The Jessop fire-raiser had been quiet for almost three months. Some in the town believed nothing more would be heard of him. Others held the opinion that his last fire had so nearly got away and destroyed the row of houses behind the church that he had become frightened, perhaps that he felt remorse and would give himself up one day and ask forgiveness for his sins from God. The vicar of All Saints, the church burned to the ground on Christmas night, 1914, held that opinion. He was wrong. All of them were wrong. The man with the fire in his head – so Thomas Hedges, headmaster of Jessop Main School, described him – had drawn back to make a better jump. He had reached the point where he wanted to burn a building with some live thing inside.
The big shed at Dargie’s was ninety feet long. The darkness in its ceiling was like a cloud and the fire-raiser gave it an anxious glance, as though it might open and pour down rain and douse his fire. The windows on the street side let in light from the gas lamp outside Wix’s bakery. It made the grain sacks gleam like fat gold ingots and the straw on the floor like golden thread. It caught the name ‘Dargie’ on buggies and carts, and shone on chains and harness and the worn leather of horse collars and the iron rims of wheels. It lit the rungs of the ladder going up to the loft at the far end of the shed, where a fringe of hay hung down like a beard below a mouth. Along the left-hand wall were a dozen horse stalls, but the light was blocked by wooden doors and the fire-raiser could not see how many were occupied. He heard a snicker though, and the stamp of a hoof in straw, and it made him smile. Dargie’s business was going downhill as motorcars and lorries took the place of horses, but the fire-raiser guessed that five or six animals were stabled tonight. He had nothing against horses. He liked horses, but a time had come when his fire must consume life. The horses were not important. Outrage, power, pleasure, were important.
He reached into the pockets of his coat and hauled out handfuls of cotton waste, and into his sack for rags, old shirts, old dresses. These he stuffed into cracks and crevices, into the buggies, the feed sacks, working fast, with an eye gleaming now and then at the office and the high double doors to the street. Once a cart rumbled by, hooves went clop on the road, and the carter whistled Bonnie Jean. The fire-raiser squatted in a hollow until the sounds were gone. He grinned with elation as he crept out, and licked his lips and cleared his throat and spat in the hay. He felt he had rubbed shoulders with the town and picked its pocket. From his sack he took a gallon can of benzine. He unscrewed the cap and tossed it away and poured the liquid on hay and rags and grain sacks. It gleamed like glass and gurgled like a tap. A horse in the nearest stall snorted and the white of its eye showed over the door. The fire-raiser snarled, ‘You can squeal all you want in a minute.’
