VI

The new chief of the Ancients devoted the first hours of the next morning to the arrangement of his fire-fighting gear in the front hall, and when all the items had been suspended, so that they would be ready to his hand as well as serve as ornament, he went out on the porch and sunned himself, revelling in a certain snug and contented sense of importance, such as he hadn’t felt since he had stepped down from the quarter-deck of his own vessel.  He even gazed at the protruding and poignant centre of that rose on his carpet slipper with milder eyes, and sniffed aromatic whiffs of liniment with appreciation of its invigorating odor.

It was a particularly peaceful day.  From his porch he could view a wide expanse of rural scenery, and, once in a while, a flash of sun against steel marked the location of some distant farmer in his fields.  There were no teams in sight on the highway, for the men of Smyrna were too busily engaged on their acres.  He idly watched a trail of dun smoke that rose from behind a distant ridge and zigzagged across the blue sky.  He admired it as a scenic attraction, without attaching any importance to it.  Even when a woman appeared on the far-off ridge and flapped her apron and hopped up and down and appeared to be frantically signalling either the village in the valley or the men in the fields, he only squinted at her through the sunlight and wondered what ailed her.  A sudden inspiring thought suggested that perhaps she had struck a hornets’ nest.  He chuckled.

A little later a ballooning cloud of dust came rolling down the road toward him and the toll-bridge that led to Smyrna village.  He noted that the core of the cloud was a small boy, running so hard that his knees almost knocked under his chin.  He spun to a halt in front of the Cap’n’s gate and gasped: 

“Fi-ah, fi-ah, fi-ah-h-h-h, Chief!  Ben Ide’s house is a-fi-ah.  I’ll holler it in the village and git ’em to ring the bell and start ‘Hecla.’” Away he tore.

“Fire!” bawled Cap’n Aaron, starting for the front hall with a scuff, a hop, a skip, and jump, in order to favor his sprained toe.  “Fire over to Ben Ide’s!”

He had his foreman’s hat on wrong side to when his wife came bursting out of the sitting-room into the hall.  She, loyal though excited lady of the castle, shifted her knight’s helmet to the right-about and stuffed his buckets, bag, and bed-wrench into his hands.  The cord of his speaking-trumpet she slung over his neck.

“I helped get father ready once, twenty years ago,” she stuttered, “and I haven’t forgot!  Oh, Aaron, I wish you hadn’t got such a prejudice against owning a horse and against Marengo when he tried to sell you that one.  Now you’ve got to wait till some one gives you a lift.  You can’t go on that foot to Ide’s.”

“Hoss!” he snorted.  “Marengo!  What he tried to sell me would be a nice thing to git to a fire with!  Spavined wusser’n a carpenter’s saw-hoss, and with heaves like a gasoline dory!  I can hop there on one foot quicker’n he could trot that hoss there!  But I’ll git there.  I’ll git there!”