e offices,
brokerages, real estate offices, all that once represented the
financial heart of the city and its industrial strength.

Up Market street from the Ferry building to Valfira street nothing but
the black fingers of jagged ruins pointed to the smoke blanket that
pressed low overhead. What was once California, Sansome, and
Montgomery streets was a labyrinth of grim blackened walls.

Chinatown was no more. Union square was a barren waste.

The Call building stood proudly erect, lifting its whited head above
the ruin like some leprous thing and with all its windows, dead,
staring eyes that looked upon nothing but a wilderness. The proud
Flood building was a hollow shell.

The St. Francis Hotel, one time a place of luxury, was naught but a
box of stone and steel.

Yet the flames leaped on exultantly. They leapt chasms like a
waterfall taking a precipice. Now they are here, now there, always
pressing on into the west and through to the end of the city.

It was supposed that the fire had eaten itself out in the wholesale
district below Sansome street, and that the main body of the flames
was confined to the district south of Market street, where the oil
works, the furniture factories, and the vast lumber yards had given
fodder into the mouth of the fire fiend.

Yet, suddenly, as if by perverse devilishness, a fierce wind from the
west swept over the crest of Nob Hill and was answered by leaping
tongues of flames from out of the heart of the ruins.

By 8:30 o'clock Montgomery street had been spanned and the great
Merchants' Exchange building on California street flamed out like the
beacon torch of a falling star. From the dark fringe of humanity,
watching on the crest of the California street hill, there sprang the
noise of a sudden catching of the breath--not a sigh, not a
groan--just a sharp gasp, betraying a stress of despair near to the
insanity point.

Nine o'clock and the great Crocker building shot sparks and added
tongues of fire to the high heavens. Immediately the fire jumped to
Kearney street, licking at the fat provender that shaped itself for
consuming.

Then began the mournful procession of Japanese and poor whites
occupying the rookeries about Dupont street and along Pine. Tugging at
heavy ropes, they rasped trunks up the steep pavements of California
and Pine streets to places of temporary safety.

It was a motley crew. Women laden with bundles and dragging reluctant
children by the hands