Freeland tribune. (Freeland, Pa.) 1888-1921, 1901-03-20
THE PROMOTION OF
PATROLMAN WAGNER
BY RAY sTANNARD BAKER,
A TRUE STORY.

tons that he still ran to fires. There
are those in the police who do not run
after one years experience; Wagner,
being ambitious, had been running
nearly three years, and nothing had
happened. Wagner is a gymnast as
well as a policeman, and he is as
proud of his big right arm-it feels
like new hemp hawser-as he is of
his drab helmet.
On night in April. some years ago,
Wagner was patrolling his beat in
Lexington avenue, New York, up as
far as Seventy-fourth street and back
again to SlXty-siXth street, a leisurely
tramp of half a mile, although dull
from being familiar. A few minutes
after 2 o'clock in the morning, as
Wagner records in his little book, he
saw q fire engine coming up the ave
nue. with horses in full gallop. In the
daytime a fire engine is an incident;
at night it is an event. This engine
turned into Sixty-ninth street and
raced to the eastward.
An engine in full steam leaves be-
hind a broad, bright pathway of
burning cinders. Wagner followed
this path, and it led him straight to
the edge of the park. Smoke was al
ready rising in a dim, gray cloud
above a brownstone house. 1t needed
keen eye at that hour of the night
to see the building was on fire. In
the middle of the street two scantily
clad men were gesticulating oddly
and pointing upward.
On a narrow ledge that ran just
below a fourth-story window stood a
girl in a white wrapper. She was
crouching, with her hands feeling out
along the smooth brick wall and over
the edge of the steep mansard roof.
She had crept from the open window,
and the smoke was now reaching out
behind her along the wall. 1t was
about so feet down to the stone steps
of the areaway, and the ledge was not
as wide as a mans two hands
AS Wagner came up, he saw the
girl look down as if intending to
jump.
watt" he shouted. "Ill help you"
Then he ran up the steps of the ad-
joining building, and when the door
was opened he dashed up four flights
of stairs and ran into a front room.
The window was already open. Two
men were leaning out and holding the
end of knotted sheet. The ledge ran
only the width of the burning build
ing; consequently, although the girl
was near the end of it. she was still
separated from the men by more than
five feet of bare brick wall; and she
was two feet below them. They were
dangling the sheet Intellectually in
her direction and shouting:
"Take hold take hold"
The girl made feeble passes at the
sheet, but she could not catch it; if
she had caught it they would, with the
best possible intentions, have dragged
her from the ledge, and she would
have been dashed to death on the
Tagging below. She was silent and
all but da2ed.
Wagner leaned out of the window,
his right hand clutching the casing
and his left extended in her direction.
He called to her to jump.
She glanced down at the gathering
crowd in the street. and clutched
again at the smooth wall. Wagner
knew that the frantic advice of the
men below, the kissing of the engines
and all the other din of the fire were
fast unnerving her.
Fitzgerald, a fireman. now came up
the stairs two steps at a time. When
Wagner saw him he said, Hold on to
my leg"
Then he straddled the sill. with his
right leg in and his left one out. Fitz-
gerald and one of the citizens graspcd
his ankle and braced their feet against
the sill.
Then Wagner leaned forward with
his left foot pushing on the wall below
the window until he stood straight out
in mid-air as stiff and firm as the
hickory shaft of a hosting crane. He
did not once look below him, or count
on the chances of falling. He was
facing the girl; slowly he swung to-
ward her.
Here, reach OUT" he shouted.
But she did not hear him. She was
trying blindly to turn on the ledge,
feeling that escape in this direction
was cut off. She was cropping for the
window that she had come through,
not knowing that the room was now in
flames from floor to ceiling. Just as
she faced about. sudden gush of fire
drove the glass outward from the sash
es and shot half hundred feet in air.
The girl shrani back before the heat,
looked down, wavered, and then de-
liberately stepped from the ledge.
Her hands were thrown out above her,
and those below turned away in hor-
ror
But Wagner had thrown himself
violently forward. As the girl shot
! past him he graspcd her arin near the