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“I want you to do exactly as I tell you, now. Don’t grab me, but let me get the first grab.” He had noticed that the man wore a heavy overcoat, and had already laid his plan.

“Don’t try,” urged the man. “You cannot save me. I will stay here till it gets too hot; then I will jump.”

“No, you won’t,” from the sergeant, as he lay at full length on the roof, looking over. “It is a pretty hard yard down there. I will get you, or go dead myself.”

The four sat on the sergeant’s legs as he swung free down to the waist; so he was almost able to reach the man on the window with outstretched hands.

“Now jump–quick!” he commanded; and the man jumped. He caught him by both wrists as directed, and the sergeant got a grip on the collar of his coat.

“Hoist!” he shouted to the four on the roof; and they tugged with their might. The sergeant’s body did not move. Bending over till the back creaked, it hung over the edge, a weight of two hundred and three pounds suspended from and holding it down. The cold sweat started upon his men’s foreheads as they tried and tried again, without gaining an inch. Blood dripped from Sergeant Vaughan’s nostrils and ears. Sixty feet below was the paved courtyard; over against him the window, behind which he saw the back-draught coming, gathering headway with lurid, swirling smoke. Now it burst through, burning the hair and the coats of the two. For an instant he thought all hope was gone.

But in a flash it came back to him. To relieve the terrible dead-weight that wrenched and tore at his muscles, he was swinging the man to and fro like a pendulum, head touching head. He could swing him up ! A smothered shout warned his men. They crept nearer the edge without letting go their grip on him, and watched with staring eyes the human pendulum swing wider and wider, farther and farther, until now, with a mighty effort, it swung within their reach. They caught the skirt of the coat, held on, pulled in, and in a moment lifted him over the edge.

They lay upon the roof, all six, breathless, sightless, their faces turned to the winter sky. The tumult on the street came up as a faint echo; the spray of a score of engines pumping below fell upon them, froze, and covered them with ice. The very roar of the fire seemed far off. The sergeant was the first to recover. He carried down the man he had saved, and saw him sent off to the hospital. Then first he noticed that he was not a negro; the smut had been rubbed from his face. Monday had dawned before he came to, and days passed before he knew his rescuer. Sergeant Vaughan was laid up himself then. He had returned to his work, and finished it; but what he had gone through was too much for human strength. It was spring before he returned to his quarters, to find himself promoted, petted, and made much of.

From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a little step. Among the many who journeyed to the insurance patrol station to see the hero of the great fire, there came, one day, a woman. She was young and pretty, the sweetheart of the man on the window-sill. He was a lawyer, since a state senator of Pennsylvania. She wished the sergeant to repeat exactly the words he spoke to him in that awful moment when he bade him jump–to life or death. She had heard them, and she wanted the sergeant to repeat them to her, that she might know for sure he was the man who did it. He stammered and hitched–tried subterfuges. She waited, inexorable. Finally, in desperation, blushing fiery red, he blurted out “a lot of cuss-words.” “You know,” he said apologetically, in telling of it, “when I am in a place like that I can’t help it.”