Pagina 20 van 416

"I thought so all along--curse me if I didn't!" yelled the judge,

and then, turning toward a crowd of men who were looking

apprehensively here and there, he shouted:

"All hands with the buckets now, lively!"

Suddenly the basement doors of Boughton's store were thrown open

and a huge, black-bearded man with a great voice appeared there.

"Buckets this way!" he bellowed, in a tone that rose clearly

above the roar and crackle of the fire. As the men reached him he

handed out the implements from great stacks at his feet--rubber

buckets, wooden buckets, tin and iron buckets, new, old, rusty

and galvanized. It was Pete Ellinwood, the fire marshal of the

village and custodian of the apparatus.

Because in the hundred or more years of its existence there has

never been water pressure in Grande Mignon, the fighting of a

fire there with primitive means has become an exact and beautiful

science.