The Constitution says that one man is as good as another; but the Fire Department says he is better.  This is a too generous theory, but the law will not allow itself to be construed otherwise.  All of which comes perilously near to being a paradox, and commends itself to the attention of the S. P. C. A.

One of the transatlantic liners dumped out at Ellis Island a lump of protozoa which was expected to evolve into an American citizen.  A steward kicked him down the gangway, a doctor pounced upon his eyes like a raven, seeking for trachoma or ophthalmia; he was hustled ashore and ejected into the city in the name of Liberty—­perhaps, theoretically, thus inoculating against kingocracy with a drop of its own virus.  This hypodermic injection of Europeanism wandered happily into the veins of the city with the broad grin of a pleased child.  It was not burdened with baggage, cares or ambitions.  Its body was lithely built and clothed in a sort of foreign fustian; its face was brightly vacant, with a small, flat nose, and was mostly covered by a thick, ragged, curling beard like the coat of a spaniel.  In the pocket of the imported Thing were a few coins—­denarii&md
ash;­scudi—­kopecks—­pfennigs—­pilasters—­whatever the financial nomenclature of his unknown country may have been.

Prattling to himself, always broadly grinning, pleased by the roar and movement of the barbarous city into which the steamship cut-rates had shunted him, the alien strayed away from the, sea, which he hated, as far as the district covered by Engine Company No. 99.  Light as a cork, he was kept bobbing along by the human tide, the crudest atom in all the silt of the stream that emptied into the reservoir of Liberty.

While crossing Third avenue he slowed his steps, enchanted by the thunder of the elevated trains above him and the soothing crash of the wheels on the cobbles.  And then there was a new, delightful chord in the uproar—­the musical clanging of a gong and a great shining juggernaut belching fire and smoke, that people were hurrying to see.

This beautiful thing, entrancing to the eye, dashed past, and the protoplasmic immigrant stepped into the wake of it with his broad, enraptured, uncomprehending grin.  And so stepping, stepped into the path of No. 99’s flying hose-cart, with John Byrnes gripping, with arms of steel, the reins over the plunging backs of Erebus and Joe.

The unwritten constitutional code of the fireman has no exceptions or amendments.  It is a simple thing—­as simple as the rule of three.  There was the heedless unit in the right of way; there was the hose-cart and the iron pillar of the elevated railroad.

John Byrnes swung all his weight and muscle on the left rein.  The team and cart swerved that way and crashed like a torpedo into the pillar.  The men on the cart went flying like skittles.  The driver’s strap burst, the pillar rang with the shock, and John Byrnes fell on the car track with a broken shoulder twenty feet away, while Erebus—­beautiful, raven-black, best-loved Erebus—­lay whickering in his harness with a broken leg.