The spirit of the doughty mariner seemed broken at last.  He looked down at himself, at the mud-clogged buckets and his unspeakable bedragglement.

“I’ve only got one word to say to you right here and now, Cap’n,” went on Todd, meekly, “and it’s this, that no man ever gits jest where he wants to git, unless he has a ree-li’ble hoss.  I’ve tried to tell you so before, but—­but, well, you didn’t listen to me the way you ought to.”  He continued to scrape, and the Cap’n stared mutely down at the foot that was encased in a muddy slipper.

“Now, there’s a hoss standin’ there—­” pursued Todd.

“What will you take for that team jest as it stands?” blurted the mariner, desperately.  The fire, the smoke of which was rolling up above the distant tree-tops, and his duty there made him reckless.  As he looked down on Todd he hadn’t the heart to demand of that meek and injured person that he should forget and forgive sufficiently to take him in and put him down at Ide’s.  It seemed like crowding the mourners.  Furthermore, Cap’n Aaron Sproul was not a man who traded in humble apologies.  His independence demanded a different footing with Todd, and the bitter need of the moment eclipsed economy.  “Name your price!”

“A hundred and thutty, ev’rything throwed in, and I’ll drive you there a mile a minit,” gasped Todd, grasping the situation.

With muddy hands, trembling in haste, the Cap’n drew his long, fat wallet and counted out the bills.  Brackett eyed him hungrily.

“You might jest as well settle with me now as later through the law,” he cried.

But the Cap’n butted him aside, with an oath, and climbed into the wagon.

“You drive as though the devil had kicked ye,” he yelled to Todd.  “It’s my hoss, and I don’t care if you run the four legs off’m him.”

Half-way to Ide’s, a man leaped the roadside fence and jumped up and down before them in the highway.  He had a shotgun in his hands.

“It’s my brother—­Voltaire,” shouted Marengo, pulling up, though Cap’n Sproul swore tempestuously.  “You’ve got to take him on.  He b’longs to your fire comp’ny.”

“I was out huntin’ when I heard the bell,” bellowed the new passenger, when he had scrambled to a place behind the wagon-seat, his back toward them and his legs hanging down.  “I’m fu’st hoseman, and it’s lucky you came along and giv’ me a lift.”  He set his gun-butt down between his knees, the muzzle pointing up.

Cap’n Sproul had his teeth set hard upon a hank of his grizzled whiskers, and his eyes on the smoke ahead.  Todd ran his wheezing horse up the ridge, and when they topped it they beheld the whole moving scene below them.

Men were running out of the burning house, throwing armfuls of goods right and left.  The “Hecla” was a-straddle of the well, and rows of men were tossing at her brake-beams.

“Give her tar, give her tar!” yelled the man behind, craning his thin neck.  Todd lashed at the horse and sent him running down the slope.  At the foot of the declivity, just before they came to the lane leading into Ide’s place, there was a culvert where the road crossed a brook.