the darkened interiors of buildings to the
open spaces. I worked as I had never worked before, and not once did I
know whose property I thus saved. At first I groped in the darkness,
seizing what I could; then gradually, like the glow of a red dawn, a
strange light grew, showing dimly and ruddily the half-guessed features
of the place. It glowed, this light, increasing in power as heating
metal slowly turns red. And then the flames licked through; and dripping
with sweat, I abandoned that place to its enemy.

All sense of time and all sense of locality were lost. The world was a
strange world of deep, concealing shadows and strong, revealing glares,
and a mist of smoke, and hurrying, shouting, excited multitudes.
Sometimes I found myself in queer little temporary eddies of stillness,
where a certain calm and leisure seemed to have been insulated. Then for
a brief moment or so I rested. Occasionally I would find myself with
some stranger, and we would exchange brief exclamatory remarks.

"Whole city is going!"

"Looks like it."

"Hear a roof fell in and killed twenty men."

"Probably exaggerated."

"Probably. Don't catch me under no falling roofs! When she gets afire, I
get out."

"Same here."

"Well, I suppose we ought to try to do _something_."

"Suppose so."

And we would go at it again.

At the end of two or three hours--no man can guess time in such a
situation--the fire stopped advancing. I suppose the wind must have
changed, though at the time I did not notice it. At any rate, I found
myself in the gray dawn looking rather stupidly at a row of the frailest
kind of canvas and scantling houses which the fire had sheared cleanly
in two, and wondering why in thunder the rest of them hadn't burned!

A dense pall of smoke hung over the city, and streamed away to the south
and east. In the burned district all sense of location had been lost.
Where before had been well-known landmarks now lay a flat desert. The
fire had burned fiercely and completely, and, in lack of food, had died
down to almost nothing. A few wisps of smoke still rose, a few coals
glowed, but beside them nothing remained to indicate even the laying out
of the former plan. Only over across a dead acreage of ashes rose here
and there the remains of isolated brick walls. They looked, through the
eddying mists and smoke, like ancient ruins, separated by wide spaces.

I gazed dully across the waste area, taking deep breaths, resting, my
min