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Page 10
The roustabout jumped to the ground. Once there he gently but in a
masterly way drew the inanimate form of Mr. Stirling from the platform,
and carried him over to a pile of ties outside of the glow and scorch of
the burning express shed.
Bart anxiously scanned his father's face. It was black and blistered but
he was breathing naturally.
"Overcome with the smoke--or tumbled and was stunned," declared the
roustabout.
Excited approaching shouts caused the speaker to glare down the tracks.
Half a dozen people were hurrying to the scene of the fire. The
roustabout with a nervous gasp vanished in the darkness.
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.
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