In consideration for the feelings of Engine Company No. 99 the details will be lightly touched. The company does not like to be reminded of that day. There was a great crowd, and hurry calls were sent in; and while the ambulance gong was clearing the way the men of No. 99 hard the crack of the S. P. C. A. agent’s pistol, and turned their heads away, not daring to look toward Erebus again.
When the firemen got back to the engine-house they found that one of them was dragging by the collar the cause of their desolation and grief. They set it in the middle of the floor and gathered grimly about it. Through its whiskers the calamitous object chattered effervescently and waved its hands.
“Sounds like a seidlitz powder,” said Mike Dowling, disgustedly, “and it makes me sicker than one. Call that a man!—that hoss was worth a steamer full of such two-legged animals. It’s a immigrant—that’s what it is.”
“Look at the doctor’s chalk mark on its coat,” said Reilly, the desk man. “It’s just landed. It must be a kind of a Dago or a Hun or one of them Finns, I guess. That’s the kind of truck that Europe unloads onto us.”
“Think of a thing like that getting in the way, and laying John up in hospital and spoiling the best fire team in the city,” groaned another fireman. “It ought to be taken down to the dock and drowned.”
[143]
