The stranger picked himself up from the floor of the dark room into which he had plunged. He couldn’t see anything, and the air was deadly with heat and smoke. He turned and kicked what little was left of the window sash clear out of the frame. Turning again, he dropped on his hands and knees, and went in search of the bed and the unfortunate Joe. The bare floor was warm. He found the bed almost immediately by bumping his head against the wooden side of it. He got to his feet, reached over and felt a human figure in the bed. He pulled it toward him, sheets, blankets, and all, clutched it to his laboring breast and made for the window. He was thankful that Joe was a lightweight. He found one of the natives at the top of the ladder and passed his unconscious burden out to him.
“Here he is,” he shouted. “Dead, I shouldn’t wonder. Asphyxiated for sure. Take him home. Get a doctor.”
He leaned far out the window, gasping for clean air. As soon as the ladder was clear he slid to the snowy ground, recovered his pack and snowshoes, reeled and fell, then crawled dizzily away from the burning house in which he had lost all interest for the moment.
The stranger crawled to the high road, turned there and looked back at the scene of his humane and disinterested exploits. He saw that the house was fated. All the lower windows within his field of vision belched smoke and flames. The ell from which the old man had escaped was blazing to the eaves. There was no wind, and the smoke went straight up. A dozen or more people now ran aimlessly about in the glare, or stood in helpless groups. The old man’s voice still rang above the roaring and snapping of the fire, cracked and raspy. No one paid any attention to the man who had performed the rescue.
The stranger moved up the road, glancing right or left at each house as he came to it. The village was of the simplest possible design—two lines of dwellings and stores and snow-drifted front yards facing one another across the white high road. Behind the houses and stores on both hands were barns and sheds, a few white-topped stacks of straw, and snowy fields climbing up to the edges of black forest.
The stranger had not gone more than halfway through the village when he spotted the thing he was looking for, and turned to his left off the road. This was a building two and a half stories high, square, hooded in front with a narrow veranda and an upper gallery, and flanked on the right with an impressive extent of attached sheds and stables—all in need of paint. By these physical features, and by its general aid of rakish unconcern of public opinion, it proclaimed itself the village hotel. The stranger stepped up onto the worn flooring of the veranda, which snapped frostily to his tread. He saw, dimly, antlered heads of moose and caribou on his right and left, out-thrust from the clapboarded walls, as if the monarchs of forest and barren had been imprisoned in the house and were now making their escape without wasting any time in looking for the door. He was not intimidated, for he had seen the same style of decoration in this province before. He crossed the veranda, and hammered on the door with his mittened fist. The door opened in half a minute, disclosing a tall man with a blanket draped about his shoulders, a lamp in his hand and a stoop in his back.