Charlie to the Rescue

Changes the Scene Considerably! (continued 5)

Reading edition

Charlie heard the howl. He and his men had retired to a safe distance when the fire was first observed—thinking the place empty—but the howl touched a chord in our hero’s sympathetic breast, which was ever ready to vibrate. From whom the howl proceeded mattered little or nothing to Charlie Brooke. Sufficient that it was the cry of a living being in distress. He sprang at once through the open doorway of the saloon, through which was issuing a volume of thick smoke, mingled with flame.

“God help him! the place’ll blow up in a few minutes,” cried Hunky Ben, losing, for once, his imperturbable coolness, and rushing wildly after his friend. But at that moment the thick smoke burst into fierce flame and drove him back.

Charlie sprang up the staircase three steps at a time, holding his breath to avoid suffocation. He reached the landing, where Buttercup ran, or, rather, fell, almost fainting, into his arms. At the moment an explosion in the cellar shook the building to its foundation, and, shattering one of the windows, caused a draught of air to drive aside the smoke. Charlie gasped a mouthful of air and looked round. Flames were by that time roaring up the only staircase. A glance from the nearest window showed that a leap thence meant broken limbs, if not death, to both. A ladder up to a trap-door suggested an exit by the roof. It might only lead to a more terrible leap, but meanwhile it offered relief from imminent suffocation. Charlie bore the half-dead girl to the top rung, and found the trap-door padlocked, but a thrust from his powerful shoulder wrenched hasp and padlock from their hold, and next moment a wild cheer greeted him as he stood on a corner of the gable. But a depth of forty or fifty feet was below him with nothing to break his fall to the hard earth.

“Jump!” yelled one of the onlookers. “No, don’t!” cried another, “you’ll be killed.”

“Hold your noise,” roared Hunky Ben, “and lend a hand here—sharp!—the house’ll blow up in a minute.”

He ran as he spoke towards a cart which was partly filled with hay. Seizing the trams he raised them. Willing hands helped, and the cart was run violently up against the gable—Hunky shouting to some of the men to fetch more hay.

But there was no time for that. Another explosion took place inside the building, which Charlie knew must have driven in the sides of more casks and let loose fresh fuel. A terrible roar, followed by ominous cracking of the roof, warned him that there was no time to lose. He looked steadily at the cart for a moment and leaped. His friends held their breath as the pair descended. The hay would not have sufficed to break the fall sufficiently, but happily the cart was an old one. When they came down on it like a thunderbolt, the bottom gave way. Crashing through it the pair came to the ground, heavily indeed, but uninjured!

The fall, which almost stunned our hero, had the curious effect of reviving Buttercup, for she muttered something to the effect that, “dat was a mos’ drefful smash,” as they conveyed her and her rescuer from the vicinity of danger.

This had scarcely been done when the house blew up—its walls were driven outwards, its roof was blown off, its bottles were shattered, all its baleful contents were scattered around, and, amid an appropriate hurricane of blue fire, that drinking and gambling saloon was blown to atoms.

Would that a like fate might overtake every similar establishment in the world!

This was the first and last attempt to disturb the peace of Sweetwater Bluff. It is said, indeed, that Crux and some of his men did, long afterwards, make their appearance in that happy and flourishing town, but they came as reformed men, not as foes—men who had found out that in very truth sobriety tends to felicity, that honesty is the best policy, and that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

The End.