like statues, posed eagerly,
lithely, their ears turned. And then they wheeled upon each other
simultaneously, and, in a single explosion, they shouted, "One!"

Again the sound swelled in the night and roared its long ominous cry,
and as it died away the crowd of young men wheeled upon each other
and, in chorus, yelled, "Two!"

There was a moment of breathless waiting. Then they bawled, "Second
district!" In a flash the company of indolent and cynical young men
had vanished like a snowball disrupted by dynamite.

V

Jake Rogers was the first man to reach the home of Tuscarora Hose
Company Number Six. He had wrenched his key from his pocket as he tore
down the street, and he jumped at the spring-lock like a demon. As the
doors flew back before his hands he leaped and kicked the wedges from
a pair of wheels, loosened a tongue from its clasp, and in the glare
of the electric light which the town placed before each of its
hose-houses the next comers beheld the spectacle of Jake Rogers bent
like hickory in the manfulness of his pulling, and the heavy cart was
moving slowly towards the doors. Four men joined him at the time, and
as they swung with the cart out into the street, dark figures sped
towards them from the ponderous shadows back of the electric lamps.
Some set up the inevitable question, "What district?"

"Second," was replied to them in a compact howl. Tuscarora Hose
Company Number Six swept on a perilous wheel into Niagara Avenue, and
as the men, attached to the cart by the rope which had been paid out
from the windlass under the tongue, pulled madly in their fervor and
abandon, the gong under the axle clanged incitingly. And sometimes the
same cry was heard, "What district?"

"Second."

[Illustration: "What District"]

On a grade Johnnie Thorpe fell, and exercising a singular muscular
ability, rolled out in time from the track of the on-coming wheel, and
arose, dishevelled and aggrieved, casting a look of mournful
disenchantment upon the black crowd that poured after the machine. The
cart seemed to be the apex of a dark wave that was whirling as if it
had been a broken dam. Back of the lad were stretches of lawn, and in
that direction front-doors were banged by men who hoarsely shouted out
into the clamorous avenue, "What district?"

At one of these houses a woman came to the door bearing a lamp,
shielding her face from its rays with her hands. Across the cropped
grass the avenue represented to h