hat, and felt sure it was not a dream, which he
did in about half a second, he began to yell, too, and to say: "How did
you get there? Fire, fire, fire! What are you on? Fire! Are you in a
tree, or what? Fire, fire! Are you in a flat-boat? Fire, fire, fire! If
I had a skiff--fire!"

He kept racing up and down the bank, and back and forth between the bank
and the houses. The river was almost up to the top of the bank, and it
looked a mile wide. Down at the bridge you could hardly see any light
between the water and the bridge.

Pretty soon people began to look out of their doors and windows, and Hen
Billard's grandmother kept screaming: "The world's a-burnin' up! The
river's on fire!" Then boys came out of their houses; and then men with
no hats on; and then women and girls, with their hair half down. The
fire-bells began to ring, and in less than five minutes both the fire
companies were on the shore, with the men at the brakes and the foremen
of the companies holloing through their trumpets.

Then Jim Leonard saw what a good thing it was that he had thought of
holloing fire. He felt sure now that they would save him somehow, and he
made up his mind to save the rat, too, and pet it, and maybe go around
and exhibit it. He would name it Bolivar; it was just the color of the
elephant Bolivar that came to the Boy's Town every year. These things
whirled through his brain while he watched two men setting out in a
skiff toward him.

They started from the shore a little above him, and they meant to row
slanting across to his tree, but the current, when they got fairly into
it, swept them far below, and they were glad to row back to land again
without ever getting anywhere near him. At the same time, the tree-top
where his roof was caught was pulled southward by a sudden rush of the
torrent; it opened, and the roof slipped out, with Jim Leonard and the
rat on it. They both joined in one squeal of despair as the river leaped
forward with them, and a dreadful "Oh!" went up from the people on the
bank.

Some of the firemen had run down to the bridge when they saw that the
skiff was not going to be of any use, and one of them had got out of the
window of the bridge onto the middle pier, with a long pole in his hand.
It had an iron hook at the end, and it was the kind of pole that the men
used to catch driftwood with and drag it ashore. When the people saw
Blue Bob with that pole in his hand, they understood what he was up to.