FIRES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13915, 28 May 1909, Page 3

FIRES.

BLAZE IN A COTTAGE. ANOTHER SUSPICIOUS CASE. The household of Mr Ruddle*" a locomotive driver, who occupies a. cottage at the corner of Arthur and Theodocia streets, wore astonished to find one of the back rooms on fire about a quarter to-ten on Wednesday night. Mr Ruddle had retired to bed, and there Ave re five or six persons including a visitor waiting for someone to call for her, when one of the number going into the kitchen at the back saw flames showing through a crevice over a back bedroom door. The bedroom was occupied by a boarder, a young man named Requier, and he being one of the party and the only man present, raced to the room and tore down some cretonne hangings that veiled clothes hooks, a similar curtain around a box, and with some child's clothes that were lying on a chair, all of them burning, and smothered the fire by means of the bed quilt, which was practically itself destroyed in the process. The wardrobe curtain was fixed to a slielf some 18 inches below a papered matched-lined ceiling, and the flame from the cui-tain had burned the paper off the hoarding and scorched the wood, by the time the fire was discovered. Mr Ruddle had insured his furniture and effects quite recently, and the insurance agent estimated his loss at 2 r ts 6d and paid the amount. Mr Requier put his loss—a pair of boots ou the shelf and the bed quilt arid a few tools damaged—at £2, but the insurance agent held that his belongings were not included iii the insurance. The cottage belongs to a Mr Toner, who is absent from the country, and it is not insured. There is ground for more than suspicion that the fire was not accidental. The child, a little boy, undressed as usual in the boarder's room before going to another room to sleep, about 8 o'clock, the light he had being in the kitchen. No one in the house entered the room thereafter till the fire was discovered. The window is a low one, with a rising lower sash, unbalanced, the cords being broken, and it was unfastened. A short time, before the fire was discovered Mr Ruddle lying awake in the adjoining room heard the sash fall, and it was also heard by. some of those in the front room, but no notice was taken of the noise. It was let down with sucli a bang that some of the perished putty was shaken out of its place. From these circumstances, and the nature ol the fire, those in the house concluded that some one had raised the sash and threw a lighted match to the foot of the cretonne curtain and then drooped the sash in a hurry. It certainly looked verv like it.