BRAINTREE, Mass. -- The Keefe family's milkman was armed with a gallon, a garden hose and enough sense to act quickly when something didn't pass the smell test -- and it wasn't the milk.

"If we didn't have him here and all this ignited, we would have been in a lot of trouble, yeah," said Diane Keefe, a mother of four young daughters who said her milkman, Dave Walker of Hornstra Farms, saved all their lives when he arrived to make his usual delivery about 6:30 a.m. Tuesday.

He arrived to put their order in a box on the house's back deck.

"I come up here to the milk box and I have their order together," he said. "I started to open the box and I could smell something burning, and then I came down here and I saw the smoldering going on here at this post," he said.

Flames were shooting up from the bottom steps of the Keefe's back deck. He ran to ring the doorbell and knock on the door, to no avail.

"We had the old air conditioners on upstairs. No phone going on upstairs. So we never even knew he was here," Keefe said.

The flames were sparked by two-day old ashes from a grill that had been dumped in a metal pot for safety, but which were still hot enough to ignite a bag of charcoal. The deck would soon be engulfed. Walker grabbed a hose.

"It was going up pretty good on the post. I just sat here and washed it down," he said.

Walker made sure the fire was out, then went on with his rounds, continually calling the Keefe's until he woke them up.

"We got the fire department over here and they said he got here just in time. The way the fire was traveling near where we have our citronella and the lighter fluid we use for the grill ... they said it could've been really bad," Keefe said.

She said it was a strong lesson in the disposal of grill ashes but also a statement on the character of their milkman, who took matters into his own hands, possibly saving their lives.