of
Smyrna were too busily engaged on their acres. He idly watched a trail
of dun smoke that rose from behind a distant ridge and zigzagged
across the blue sky. He admired it as a scenic attraction, without
attaching any importance to it. Even when a woman appeared on the
far-off ridge and flapped her apron and hopped up and down and
appeared to be frantically signalling either the village in the
valley or the men in the fields, he only squinted at her through the
sunlight and wondered what ailed her. A sudden inspiring thought
suggested that perhaps she had struck a hornets' nest. He chuckled.

A little later a ballooning cloud of dust came rolling down the road
toward him and the toll-bridge that led to Smyrna village. He noted
that the core of the cloud was a small boy, running so hard that his
knees almost knocked under his chin. He spun to a halt in front of
the Cap'n's gate and gasped:

"Fi-ah, fi-ah, fi-ah-h-h-h, Chief! Ben Ide's house is a-fi-ah. I'll
holler it in the village and git 'em to ring the bell and start
'Hecla.'" Away he tore.

"Fire!" bawled Cap'n Aaron, starting for the front hall with a scuff,
a hop, a skip, and jump, in order to favor his sprained toe. "Fire
over to Ben Ide's!"

He had his foreman's hat on wrong side to when his wife came bursting
out of the sitting-room into the hall. She, loyal though excited lady
of the castle, shifted her knight's helmet to the right-about and
stuffed his buckets, bag, and bed-wrench into his hands. The cord
of his speaking-trumpet she slung over his neck.

"I helped get father ready once, twenty years ago," she stuttered,
"and I haven't forgot! Oh, Aaron, I wish you hadn't got such a
prejudice against owning a horse and against Marengo when he tried
to sell you that one. Now you've got to wait till some one gives you
a lift. You can't go on that foot to Ide's."

"Hoss!" he snorted. "Marengo! What he tried to sell me would be a
nice thing to git to a fire with! Spavined wusser'n a carpenter's
saw-hoss, and with heaves like a gasoline dory! I can hop there on
one foot quicker'n he could trot that hoss there! But I'll git there.
I'll git there!"

He went limping out of the door, loaded with his equipment.

The Methodist bell had not begun to ring, and it was evident that
the messenger of ill tidings had not pattered into the village as
yet.

But there was a team in sight. It was "Balm o' Joy" Brackett, his
arms akimbo as he fished on the reins to hu