, cases of oil, and casks of butter and lard.

       The men brought their axes high over their shoulders and attacked the blinking, sinister barrier between them and the black and red pit below. Other men stood back, ready with the hose to shoot streams of water into the apertures which the attack would yield. The axmen struck in unison, shielding their eyes under their left arms as splinters of glass and iron flew about them. In less than a minute a ragged hole was made in the barrier, and the water was shooting below as there came upward a cloud of acrid smoke and the sound of the roaring of a not too distant furnace.

       The police reserves of a score of stations had arrived and had roped off an area of five blocks square, beating back the fast-growing multitude.

       Suddenly the men fighting the fire from the subway station heard their chief give a shrill cry of warning. The roar of the furnace had become stilled. The men made the retreat from the ragged entrance to the pit in a rush, abandoning the hose. They felt rather than heard the explosion below as the first back-draught came. The air trembled and the asphalt under their feet seemed to lift soggily.

       A wide-spreading, funnel-shaped body of flaming gas shot through the vent the men had made with their axes. It came with a hundred times the force, heat, and volume of the greatest blow-pipe ever fashioned, and it melted iron and glass and caused the paint to run in ribbons from the walls of the station.

       A subway train pulled in at half speed, but the heat was so intense that the motorman put on full speed and continued his way toward Bowling Green and the entrance to the East River tubes.

       One high-pressure hose that had been abandoned by the nozzlemen suddenly twisted and sprang into action, like a mighty snake of the age of animal monstrosities. As if possessed of hate and the fever of destruction, it made a vicious swing through the air. The bright brass nozzle rang against a steel pillar and then flew from its socket. The water gushed with tremendous force from the torn mouth of the hose, smashing to splinters a ticket booth and sending the firemen clattering up the iron stairs to the surface.

       The fighting line — the abandoned point of fire attack from the subway station was of such mean advantage that it hardly deserved that description — had been eliminated. Scores of fire companies that had arrived in the neighborhood in answer to the five alarms were practically idle.

       The first explosion below ground had put every one of the twenty elevator cars out of business. Almost instantly with this disaster — for the stoppage of the elevators was as if an ocean liner had been stripped of every life boat and life preserver at the moment of collision — there came a series of terrific explosions from the steam pipes in the baths just under the street floor, and the twenty elevator shafts became twenty flues for smoke, gas, and flame. The miles of subway tubes gave to these forty-story chimneys a forced draft that might have been well imagined powerful enough to fan the very flames of hell.

       The fire following this great draft was now being fed by the fuel stored far below the surface, stores of lubricating oil for machinery, the bales of waste paper collected the night before from the forty floors of offices, the fats and grease of the restaurant kitchen, the rich furnishings of the restaurant itself, the rugs, bedding, furniture, and fittings of the baths.

       In twenty seconds the people above the twenty-fifth floor, who had tried to reach the surface by means of the narrow and hidden stairways which encircled the elevator shafts, were cut off by gas and smoke as deadly as the flame itself.

       The chief of the fire department of the city dispatched an aid to instruct headquarters to sound the "Two Nines," a signal to the world that a catastrophe was in progress, and that there was at hand one of those supreme moments of great menace to test human ingenuity, human courage, and the weapons of defense and prevention fashioned by man against the elements.

       The heavy black cloud that had hung over Manhattan all during the early afternoon had spread so that it shut off the setting sun. In all the skyscrapers there flashed electric lights and down-town became a fairy city fashioned in countless jewels. As the blackness gathered there came from the thousands of white faces staring from the gloom of the streets many sharp cries of dismay and horror. From the dark windows of the Intercontinental Building were darting the blue flames of gas, igniting as it struck the outer air and fed upon oxygen sufficient to set it off.

       The fireproof Intercontinental Building had become a huge gas retort. Every office room was a cell for the creation of a small back-draught. As the heat became more intense from floor to floor, and as the oxygen inside was used up, the furniture, books, rugs, and other equipment of each office underwent the process of destructive distillation. Hundreds of windows began to pop, sounding a fusillade as from a battery of gatling guns in use in aërial warfare.

III

THE sounding of "Two Nines" informs the officials of the city that great peril obtains. It means a request to the governor for the mustering of the militia in the various armories, the assembling of ambulances and surgeons, and the preparation of emergency hospitals and emergency morgues. The troops are needed to prevent general panic or the sway of the thief who, jackalwise, will prey where the dead lie. The extra morgues are needed to guard against the age-old fear of plague, and the extra hospital beds to hold the victims of disasters that come in the dies mali of mankind, the dis-mal days of the world.

       With the coming of night, Manhattan's skyline showed its tall buildings with every window illuminated. The rich borough of the city lay between the two dark rivers as a thing fashioned from an El Dorado store of pieces of gold, softly shining, alluring. But the windows of the tallest of the Mammon temples, from the twenty-fifth to the fortieth floors, were filled with little white patches, the faces of human beings entrapped, while below the twenty-fifth floor shadows danced fantastically with the unearthly greenish-blue light of burning gases. One of the greatest and most modern of the structures of its kind in the world was a fireproof torch.

       At the foot of the doomed structure the water towers, engines, and trucks took on the proportions of the toys fashioned after their models. There was no ladder or series of extension ladders that could get within fifteen stories of the twenty-fifth floor. The narrow stairs, that had never been intended for practical use, were cut off by the great sheets of flame, smoke and gas that poured up from the roaring furnace below ground.

       The sounding of the "Two Nines" became known to the millions of Greater New York when the National Guard regiments marched from their armories, and, instead of blue-coated policemen patrolling the streets, soldiers with fixed bayonets became the guardians of the masses.

       On the very heels of the smartly accoutered militia came a hooligan horde shrieking the wares of calamity, the special extra editions of the afternoon newspapers.

       Women screamed and fainted in the streets; men cursed and prayed alternately and meaninglessly.

       The headlines of the extras shouted, with almost demoniacal glee of ultra-journalism:

FIVE THOUSAND DOOMED IN
BLAZING SKYSCRAPER!

       Cavalry troops were added to the squadrons of mounted police in making wider the free space about the heart of Manhattan's financial section. Cystlike, they would make this spot of horror, cutting it off so that the flail of death might have room for quick and therefore more merciful work. None could tell when they would begin to jump, as they had jumped before from the high windows in the Washington Place fireproof horror one Jewish Sabbath afternoon. None could tell when there would sound from the lips of those in whirling flight to death that strange despairing appeal described by a "Titanic" survivor as like the cries that come from a great kennel at the feeding time.

       There might be even worse scenes than those enacted within a hundred feet of safety when the "Slocum" holocaust made a great community shudder and sob, or when the great ocean liners swung away from the burning wharves of Hoboken with crews and passengers doomed within their burning decks.

       If the mob, strangers to philosophy and hateful only of the implacable, should gather to witness the end, hysteria would come as a cloak to horror and then — What?

       The superbly trained and intelligent horses of the mounted police pushed back the crowd with their buttocks and shoulders, treading lightly and injuring none. The mounts of the cavalry trampled the feet of the insistent or flecked the foam from their bridled jaws in their faces.

       All the while the dancing shadows and gas flames showed in the windows of the Intercontinental, showers of glass fell as the panes popped out, and, finally, something heavy and making a ruffling sound struck the middle of Broadway.

       It was a large law volume bound tightly about with the veil of a woman. A fireman picked it up and knew that it contained a message. He hurried with it to a man in white helmet and white rubber coat.

"A message from above, sir."

 

       "What is it?" demanded the Deputy Chief.

       "A message from above, sir, I think."

       "It was thrown from a window?"

       "It must have been; it grazed my shoulder."

       The Deputy Chief ripped the veil fastening of the book and a sheet of loose paper fell from the bound leaves. He held it to the side light of a useless hook and ladder company's apparatus and read:

       "We have made bulkheads for half of the elevator shafts on the twenty-fifth floor but have used all material. The bulkheads cut off the gas and the smoke and send it to the windows of the twenty-fourth floor. This is the fifth message we have thrown you. We are making a rope of the clothes of every man and woman here. There are about three thousand five hundred of us all told, and the women have the top floors on the side cut off from the smoke and gas by the bulkheads.

"JOHN BLAKE, Superintendent."       

IV

A ROPE!

       With a coil of good stout hemp the chasm between the twenty-fifth floor and the pavement of Broadway could have been plumbed. But hemp had gone out of fashion in the saving of life as well as in the taking of life.

       While John Blake, superintendent, was trying to fashion a cord long enough to reach the ground, the men of the fire department were trying to send him one ready made.

       There were two possibilities of reaching the imprisoned people from below: One was with the use of scaling ladders, and the other was with the rope gun. The gun, like the aërial ladders, the hose, the picks, and the axes, was designed for use in fighting fires in buildings as high as ten stories or, at most, fifteen stories. It could not fire a charge heavy enough to hurl a stout cord twenty-five stories high and with speed enough to strike an open window as a target.

       The Fire Chief ordered a sixty-foot aërial ladder sent up from the heaviest of his modern trucks. The tip of this ladder was thrown to one side of a window on the sixth floor.

       About the base of the ladder gathered the men of a company that had become famous by heroic aërial work in the rescues made during the destruction of the Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue, March 17, 1899.

       "Is Finnegan here?" asked the Chief.

       A well-knotted little man, with a face of tight parchment and eyes that were like two new agates, small and bright, stepped from the crowd. Finnegan was a probation man in the company during the Windsor fire, a bit of a lad, eager and fearless. I had seen him climb the front of the burning hotel with two scaling ladders, slowly, like a daddy-long-legs, and had seen him come down with a heavy woman trying to choke him with a half-nelson. I had seen him hold fast with feet and hands to the little bars of the scaling ladders while one after another they bent like bows outward from the wall, the tough Georgia pine seeming on the point of snapping every second.

       "Peel off, Finnegan," the chief ordered.

       The little man slipped from his coat, turned his helmet as he looked aloft and saw the burning jets at the windows and then, as he took a second glance and measured the great stretch upward that he would have to climb, he squatted in the watery highway and yanked off his boots.

       A great hank of thin but strong rope had been. secured and this Finnegan made fast about his waist. The only other thing he would take aloft with him was a big jack-knife, which was made fast to his belt with a stout bit of twine.

       Two men ran up the sixty-foot aërial, each taking a scaling ladder. At the third rung from the top the first of these men pushed up his ladder to its full length and then smashed it over the sill of a window on the seventh floor. He pulled it far over to the right hand corner and crowded over to one side of the aërial as Finnegan came scampering up like a monkey.

Could he make it? Could he clear each window between the eighth and the twenty-fifth floors?

 

       It was a one-man job. There were no friendly cornices above the seventh floor and the climbing fireman would have to edge around the windows to avoid the flames. By overlapping his two scaling ladders he might be able to dash upward through the fire, gas, and smoke, drawing his Georgia pine strips after him in time to prevent them from being burned and his return cut off.

       A giant searchlight blazed the way for the little Irishman, who seemed like a fly sticking to the wall as he paused at the top of his first ladder and began shoving the second above him.

       Above the rescuer's head the gas flames played, licking upward and downward and to right and left, coming out in puffs and then sucking back in. His helmet shone in the silver shaft of the searchlight like the head of an attacking beetle. The firemen below held their breath as they saw the top ladder's hook take a grip on the window of the eighth floor. Finnegan did not move until the gas jet of the seventh story window flickered and drew in. Then he scrambled upward with the agility of a trick performer, which he was. He was obscured for a moment when a great puff of blue flame shot from the window, but the watching firemen saw the lower ladder moving upward and they knew that he was safe and still working.

       The Fire Chief dug his finger nails into the palms of his hands. He wanted to yell, to yell exultantly and cheeringly. The men about him did it for him, and the slowly climbing Finnegan heard the shout and felt pleased.

       Could he make it? Could he clear each window between the eighth and the twenty-fifth floors? Would his tight little muscles, would his lungs, his nerve, his luck hold out over that long, fire-belted, perpendicular stretch? The cutting off of his breath for a second or two by the window gas jets would mean the end for Finnegan. The burning or breaking of one of his two scaling ladders would mean that he would be caught sticking to the wall between fires, helpless. He was already far out of reach of the aërial ladders.

       The Chief, thinking always of the life of his brave little Tad, ordered the truck pulled away, leaving clear the street below the rescuer. Then he ordered the strongest and largest of the life nets made ready for use, and to the company captains he sent word to pick out the heaviest and most powerful of their men for special service. If the net would hold he wanted to be sure that the arms, backs, and fingers of the net crew would not fail, even if Finnegan jumped or fell at the twenty-fourth floor.

       Finnegan passed the twelfth floor. Eight times he had watched his chance and had scurried across the windows of hell. His helmet did not shine so brightly as it did at his start. He was passing the zone of efficiency of the searchlight, as he had long passed the field of operations of the other tools of the men of his craft. The men on the street no longer cheered. Their necks were stiff with craning, and they took it turn about in watching the progress of the little black human speck. The chief never lowered his head. With a pair of night glasses he watched every move of hand and foot, every bend of the swaying scaling ladders, and when one of them swung with the increasing wind he found himself running over in his mind little prayers for aid and comfort that he had thought lost with a forgotten childhood.

       The foreman of the net crew stood beside the chief waiting a word that would throw his men into position with taut muscles and wide-apart legs.

       "He is between the fifteenth and twentieth floors," the chief announced, finally. "He is resting. There is smoke coming from the top of the ladder on the twentieth. He can't rest long."

       Five seconds had been enough for Finnegan, but when he made the next floor the Chief saw that the second ladder he was hauling after him was blazing. This menacing little tongue of flame was made all the more distinct because of the fact that the searchlight rays were now very faint.

       Finnegan managed to put out the fire on his scaling ladder. He smudged it with hands that were covered with callouses from hard work until they were as if gloved with horn. He reached the twenty-second floor, when again the charred scaling ladder took fire. This time he lost a good two feet of it before he could beat out the flame. At the twenty-third he was again compelled to stop to rest: again the ladder caught fire and again he put it out. The original eighteen-foot length of the ladder was now cut to fifteen, leaving him barely enough to reach the window above on the twenty-fourth floor. He still had the full length of the other ladder, although it, too, was charred at one end.

       Five minutes, full of the agony of suspense, and then there came from the dry lips of the chief a cry that was half a curse. It was the signal to the foreman of the net crew.

       Thirty of the most powerful men in the department sprang into position in a circle. The net drew taut.

       Finnegan had reached a point just under the sill of the twenty-fourth floor and was groping for the twenty-fifth with his charred and burned scaling ladder. He could not reach it. He was trapped upon the wall.

Finnegan had reached the sill of the twenty-fourth floor and was gropingfor the twenty-fifth with his charred and burned scaling ladder. He could not reach it. He was trapped upon the wall

 

V

FINNEGAN, finding himself trapped, recalled, with that abundant hope of the Celt, that a chum of Engine Company 32 had been buried alive under a burning building for nearly two days in Elizabeth Street during the winter of 1907. After the collapse of the building an undertaker's wagon was kept waiting within the fire lines for his friend's body. But his friend came out of it alive. There was always a chance.

       Below the little Irishman was the great city of New York stretching in a panorama of lights. He could not look straight downward because of the gas fumes, from which he protected himself, as best he could, by breathing in the crook of his right arm. The burned ladder he had hooked to one of the crosspieces of the one he had in place above him on the twenty-fourth floor window sill. He would hold it in reserve. If his iron hook melted and began to sag too dangerously he would use the fragment of the other ladder to hang to for a while longer.

       An aëroplane might save him if an aëroplane could graze a skyscraper without breaking a wing — a thing it could not possibly do. A parachute would do, but there was no parachute to be had. A rope might be the very thing!

       He had one about his waist, but it was very thin, though strong, and would be burned at one of the windows before he could reach the ground. He looked upward to see how his iron hook was holding against the heat pouring over the fireproof sill. Something strange caught his eye. A thin black object was dangling toward him from above, dodging the gas sheets as they shot from the window. He was getting help from above — from the twenty-fifth floor. There was something doing for Finnegan.

       "Let it come! I gotcha, Steve!" he shouted at the top of his voice.

       He unloosened the stout rope about his waist, made one end fast under his armpits and reached for the black object that was being dangled to him. He caught it and found it a homemade cord, fashioned of silks and ribbons and strips of wool and cotton, a pretty enough thing for the halter of a harlequin, perhaps, but not strong enough for a fireman's wornout body. He had become skilled in watching and playing against the dangers of the gas-filled windows, and he managed to get his rope tied to the patchwork cord without having either burned. He gave a shout and the cord and rope were hauled until they were taut.

       Finnegan would have tried to scale the thin rope hand over hand, but every living thread in his body ached. Suddenly he felt a tug under his shoulders and his feet left the scaling ladder. His helmet, reversed, covered his face. He held his breath as he swept upward through the flame. Then a black curtain dropped over his eyes.

       When he awakened he found himself in a room crowded with men.

       "What's the matter?" he asked, sitting up.

       The room was filled with gas and he was choking.

       "Shut that door," he ordered. "It's the outside air makes the gas take fire."

       He scrambled to his feet.

       A sensible working-fireman was in action.

       "Shut every door and window on the windward side," he commanded. "Leave just a little air come in on the leeward. Be quick. Where you got the women? On the top floors? All right. Do the same thing up there, but do it in a hurry. This gas will burn out down below. Have you cut off the ventilators? No? All you men get busy and cut 'em off. Keep your eye on that rope for me. I'll take a look."

       Finnegan found half of the elevator shafts covered with roughly fashioned bulkheads and keeping back the smoke and fumes. Office furniture, books, rugs, carpets, had been used for this. Blake the superintendent, who had directed this work, was at his elbow.

       "Come," said Finnegan, hurrying back to the room into which he had been drawn. "Write me a note — I don't spell much and when I do spell nobody can get me."

       Blake was ready with pencil and paper in a second.

       "Send up block and fall and one ax in a hurry," Finnegan dictated. "Keep rope clear of window. Get mattresses, bedding, boards to cut off elevator shafts from gas. Then we're all right. — Finnegan."

       The quick eyes of the fireman saw a long curtain pole stretched between two rooms of the office suite. He jumped for it and tore it free of its fastenings. With one of the rings he made a simple pulley attachment and through this passed the thin rope he had brought with him up the front of the building.

       Blake had put the message in a book and had made the book fast to the free end. Finnegan then put his curtain pole over the sill and extended it as far as he could away from the windows and to one side. Down shot the message.

       In a short while he got a signal from below. It meant for him to pull away. With quick, steady strokes he and a dozen men drew in the line.

       Finnegan grabbed the ax as he would have grabbed a brother he had thought dead. With muscles, a clear head, a piece of steel well tempered, and a tough bit of wood with which to wield his steel, a fireman can tackle any phase of his enemy's fury. He found a massive director's table in one of the offices. It was built of black oak. He knew the strength of English oak, and from this elegant piece of nonsense he cut a beam that would replace the curtain pole. To one end of this beam he soon had his block and fall made fast, and in a few minutes his thin rope was replaced with a thin steel hawser that his chief had requisitioned from a construction company.

       When the earth end of this appeared at the window on the twenty-fifth floor it brought the Chief himself with a supply of boards and materials for making bulkheads.

       He had requisitioned from the wholesale houses in Chambers, Duane, and Warren streets, west of Broadway, hundreds of horse blankets, bales of felt material and other stuff of the trade that would serve the needed purpose. Better still, once he was sure of the stoutness of the overhanging oak piece and its fastening, he could put in use a hastily rigged platform which would bring his men after him and, if necessity came, serve as a car for the rescue of the imprisoned.

       "Where's Blake?" asked the chief, when he landed safely inside the building.

       "Here, boss."

       Finnegan pointed out his whilom amanuensis.

       "Get busy with this stuff, and bulkhead the other shafts," ordered the Chief. "I'm going to hitch a car to this block and fall and in ten minutes there'll be a company of men to help. I'm going for them."

       The men in the room joined Blake in pulling in the material for cutting off the gas at the twenty-fifth floor. The Chief made a wide noose in the end of the steel hawser and slipped his foot in it as he crawled over the window sill and swung to the left, free of the menaceful windows below.

       "Say, Finnegan," he called, "this rescue is going to be a cinch. Boss the job for me until I come back."

"Say, Finnegan," he called, "this rescue is going to be a cinch. Boss the job for me until I come back."

 

(THE END)