its element of
peril to add to the conflagration's own; it caught the white heat from
the blazing mass of buildings and started it sweeping southward in a
devastating wave of superheated fluid air.

As the man on the Common had said, this was a fire--but rather was it
Fire, the essence of the god, the very burning breath of Loki. The
city was in the hand of something greater than chance and more sinister
than circumstance.

But the firemen did not realize this. When Smith found himself once
more approaching the northern end of the Common, he could see that the
fire had changed its humor. It was no longer a gambler, dicing with
the fire fighters to determine whether it should live or die; it had
taken on surety and become a tyrant, an absolute dictator, a
juggernaut--and it would not pause now till all its grim play was
played, or its humor changed, or some breath mightier than its own
should quell it. But the firemen did not see this.

They were working like madmen now, facing a thousand hazards, unseeing
yet noticing all, undirected save by words which they could hardly hear
and even more hardly comprehend. There was not, however, even for
their stout hearts, any longer the faintest hope of meeting their enemy
face to face. The heated blast, borne on the wind's wings, entirely
prevented that. All that the department could endeavor now to do was
to restrict the conflagration's lateral spread, to keep the daemon in
the track he had chosen, and not allow him to stray to east or west.
But they reckoned without his whimsy.

There was a stray puff of wind to westward; there was a sudden cry of
men mortally hurt, of horses suddenly tortured. Out from the windows
of the Phipps Building a flood of flame sprang west; expelled from the
tottering structure by some inward impulse, perhaps by an explosion of
smothered air, this sheet of heat and flame, of unburned and burning
gases, leaped Tremont Street as a rabbit leaps a ditch. Simultaneously
the Tremont Street face of the old Park Street Church burst into flame,
and along the rear of the buildings which fringed the ancient burial
ground the fire crept. Under the eaves of these buildings it ran, and
a moment later the line of brick structures on Park Street was briskly
ablaze, and once more the fire fighters' flank had been turned.

Quickly this westward adventure proceeded. So unexpected had been this
attack that it was some time before the department could adjus