“Hurrah!  Hurrah!  Hurrah!” went up heartily from the dense, black crowd below.  The rescued boys were laid upon the grass at a safe distance from the burning mill.  The people began to gather about them.

“Ah, poor Tim, poor Tim!” said a woman, bending over one of the boys.

“That’s Ann there with Tim Tyler,” said Charlie to Sid Waters, these two enterprising knights having made good use of their legs and quickly reached the spot.

“Who’s Ann?”

“It is Tim’s mother.”

“I recognize the other boy.  It’s Bob Landers.”

“Will Somers, this you?” asked Charlie.

“It will be when my face is washed.  Dirty work at fires.”

“Why, Mr. Walton, is this you?  What a ’ero!  Did you save one of them boys?” squeaked Miss Persnips to Will’s companion.

The minister’s face was not very clean after his fight with the sooty enemy, but as Will thought, “Love sees through all disguises.”

“Yes, here I am, and if some of you good people will carry these boys home, the rest of us will soak down those tenement houses opposite the mill and see if we can’t save them.”

“The dear man!  So disinterested, and before he had got his face washed,” said Miss Persnips, pressing nearer to gain a better look at the object of her admiration.

“Miss Persnips, excuse me,” said the foreman of the “Torrent,” the great rival of the “Cataract,” “but unless you withdraw, we shall be obliged to wash you out of the way with the hose.  Play away, Three!” he roared.

“O, massy!” screamed the shop-keeper, retiring to a safe place.

Will Somers went back to his place at the brakes of the “Cataract.”  As he passed the door of the mill he looked into the entry, “What a blaze!” he said.

It was not surprising that the flames had swept forward with such rapidity.  Up those old wooden stairs drying for years, greasy with the oil drippings of the mill, the fire leaped and flew even rather than leaped.  The flames were reaching out like long, forked arms, vainly clutching after the two boys that had been snatched away.  The building was now the plaything of the flames.  Through it and over it, now climbing to the highest point of the old-fashioned roof, then searching down into the cellar, scorching, raging, roaring every-where, went the fire.  In places unexpected the flames would show themselves, looking out like the faces of firefiends.  Then they would retire a moment, only to come again and burst out with a fury that nothing could resist, a fury that raged and rioted till beams, rafters, flooring, and stair-ways were a black, ashy heap, sputtering and hissing toward the sky—­a snake heap full of hot fangs.

“I wonder how that fire started,” was a frequent exclamation.  “Don’t know,” said every body save one poor, old tobacco-ridden man who confessed that he had been smoking in the waste room, the place where the fire started.