Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/294

Rh floor is it? How did it start? Is it insured? Is anybody burned?" I asked a fireman. The answer came and I jotted it down; it was the top floor, how it started was unknown, nobody was hurt--it was heavily insured.

It had been burning for four hours, the worst was over, the fire was out; only steam and smoke now filled the staircase and corridors. The street was covered with a litter of ruined furniture. The occupants of the lower floors stood about in various attire; I caught unpleasant remarks as I dashed upstairs to Brodie's floor. Hoses, I found, were still at work; the room we had left six hours before was gutted; a gaping hole permitted a view of the room on the floor below, and this hole began immediately in front of the grate. A black woolly mat with long hair, I remembered, had lain on the floor just there. The unpleasant remarks, as I ran up, had reference to insurance; phrases such as "over-insured," "too well insured" were audible. They were the usual phrases uttered at the scene of a New York fire, where arson was as common as picking pockets; I had heard them a hundred times; they had furnished clues for my newspaper stories. On this occasion they held a new significance.

Brodie shared my folding-bed that night, but he did not sleep. He cried a good deal. He said very little. He referred neither to the loss of his stuff, nor to the fact of its being covered by insurance, nor to how and why the fire started. He was frightened to the bone.

Next day, when we visited the burned apartment to secure what fire and water had spared, Brodie was abused and scarified by the inmates as he went upstairs.... Weeks of keen anxiety followed, of worse than anxiety. The insurance companies refused to pay the claims, which Brodie, after much hesitation, had sent in. They decided to fight them. The lawyer--a scheister, meaning a low, unprincipled type of attorney who would take any case for the money it might contain--bled my friend effectively by preying on his obvious fear. He was summoned to give witness before a hearing in the offices Rh