flying feet; the steady
chug-chug of the tireless engines with their fireboxes seething
white-hot in the effort to hold the steam to its figure on the gauge.
The far shock and the dull boom of dynamiting that was like the rumor
of a distant heavy cannonade. Then the men, the leagued enemies
against this arch conspirator--the thousand heroisms of these men who
contended without fear against unbeatable odds; the stark, cold bravery
that is a thing outside of human experience save in some sublimated
essence such as this--men who spanned impossible gaps, bore impossible
weights, scaled unscalable heights, died incredibly heroic and
unutterably tragic deaths, and who did these preposterous things as
simply and unquestioningly as a child falling to sleep. The bitter
humors of this prank of fate--the things shattered which should have
been whole, the things preserved which no hand but that of error had
ever created. The ruthless mixture of the farcical and the pathetic;
the fire horse struck to earth by a falling wall, screaming in
anguish--and the coal heaver, carrying hurriedly toward safety a gilt
and white ormolu clock. And behind all this the swaying, eddying,
swirling, but inexorably onward movement of the Fire, and the muffled
drum beat that served it for a pulse; behind all this the Fire's voice,
the low, purring, sinister roar which never ceased and which was deeper
than the sound of any surges on any shore; behind all this the valley
of the shadow, with its grim processional of life and fear and death, a
processional spurred and driven to a speed which never slackened, under
the wind which for twenty hours had hardly tired, but had blown so
steadfastly that to the people of the city it seemed to be what in
reality it must have been--the breath of God out of the north.

CHAPTER XXIII

It was nearly nine o'clock in the evening when there came a ring at the
Maitlands' doorbell. It had not been the easiest waiting in the world,
that of the two women in the half-deserted apartment building through
the long night and longer day. Helen would have preferred to go out of
doors, feeling that there she could see and follow, at a distance at
least, the progress of the conflagration; but Mrs. Maitland in a
strange and unlooked-for obstinacy absolutely declined to leave the
apartment or to permit her daughter to do so.

"I don't know anything about fires, but if this one starts in this
direction I want to be here,