Swatty. Ellis Parker Butler
and Swatty. She was crying all the time; she kept moaning, “My father! My father!”
So just then Swatty's father ran out and grabbed the fire marshal by the arm and talked to him in German, because they were both German, and the fire marshal ran toward his firemen and shouted through his trumpet, and all the firemen up the street came running back, dragging all their hose and all shouting.
It was all wild and sort of crazy, and suddenly the fire marshal ran back to where the firemen were tugging at the heavy hose and shouting, and four firemen who were holding on to a nozzle pointed the stream into the air. It was worse than any rain you ever saw. It was just “whoosh!” and we were all soaked. So all the crowd hollered and screamed, and we all turned and ran, and all I knew was that I had hold of Mamie Little's hand and was helping her run. I was awful sorry for her because she was crying and her father was going to burn.
So Swatty said: “What's she crying for? Why don't she shut up?”
He meant Mamie Little. So I said:
“She can cry if she wants to! I'd like to see you try to stop her! She's crying because your father gave her his fashion plate and it's going to be burned up, and if you say much I'll lick you!”
So Swatty said: “If that's all she's crying for, come on. We'll get her old fashion plate for her.” So I said to Mamie Little: “Stop being a baby and shut up, and we'll get your old fashion plate for you.”
Swatty just cut in through the crowd, and me and Bony followed after him. He went up the side street, and we climbed over the fence into the yard of the corner house and cut across that yard and over another fence. That way we got to the back of Swatty's father's shop without any one stopping us. Bony kind of kept behind us.
It was mighty hot, because the house next door was all afire, but the firemen were keeping all their hose on the side of Swatty's father's shop, trying to keep it from burning. We crouched down and kept our backs to the fire so the heat wouldn't shrivel us, and we got to the back door and it wasn't locked. We went in. It was hot—like an oven—inside, and the noise of all the water on the side of the house was like thunder, only louder. The inside of the shop was like under a waterfall. You wouldn't think anything so wet could burn, but it did. Before we were halfway to the front window the fire began to eat into the shop along the floor. The water on that side just turned to steam and dried as fast as it ran down.
Bony began to cry, but we hadn't any time to stop. Swatty took him by the hand and jerked him along, and we got to the window and I grabbed the fashion plate. Then we couldn't go back because the shop was mostly afire and we would have been burned up. So then Bony got real scared and ran to the front door and threw it open, and a stream from a hose caught him and sent him head over heels back into the shop where it was burning; he was knocked unconscious because his head hit a table leg.
So I didn't know what to do. I guess I began to cry. I crouched down in the window because I couldn't get out at the door on account of the stream of water that was coming in there a hundred miles a minute, and I couldn't go back because the back of the shop was all afire now. But Swatty crawled on his hands and knees under the table where Bony was, where the fire was beginning to burn harder, and he grabbed Bony and yanked him along the floor back to the window. I guess I helped him jerk Bony onto the window shelf, but just then another stream of water busted the window in. The glass fell all around us and one piece cut Swatty on the hand, but he only said, “Jump! Jump!”
Maybe we would have jumped, but we didn't. The firemen had got to the back of the building and had turned the hose in at the back window, and just when Swatty said, “Jump!” the stream of water hit us like a board. It took us as if we were pieces of paper and slammed us out of the broken window and halfway across the street, and threw us head over heels in the mud, and the fashion plate, with Mamie Little's father, came flying with us.
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