“Oh dear,” I said, the jug halfway to my mouth.
We both turned and there he was, Mean-Dog himself with a pickaxe in his chest and no blood left in him, struggling to sit up. Next to him Killer Muldoon was starting to twitch. Mean-Dog looked at us and his eyes were already glowing green.
“Was this part of the plan, then?” I whispered.
Pat said “Eeep!” which was all he could manage.
That’s how the whole lantern thing started, you see. It was never the cow, ’cause the cow was long dead by then. It was Patrick who grabbed the lantern and threw it, screaming all the while, right at Mean-Dog Mulligan.
I grabbed Pat by the shoulder and dragged him out of the shed and we slammed the door and leaned on it while Patrick fumbled the lock and chain into place.
It was another plan we hadn’t thought all the way through. The shed didn’t have a cow anymore, but it had plenty of straw. It fair burst into flame. We staggered back from it and then stood in his yard, feeling the hot wind blow past us, watching as the breeze blew the fire across the alley. Oddly, Pat’s house never burned down, and Catherine slept through the whole thing.
It was about 9 p.m. when it started and by midnight the fire had spread all the way across the south branch of the river. We watched the business district burn — and with it all of the bars that bought our whiskey.
Maybe God was tired of our shenanigans, or maybe he had a little pity left for poor fools, but sometime after midnight it started to rain. They said later that if it hadn’t rained then all of Chicago would have burned. As it was, it was only half the town. The church burned down, though, and Father Callahan was roasted like a Christmas goose. Sure and the Lord had His mysterious ways.
Two other things burned up that night. Our still and Aunt Sophie. All we ever found was her skeleton and the chains wrapped around the burned stump of the oak. On the ground between her charred feet was a small lump of green rock. Neither one of us dared touch it. We just dug a hole and swatted it in with the shovel, covered it over and fled. As far as I know it’s still up there to this day.
When I think of what would have happened if we’d followed through with Pat’s plan…or if Mean-Dog and Muldoon had gotten out and bitten someone else. Who knows how fast it could have spread, or how far? It also tends to make my knees knock when I think of how many other pieces of that green comet must have fallen…and where those stones are. Just thinking about it’s enough to make a man want to take a drink
I would like to say that Patrick and I changed our ways after that night, that we never rebuilt the still and never took nor sold another drop of whiskey. But that would be lying, and as we both know I never like to tell a lie.
HISTORICAL NOTE: There are several popular theories on how the Great Fire of Chicago got started. It is widely believed that it started in a cowshed behind the house of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary. Historian Richard Bales asserts that Daniel “Pegleg” Sullivan started it while trying to steal some milk. Other theories blame a fallen lantern or a discarded cigar. One major theory, first floated in 1882 and which has gained a lot of ground lately, is that Biela’s Comet rained down fragments as it broke up over the Midwest.
About the only thing experts and historians can agree on is that the cow had nothing to do with it.
