Bart Stirling's Road to Success Part 4

It rolled and whirled, obliterating all outlines within the room.

"Father! father!" shouted Bart, das.h.i.+ng recklessly in at the open doorway.

He could not make out a single object in that chaos, but he knew the location of every familiar article in the place, and made for the chair in which his father usually sat.

"Father!" he screamed, as his hands touched the arms of the chair and found it empty.

The sulphurous flames nearly choked him, the heat from the crackling wooden part.i.tion singed his hair, but he could only grope about blindly.

"Here he is," sounded a suffocating voice.

"Where, oh! where?" panted Bart.

He threw out his arms wildly, groping to locate the speaker, whom he knew to be the roustabout. "Where is he--where is he?"

He had come in contact with the roustabout now, who with all his timidity was proving himself a hero in the present instance.

"Lying on the floor--stumbled over him--I'm on fire, too!"

Bart's feet touched a prostrate form. It was moved along as Bart stooped and got hold of the shoulders.

The roustabout was helping him. They dragged together, stumbling to the doorway on the very verge of fatal danger, and reeled across the platform.

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 extinguis.h.i.+ng 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 rea.s.suringly. "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.

The strain was relieved when Bertha Stirling came home about eleven o'clock.

She was in tears, but subdued any active exhibition of emotion until Alice, on the a.s.surance that her father was resting comfortably at the hospital, was induced to retire.

Then she broke down utterly, and Bart had a hard time keeping her from being hysterical.

She said that her mother intended staying all night at the side of her suffering husband and had tried to send some rea.s.suring word to her son.

"You must tell me the worst, you know, Bertha," said Bart. "What do they say at the hospital? Is father in serious danger? Will he die?"

"No," answered the sobbing girl, "he will not die, but oh! Bart--the doctor says he may be blind for life!"

CHAPTER V

READY FOR BUSINESS

Bart Stirling stood ruefully regarding the ruins of the burned express shed. It was the Fourth of July, and early as it was, the air was resonant with the usual echoes of Independance Day.

Bart, however, was little in harmony with the jollity and excitement of the occasion. He had spent a sleepless night, tossing and rolling in bed until daybreak, when his mother returned from the hospital.

Mr. Stirling was resting easily, she reported, in very little pain or discomfort, but his career of usefulness and work was over--the doctors expressed an opinion that he would never regain his eyesight.

Mrs. Stirling was pale and sorrowed. She had grown older in a single night, but the calm resignation in her gentle face a.s.sured Bart that they would be of one mind in taking up their new burdens of life in a practical, philosophical way.

"Poor father!" he murmured brokenly. Then he added: "Mother, I want you to go in and get some rest, and try not to take this too hard. I will attend to everything there is to do about the express office."