Homeburg Memories

g Him with a Volunt

Ouch! Excuse me for living. This is no place for a peaceable spectat

the first really human impulse I've seen a citizen give way to. Until this minute I've felt as if I were a hundred thousand miles from Homeburg, with all train service suspended for

haps now. That makes the fourth engine that's come past. You get more for your money than we do. Look at that chief hurdli

ongue hung out any farther, he'd trip up on it. But he'll do it again next time. They all do. Learning to stop running to fires is as hard as learning to stop buying mining-stock in the West. And it's just as big a swindle too.

stack in the afternoon, and I was so dead tired that I slept right through the performance that night. And once I did see a row of stores burn, back in Homeburg-at the distance of a mile. I was in school, and the teacher wouldn't dismiss us. By stretching my neck several feet I co

end a pleasant evening watching a burning oil-refinery make a Vesuvius look pale and sickly in comparison. Luck is distributed in a dastardly way, and as for myself I've quit trying. I don't run to fires at

n't have to be real fires, either. Any old alarm will do. Our fire-bell sounds just as terrible for a little brush fire as it would for a flaming powder-mill. It's an adventure merely to hear the thing. Take a winter night in

downward into a crater of flame-and then you wake up entirely, and the fire-bell is going "clang-clang-clang-clang-clang," while below you hear the ringing crunch of your neighbor's feet on the cold snow, and outside the north window there is a red glare which may be either the end of the world or another exploded

y spot on the edge of the sidewalk and leaning against a telephone-pole, sound asleep. You're sitting in your office chair, with your feet on the desk, dozing, when suddenly you hear footsteps outside. Whoever is making them is turning them out with great rapidity, and that in itself is novel enough to

r heart beats with suspense when Gibb comes to the town-hall corner. Hurrah! He's steering for the fire-house. You're overhauling him rapidly, and by a big

s moments and keeps his helmet hanging on the forge-cover, dashes into the engine-room, grabs his trumpet, and begins firing orders, not singly, but in broadsides. There's nobody there to order yet, but he's just getting his hand in, and ten seconds later, when the first member of the company arrives, he is saluted with

. From the south comes a cloud of dust and a terrific racket. At an equal distance from the east comes another cloud of dust and an even more terrible uproar, Clay Billings's dray having more loose spokes than Bill Dorgan's. The clouds approach

Bill, cutting off a good fifty feet. His team stops, sliding on their haunches, and ten seconds later is being hitched to the hose-cart, while Clay is on the seat clanging the foot-bell triumphantly. It's the

nd late advices indicate terrible progress. As fast as forty-nine rival fingers can do it, the

e-cart boys, because the former get the second team and rarely arrive at the fire in time to hoist the beautiful blue ladders before the hose-cart gang puts the conflagration out. Indeed, the feelin

elled fire and beat the world to the engine-house. So you set out for the fire yourself and jog over the half-mile in pretty fair time, considering the heat. It is an im

keep that horse still-" "Bring her round this way-" "Bring her round this way-" "Hey, you chumps, the fire's this side-" "Back up that wagon-" "Come ahead with the wagon-" "Get out of here till we get a ladder up-" "Axes here-" "Turn on t

the nozzlemen this way and that and sweeping firemen

rsuaded the department to call off its hose, the barn being full of valuable hay. So there isn't anything to do. The water is turned off. Gibb Ogle explains to t

but otherwise the affair is a flat failure. They go back sullenly, but are comforted when the roll is called, when each member who was present draws a dollar from the city treasury. As usu

y? It makes life worth living, and I really wonder that there isn

Chief Dobbs is so hoarse that he can't talk for a week, and when the row of wooden stores on the south side went up in flames a few years ago, th

the buildings, and when Art Simms had climbed to the top, he managed to fall fifteen feet to the roof of the furniture-store, bruising himself badly. But, on the whole, great good was done, and the second story workers were kings that day. When the ho

. Frank Sundell was the hero. He was sitting on the ridge-pole of Emerson's restaurant when he noticed a few blazing spots on the shingle roof beneath him. He might have called the hose department; but, as I have said, there is a good deal of rivalry between the two, and, besides, Sundell had had a slow time that day, Lowes doing most of the disp

itical moment, there hasn't been a conflagration in Homeburg big enough to get into the city papers. The boys may be a little overzealous now and then, but they are always on the job ten minutes after the first tap of the bell, and the way they go after a red tongue of flame on a kitchen roof reminds me of a

ing to the magnificent depth of Exchange Street, the roads having broken up, and how, when it got there, the house was a mass of flames, with the poor old lady, who had been bedridden for years, shrieking inside, and a hundred neighbors shrieking on the outside; and how Pat McQuinn and Henry Aultmeyer dove in through a window, with wet coats around their heads and the chemical-hose playing

y couldn't have stuck to the job any more heroically; and when Homeburg citizens talk about "brave fire-laddies" and "homely heroes" at the

eat blue caps, we look at them full of pride and confidence. Our little boys dream of the time when they will grow up and join the company and wear seven-pound red helmets at fires, and come home tired and muddy in the gray dawn a

uniform, leads the company around the hall, every hero with the girl or wife of his heart on his arm and a full hundred couples of the mere laymen crowding i

truction makes the world fire-proof, and the Homeburg fire department rusts away and disappears, we will mourn it even more sincerely than we did the opera house w