dashed outside and shouted to the firemen on the roof. The store
room window was too little for a man to go through, and they
hadn't opened it for fear of creating a draft.

I can't describe what happened in the next agonizing ten
minutes. The third-floor stairs fell in with a crash and a burst
of flame about five seconds after the doctor passed over them.
We had given him up for lost when a shout went up from the crowd
on the lawn, and he appeared for an instant at one of those
dormer windows in the attic, and called for the firemen to put up
a ladder. Then he disappeared, and it seemed to us that they'd
never get that ladder in place; but they finally did, and two men
went up. The opening of the window had created a draft, and they
were almost overpowered by the volume of smoke that burst out at
the top. After an eternity the doctor appeared again with a
white bundle in his arms. He passed it out to the men, and then
he staggered back and dropped out of sight!

I don't know what happened for the next few minutes; I turned
away and shut my eyes. Somehow or other they got him out and
halfway down the ladder, and then they let him slip. You see, he
was unconscious from all the smoke he'd swallowed, and the ladder
was slippery with ice and terribly wobbly. Anyway, when I looked
again he was lying in a heap on the ground, with the crowd all
running, and somebody yelling to give him air. They thought at
first he was dead. But Dr. Metcalf from the village examined
him, and said his leg was broken, and two ribs, and that aside
from that he seemed whole. He was still unconscious when they
put him on two of the baby mattresses that had been thrown out of
the windows and laid him in the wagon that brought the ladders