WIFE’S DEVOTION AT A FIRE.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 March 1922, Page 12

WIFE’S DEVOTION AT A FIRE.

DEATH RATHER THAN LEAVE SICK HUSBAND.

Nothing stood in the way of escape to safety of Mrs. John Kerin and her baby when flames, shooting up an airshaft from an apartment beneath, spread into her little sixth floor flat in New York and set it on fire—nothing, that is, except the fact that her husband lay in bed with a broken thigh. She could have made her way out and down the stairs without danger, provided she hurried, and her husband implored her to do so. Instead she seated herself on his bed and answered gently. “I will never leave you, John.” In vain he expostulated and pleaded with her for their baby’s sake. “What would become of baby and of me without you?” she wanted to know. “If you must die, we will all go together.”

The sleeping baby awoke choking with smoke, which, rolling in thick volumes, obscured things in the room. The kitehen was ablaze, and the flames reached the bedroom and flared up the window curtains.

Keron, a heavy man, raised himself, and perspiration of agony beaded his brow as he made a supreme effort to get out of bed and drag his wife and habv away, but the pain was too much, and’lie sank back again groaning. The baby had ceased to cry and gasp, and lay’ quite still clasped to the breast of* the little mother, who pressed it to her with one arm and elung to her husband with the other. The very bedclothes were catching fire when two firemen smashed their wav in at the window, and while a watertower deluged the flat, bore the whole family out and. down a ladder to the street, where an ambulance rushed them to the shelter of a hospital.