rumpet. "Get that hose and engine
back to a safe place! Can't you see the wall's about ready to fall?
Everybody fall back! Women and children first! Women first, remember!"

Down the road fled the crowd, looking over its collective shoulders, so
to speak--followed by the venerable fire apparatus and the still more
venerable commander-in-chief.

Harry Squires, in his two-column account of the fire in the _Banner_,
dilated upon the fact that the women failed to retain the advantage so
gallantly extended by the men. For the matter of about ten or fifteen
yards they _were_ first; after which, being handicapped by petticoats,
they fell ingloriously behind. Some of the older ones--maliciously, he
feared--impeded the progress of their protectors by neglecting to get
out of the way in time, with the result that at least two men were
severely bruised by falling over them--the case of Uncle Dad Simms being
a particularly sad one. He collided head-on with the portly Mrs. Loop,
and failing to budge her, suffered the temporary loss of a full set of
teeth and nearly twenty minutes of consciousness. Mr. Squires went on to
say that the only thing that saved Mr. Simms from being run over and
killed by the fire-engine was the fact that the latter was about a block
and a half ahead of him when the accident occurred.

Sparks soared high and far on the smoke-laden wind, scurrying townward
across the barren quarry-lands. The vast canopy was red with the glow of
flying embers and fire-lit clouds. Below, in the dusty road, swarmed the
long procession of citizens. Grim, stark hemlocks gleamed in the weird,
uncanny light that turned the green of their foliage and the black of
their trunks into the colour of the rose on the side facing the fire,
but left them dark and forbidding on the other. The telegraph-poles
beyond the burning warehouse lining the railroad spur that ventured down
from the main line some miles away and terminated at Smock's, loomed up
like lofty gibbets in the ghastly light. Three quarters of a mile from
the scene of the conflagration lay the homes of the people who lived on
the rim of Tinkletown, and there also were the two churches and the
motion-picture houses.

"We got to save them picture-houses," panted Anderson, and then in hasty
apology,--"and the churches, too."

"You got to save my studio first," bawled Elmer K. Pratt, the
photographer, trying to keep pace with him in the congested line.

"Halt!" commanded the