Bart was hovering over his father in a solicitous way as a night watchman and a freight crew appeared on the scene.  There was a volley of excited questions and quick responses.

No means of extinguishing the flames were at hand.  The newcomers suggested getting the insensible Mr. Stirling over to the street beyond the tracks a few hundred yards distant, where there was a drug store.

Bart ran for the hand truck on the platform, saw two of the men start off with his father on it, and hurried back to the burning express shed.

He had hoped to save something, but one effort drove him back, realizing the foolhardiness of repeating the experiment.  The building and its contents were doomed.

The crowd began to gather and grew with the moments.  A road official appeared on the scene.  Bart made a brief, hurried explanation and ran over to the drug store.

To his surprise his father was not there.  Bart approached the druggist to ask an anxious question when the companion of the latter, a professional-looking man, spoke up.

“You are young Stirling, are you not?” he interrogated.

“Yes, sir,” nodded Bart.

“Don’t get frightened or worried, but I am Doctor Davis.  We thought it best to send your father to the hospital.”

“To the hospital!” echoed Bart turning pale.  “Then he is badly injured—­”

“Not at all,” dissented the physician reassuringly.  “He was probably overcome by the smoke or fell and was stunned, but that injury was trifling.  It is his eyes we are troubled about.”

“Tell me the worst!” pleaded Bart in a choked tone, but trying to prepare himself for the shock.

“Why, one eye is pretty bad,” said the doctor, “and the other got the full force of some powder explosion.  They have good people up at the hospital, though, and they will soon get him to rights.”

“I must tell my mother at once,” murmured Bart.

He left the place with a heart as heavy as lead.  It seemed as if one furious Fourth of July powder blast had disrupted the very foundations of all the family hopes and happiness, leaving a blackened wreck where there had been unity, comfort and peace.

If his father was disabled seriously, their prospects became a very grave problem.  Bart, too, was worried about the loss to the express company.  The books were probably out on the desk when the fire commenced, the safe was open, and the loss in money and records meant considerable.

Bart felt that he was undertaking the hardest task of his life when he reached home and broke the news to his mother—­it was like disturbing the peace of some earthly Eden.

Mrs. Stirling went at once to the hospital with her eldest daughter, Bertha.  Bart, very anxious and miserable, got the younger boys to bed and tried to cheer up his little sister Alice, who was in a transport of grief and suspense.

The strain was relieved when Bertha Stirling came home about eleven o’clock.