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Naturally, after this conversation with Katy I agreed with my sister that it would be interesting to call; and we planned an early day. It was, however, even earlier than our plans.

My chamber (at my sister’s house, where I was visiting) is on the side near the Bateman house; and it happened to be I who first discovered the smoke volleying out of the Bateman furnace chimney, followed by a roaring spout of flame. I knew Katy had gone to our little up-town grocery, for I had seen her on the way; and I made all haste across the lawn, with all our ice-cream salt. The fire really was easily dealt with. By the time the firemen arrived (summoned by Nellie), all was over save the shouting, as they say in the political reports. Amos and Nellie were still calling “Fire!” Katy arrived a good second to the hose cart, breathless with running, but all her wits in good order.

“Long’s you’ve put out the fire, Miss Patsey, I’ll put out the fire department,” said she; “they’re the only danger. Miss Mercy, you open all the windows; let’s git rid of the smoke. Nellie, what you carrying your clothes out for?”

Mercedes quite won our hearts by her docility and the quiet way she obeyed. Perhaps it was in recognition that Katy became her tower of refuge when the cause of the fire appeared. It was no less than Amos. He had been hired without any heartless prying into recommendations, on the ideal Altrurian ground of Need. He was asked, to be sure, could he run a furnace, and with the optimism of the African replied that he reckoned he could. He did not add that he had never tried to run one before. Doubtless it was natural that he should not discover the meaning of the cunning chains going through the floors; and when dampers increase the draft if shut and diminish it if open, who can wonder that Amos should artlessly shut everything in sight–including the registers? Natural laws did the rest.

Amos was very patient, almost tearful. He said he didn’t know whatever Sally would do when he come home outen a job; Sally be’n so satisfied befo’ but he didn’t cast no blame on nobody. Sally, it came out later, was ill.

“Is it anything infectious?” demanded Mercedes’ sister, the doctor, who by this time was on the scene.

“I dunno, ma’am; I reckon ’tis,” deprecated Amos. “Hit’s a right new baby, come a week ago, an’ she ain’t got up yit.”

Then it was while Nellie glibly proposed a new man, a man of assured efficiency, two years janitor of a “flat,” and the brother of a friend; and Mercedes Van Arden had only bewildered compassion to justify her desire to forgive the culprit; and Doctor Van Arden frowned, that Katy spoke the word of power.

“Doctor,” said she, “Amos mayn’t know much about the furnace, but he’s a decent, honest man that found my ten cents out on the steps and gave it to me; and I know how to run furnaces, and I’ll learn him. What’s more, I can burn up all the coal, and not smoke up the house or the neighborhood. And one good thing–if Amos can’t run a furnace, he knows it now, anyhow; there’s many a janitor man’s been smoking up flats for years ain’t found out that yet. Doctor, I’ll answer for Amos if you ladies will keep him.”

Amos was kept. I fancied that Mercedes was almost as grateful as he.

After this for a time matters went on in a sufficiently prosaic and satisfactory manner. We put both of the sisters up in the Monday Club and the doctor consented to talk to the club on the “Smoke Nuisance” at our meeting in which we discussed that bane of the housekeeper, under the startling caption, “The City of Dreadful Night.” We asked Mercedes to embody her own Social Creed in a fifteen-minute paper; but she pleaded almost with tears that she was simply a student who had not studied enough to know, only to feel; and she blushed deeply. So she was reprieved. Meanwhile the doctor (who had been quietly working up a practise in our town for six years) began to be seen at the bedsides of divers prominent ladies.