'd swaller quarters as fast as you'd give 'em
to him, and let you punch him in the stomach and hear 'em rattle around.
Then he'd light a match, open his mouth, put the match 'way inside, and
let you watch the quarters come up again. Had a double stomach, or
something. He could swaller canes, too, same as a circus man. Said he'd
learned all his tricks over in India, but some of the boys thought he
lied. They said he'd prob'ly traveled with some show. He used to tell us
how he could speak Burmese and Siamese and Hindu, all those lingoes,
just perfect; so one day a battalion chief called his bluff when there
were a lot of emigrants from those parts down at the Battery, and blamed
if Banta didn't chin away to the whole crowd of 'em; you'd thought he
was their long-lost brother. Was he a foreigner? No, sir; he was born in
Hohokus, N. J.

"But the time Banta fixed his reputation all right was at a fire in
Pell Street--some factory. After that he might have told us he could fly
or eat glass or any old thing, and we'd have believed him. Tell ye what
he did. This factory all smashed in after she'd burned a while, and one
of the boys--Dave Soden--got wedged under the second floor, with all the
other floors piled on top of him. It was a great big criss-cross of
timbers, with Dave at the bottom, and the flames eating in fast. We
could see the whole thing was going to make a fine bonfire in about
three minutes, and it looked as if Dave would be in it.

[Illustration: AT FULL SPEED.]

"You understand, we didn't dare pry up the timbers, for that would have
brought the whole factory down on Dave and killed him plumb. And we
couldn't begin at the top and throw off the timbers, for there wasn't
any time. We didn't know what to do, but Banta he did. He grabbed up a
saw, and said he'd crawl in and get Dave out. And, by thunder! he did.
He just wriggled in and out like a snake through those timbers, and when
he got to Dave he sawed off the end of a beam that held him and then
dragged him out. He took big chances, for, you see, if he'd sawed off
the wrong beam it might have brought down the whole business on both of
them. But Banta he knew how to do it. Oh, he was a wonder! They gave him
the medal for that, and promoted him. Say, you'd never guess how he
ended up?"

"How?" I asked.

"Got hit by a cable-car; yes, sir. Hurt so bad they retired him. What d'
ye think of that? Not afraid of the devil, and done up by a measly
cable-car!"