Jim McCauley calls John Fiore a “real hero.”

Mo, a yellow Labrador retriever, probably would, too — if the dog could talk.

Fiore, a former firefighter, extinguished a grass fire Monday at McCauley’s rural Douglas County home before it could scorch the house — and the 4-year-old dog in a fenced area nearby.

“He deserves a lot of credit,” McCauley said Tuesday of Fiore. “He saved my dog and saved my house. So many stories are about people doing bad things to each other. He went out of his way to help me.”

The story began about 2 p.m. Monday, when an animal chewed through a wire in a transformer on a pole in McCauley’s yard, about three miles west of Lawrence. It sparked a fire that shot through dry grass and leaves to engulf much of McCauley’s 5-acre yard.

No one was home at the time. McCauley was at his job with the Kansas Geological Survey.

Fiore, who works for a Topeka construction company, was driving to Lawrence to check on a work site. He saw the smoke from U.S. Highway 40 but drove past at first.

“I had this gut feeling,” he said. “I turned around and went down the road. I saw the fire and thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to lose his house.'”

After asking a neighbor to call 911, Fiore went to McCauley’s home and grabbed Mo, the dog, from her pen as the flames approached.

“She was hanging onto me for dear life,” Fiore said. “Her paws were wrapped around my neck. She would not let me go.”

Then Fiore, a former firefighter in the Air Force and volunteer firefighter in Iowa, grabbed a garden hose from the front of McCauley’s house and kept the fire at bay until Kanwaka Township firefighters arrived.

He was manning the hose near a 25-foot-tall pine tree as it went up in flames. As the heat singed the hair on his arm and eyebrows, Fiore knelt to avoid the heat and smoke.

“I was so frightened,” he said.

John Fiore, left, of Topeka and Jim McCauley pet McCauley's 4-year-old yellow Labrador, Mo, in McCauley's charred back yard west of Lawrence. A grass fire Monday trapped Mo until Fiore rescued the dog and protected the house with a garden hose until firefighters arrived. Fiore was on his way to Lawrence when he noticed; McCauley was not home at the time.

The fire consumed a trampoline, damaged a fence and came within five feet of the house in one spot.

“I was really lucky he came along when he did,” McCauley said of Fiore. “It could’ve been a heck of a lot worse in a matter of minutes.”

Chris Lesser, chief of the Kanwaka Township Fire Department, said passing motorists don’t often take on a fire.

“It’s not unusual for a passerby to be the one to call it in,” he said. “It’s something else to have one stop and help put the fire out.”

Lesser said he wouldn’t encourage people who had no fire training to follow Fiore’s example.

“It all depends on the situation and how bad it is,” he said.

Fiore said several neighbors gave him waves and thumbs-up signals as he drove from the neighborhood.

As for Mo, McCauley said the dog was recovering from the traumatic event.

“She’s a yellow Lab, but if it hadn’t been for (Fiore) she’d be a black Lab,” McCauley said. “I was going to start calling her Smoky.”