The morning broke upon a sight almost beyond imagination. Through the darkness none had been able or had cared to see the city save in fragmentary glimpses, caught by the fierce light that flared and fell. Now, in the gray dawn, the city as a whole appeared beneath a smoky cowl, looking mightier and more austere than ever under the shadow of this dreadful visitation. All sectional sights aforetime had been of single streets, of squares, of stray purlieus—but now appeared the wide, sweeping stretch of the myriad roofs, the sturdy strength of brick and steel, the compelling magnitude and silent, massive power of the whole.

In the north, where all was safe, the sky was fairly clear; but where the fire took its way the smoke haze hung grim and close. From the east the scene was a striking one. Along the water front of Fort Point Channel were the buildings gray and red; down Summer Street, which lay like a canyon between walls of brick and stone, white steam and smoke rode in a seething mist, lighted at odd times and places by keen flashes of crude red fire; over the roofs wavered more steam and smoke, floating in some places like level banners which flapped in the wind, while in others it seemed to wrap itself in dirty folds about some skeleton of what had yesterday been a building. At various points, and suggested by the premonitory roar of dynamite, rose black, sinister columns of the densest smoke mingled with the dust of shattered buildings, like the pictured outburst of some volcanic crater; and through and behind and implicitly within all this the Fire moved upon its way.

It was about half-past seven in the morning when it was seen that all efforts to check the flames at Summer Street had failed. Along the north side of that thoroughfare lay the tumbled ruins of the dynamited buildings, destroyed in a hopeless hope, for the remedy had been too homeopathic and the disease too swift. Indeed, it almost seemed as though the razing of these structures had merely made more easy the progress of that river of unconsumed gases and air which the steady wind drove undeviatingly forward upon the windows and the roofs which the conflagration had not yet reached. It was very much as though this flood of invisible heat and destruction contained the sharp-shooters before an army's van; it was like the cavalcade that rode before a Roman Emperor's triumph two thousand years ago; like the flight of arrows which preceded the thunderous charge of English heavy soldiery on Continental battle grounds.

In the little triangle between three streets just west of Dewey Square stood a solidly built, compact group of five- and six-story structures, one of them of fire-proof construction. This triangle, by a vagary, now proved to be a crucial point. If this could be saved, probably so also could the whole block to the south of Summer Street; but if it could not, then that block too was doomed, and there was grave danger beside lest the district east of Federal Street be also involved. So on this precious spot the combined forces of defense concentrated. In Fort Point Channel four fireboats gave their powerful pumps to aid the engines; the firemen, hanging close to their work, sent stream after stream of water against the attacking flame.

It was in vain. After the most desperate endeavors, this little group went to join the rest, the only fruit of victory being that Federal Street found itself the eastern barrier, the fire north of Summer Street having been checked at that point. Small triumph that! for the buildings west of Dewey Square were now thoroughly ablaze—and the South Station was in danger.

In the open space known as Dewey Square, which is really nothing but the momentary widening of Atlantic Avenue at its intersection with Summer, the elevated railroad has its tracks. These, raised some twenty feet above the street, extend north and south along the western face of the South Station; there is a station at Essex Street, with stairways leading into the great depot itself. It was this elevated structure which now proved to be the compelling menace.

Suddenly, in what manner it could not be said, there was seen to be a serpent of flame swiftly stealing along the Elevated's track. A tiny frill of fire, under a feathery cloud of smoke, ran down the wooden ties; sharp crackling sounds were heard; and a moment later the frame roof of the raised depot burst into light. One would hardly have thought that there was here sufficient fuel to jeopardize greatly the stout stone walls of the South Station itself; even to the firemen, skilled in such matters, risking their heads to drench those walls with water from a dozen lines of hose, the hazard, while grave, seemed far from hopeless. But this was not a day of reason nor of precedents. As the clock in the great facade showed five minutes before nine, the western eaves of the South Station caught.

In this building, which is one of the busiest of the world's terminals, was little inflammable material save that which was movable. The structure was built almost entirely of brick and stone and steel. Much of the steel work, to be sure, was not so protected as to render it fireproof; yet in the building there would ordinarily have been scant fuel for an ordinary fire. But this was not an ordinary fire. Along the western side of the structure, where were baggage rooms, offices, and the like, this irreverent intruder found congenial occupation. In not more than twenty minutes this entire side of the Station was ablaze, and the flames had begun to eat their way upward to the vast iron roof of the train shed, which hung in a tremendous arch some eighty feet above the base of rail. Stretching north and south down the full length of this mighty shed stood at the summit of the arch a raised lantern, or texas. Supporting the weight of this roof, wide spans of steel branched, curving upward from the walls at east and west—and it was one of these walls whose integrity was now so bitterly beset.

A great fire makes its own fuel; it finds food where no food seems to be; stone walls crumble like sugar before it; it devours iron like dry wood, and plays wild pranks with steel. To its grisly power and its reckless humor the Station was now to bear witness.

The west wall had begun to crumble, and cracked and spalled by the intense heat, not alone of the direct fire, but also by radiation from the burning risks to westward, the stone was giving way. Down part of its length, where the cross walls came, it stood stoutly; but elsewhere it began gradually to weaken. Here and there a doorway broke into what might have been a solid section; in one or two cases arches crumbled; in many others inside walls or beams or stairways, falling, carried down with them another modicum of the long wall's resistive power.

Atlantic Avenue near the station was now untenable, and the fire fighters were divided. Part of them were north, but most of them were south of this latest scene in the play. The disaster here had done more than any other single occurrence in the progress of the conflagration to demoralize the department and spread dismay in its ranks. It may have been the fact that this great building had been held to be safe beyond a doubt; it may have been merely that these men had for nearly twelve hours been achieving and repeating the impossible, the heroic, and that this last blow had been more than they could bear. Their faces were gray beneath the smoke and grime, their eyes stung and smarted almost unendurably from the heat and smoke and their long vigil; and now for the first time since this whirling maelstrom had engulfed them, they were finding the opportunity to realize that human endurance is not supernal.

There was another reason why they realized this now, and that was that the bitterness of this last defeat had, for the moment, broken their hearts. So long as they had fought with a gambler's chance, with the barest hope of success, it was easy to forget they were hungry, were weary unto death, were human at all. But under the numbing stroke of this last setback, they suddenly felt all these things.

The most heart-breaking thing, perhaps, in human experience is impotence in the face of trying need. A man can stand well enough the ordinary vicissitudes of life; but to be confronted with an exigency that finds and leaves him utterly helpless is enough to crush the bravest spirit. The Irish soldiery that four times tried to scale Marye's Heights, which were not for scaling by any mortal men, felt this bitterness, and the mere memory of them preserves the image for the world. It is this same feeling that makes the injured football player cry like a child after he is recalled to the sidelines, and that makes a man in the grip of an undertow give up and sink. It is because they are called upon to combat forces against which their mightiest muscular efforts are as futile as the flirting of a fan in jeweled fingers.

Nowhere is this more terribly felt than by men facing a great fire; for here not only have they to deal with a power out of all proportion to humanity, but they confront a power perverse, saturnine, malignant, diabolic. A conflagration is wantonly cruel; not content with the simple panoply of its might, it summons to its aid the evil whims of an enraged elephant. It plays, like a kitten, with hope before it crushes and kills it. The spectacle of a building soaked and saturated in water from the nozzles of a score of hose lines, with the flames driven back from it by the sustained heroisms of a hundred men—and then the spectacle of that building leaping suddenly into light in not one but a dozen places—this is a thing no man can endure, if many times repeated, and this is what these men had been enduring for ten hours. They had done all that men could do—more than men could do—and it was not enough. At that moment all they wanted in the world was the privilege of lying down, never to rise.

Long hours before, shortly after midnight, when it had become certain that help would be needed, the wires had carried to the nearby cities Boston's appeal for aid. As far as Portland and Worcester and Providence the call had then gone forth; and later on the urgent word had been flashed to Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, and New York. The New England cities had loyally responded; their engines and their men were even now scattered along the battle line and doing brave service. But these weary men by the South Station had not seen them; they found it almost impossible to believe that they were not alone and without aid in this titanic but hopeless task. Help might have come, their aching brains reflected—but not to them. For them there had been no help in sea or sky. Gathered together in the yards below the station, they silently watched it burn.

Of a sudden there came a lurch, a swift sagging of the arch supports at the western face of the arches; the roof quivered a little, then was still. It could now, from the open end, be seen that the supports in several places were wrenched loose from the wall; the steel spans hung free in air, while white smoke lifted unceasingly toward the summit of the vast shed. On the tracks the cars were burning briskly. Presently it could also be seen that the south end of the roof was bending of its own weight. It bent first just a little—then more. Then for a long moment it hung motionless, or with but the faintest quiver of vibration. Then, out of the sightless cavern came the screeching sound of metal scraping upon metal—a wild sound, like the torture of some inarticulate thing; a dull, grinding noise followed, and at last, out of the steaming furnace which the lower part of the train shed was now become, came the dull roar of some great weight falling.

With a crack like that of a gigantic express rifle the western end of the great roof arches pitched down to earth; weakened at the angle, loosened from their laterals, the big roof spans lurched heavily downward. A thrill seemed to run through the whole structure; the roof, strained now to an impossible angle, hung breathless above the abyss. Then slowly, almost in majesty, but with a sound like the crashing fall of a giant tree, the great arch tottered and fell.

On the tracks beneath the shed the cars which there had been no time to remove continued to burn cheerfully, in no wise dismayed by this terrible descent. And far out in the yards, blocked by a mass of salvaged rolling stock, stood a panting Mogul locomotive which had traveled the last fifty miles in something less than fifty minutes, and behind it lay the special train of the New York City Fire Department.

Were it not for the preponderance of the trivial in the affairs of life, all women and nearly all men would believe in Fate. This is borne out by the evidence of great men, who are fatalists one and all—or who were so until these modern, ultrapsychologic days in which overthinking is held to be so dangerously near a vice. Those persons now whose ears are close laid to the breathing of the world all believe in Fate. Not negatively, not foolishly, not in the manner which sets forth that what will be, will be, and any opposing effort is therefore futile; but in the way of the true philosopher, of the man who can look upon the ruin or the loss of all that he held dear, and realize that what is to him a tragedy must, in some light cruelly hidden from him, be conserving some higher, some more inscrutable end.

This is the better fatalism; and the closer one approaches the primitive realities, the nearer this kind of fatalism he comes. Looking on the naked face of life or the crude fact of death, it is obvious to all save the most frivolous that these things were meant to be so. As the Aryan saying has it, looking forward there are a dozen ways, looking backward on the way each man has traveled, there is but one. Crude tragedy carries with it its own conviction of predestination. It would be absurd to suggest that Togral Beg killed thirteen million people by accident or by an extraordinary succession of chances. Admit there is such an element as chance, and between it and Fate is room for a thousand doubts. It is natural enough for men who deal with the tiny, circling ball of a roulette wheel or with the turn of playing cards to deny any power higher than chance; but how of Napoleon, dicing for empires without end?—and how of Columbus, sailing indomitably westward into the wheel of the sun?—how of Shan Tung, surveying the rotting corpses of seven times seven cities of Chinamen slain by the Tartar sword?—and how of Boston, on this February morning, looking white-faced on its own ruin, a ruin which, furthermore, seemed scarcely begun? Whether Fate be Fate or not, Boston believed in it that day.

Only one thing now tended to lift the gloom from the outlook, and this was the fact that the fire seemed to have spread as far from east to west as it was possible for it to do. The Common on the west, and on the east side the Fort Point Channel, held its destructive sweep apparently safe. To be sure, there was just the possibility that where the Common ended, the corner of Tremont and Boylston might be turned and the flames swing west once more; but this, in view of the lower heights of buildings and the fact that the wind had now shifted and was blowing toward the east rather than the west of south, seemed unlikely. Moreover, the combined departments of Charlestown, Cambridge, Lynn, and a dozen other places were massed along Tremont Street to prevent this very thing. It was, however, a significant commentary on the hopelessness of the situation when men could find comfort in the reflection that a strip of city a half mile wide was alone exposed to the direct path of destruction.

Smith had been in the lower yards of the South Station at the time the train shed fell; he had waited only a short time after that, working for a hot quarter hour to save some of the cars not yet exposed to the shed fire. The method adopted was one suggested by a lieutenant of militia from Braintree; his plan, since no locomotives were for the moment available, was to fix bayonets, stick them in the woodwork of the car sides, and then, forty men pushing at once, the car would be rolled out of danger. Dozens of passenger coaches were saved in this way. When the bulk of the close work here was done, the New Yorker turned westward, taking care to keep well south of the burning zone.

"How far south on Tremont has it got?" he asked a passing stranger on
Kneeland Street.

"About to the end of the Common," the man replied, without slackening his pace.

"By Jove! the Aquitaine'll be going next," reflected Smith. "I might as well retrieve my suitcase. It's the only one I own."

On his way back to the fire from Deerfield Street, the night before, he had stopped at the hotel, changed his evening clothes for a business suit, and left his suitcase in his room. It had not occurred to him that the fire might spread as far as that. Now, his interest quickened by a touch of amused fear lest he might already be too late, he turned toward the hotel with faster tread.

The scene at the Aquitaine was one of the utmost panic and confusion. Only a little way to the north the firemen had been blowing up buildings in another futile effort to check the fire which would not be checked, and the dynamiting, coupled with the close approach of the fire itself, had demoralized most of the hotel attendants. Almost all the guests had long since taken their belongings and departed. Porters, waiters, and clerks alike were engaged in collecting whatever in the building could be moved and carrying it to trucks which were backed along the curb to receive the property and bear it to a place of safety.

No one was at the desk; Smith found his own key. The elevator was piled full of salvaged furniture and curtains, and he walked up to his room on the fifth floor. There he collected his belongings and returned to the office. Thinking to himself that he would defer paying his bill until there was some one in a mental condition capable of receipting it, he went forth into the street, suitcase in hand.

"Where now?" he thought. The answer was not difficult. There was only one place where he wanted to go, and he had promised to go there.

To Deerfield Street, then, he went. There he found two anxious women whose questions he answered as best he could, and whom, after an hour's rest, he left, having promised that he would warn them if by any chance the conflagration turned in their direction. Warmed at heart, and much refreshed by the luncheon they had insisted on his taking, he left the Maitlands, and turned once again toward the path of the fire.

It had been nearly thirty hours since he had slept; and he found his eyes hot and dry and heavy in his head. Whether it was the smoke he had breathed, or the steady strain of the long night, or the lack of sleep and sheer fatigue, he did not know; but he found developing in his brain a strange, numb sense of remoteness, a want of coordination and identity between it and his body. In remembering this day, he was always afterwards to associate it with a smell of stale smoke in his nostrils and a vague dimness of sight. Even the thousand vivid incidents of the great conflagration were always to come back to him with this haunting sense of unreality, the feeling that it was not actually he but some one else who had witnessed and shared and lived through them—some one not alien, yet not wholly kin to himself. The gray and ochre smoke haze, and the diffused heat, and the sense of intimate danger long faced and hence grown hardly noted, clouded and filmed the facts, the colors, and the emotions of this day in the dim light of a dream.

They were wild facts, too; great deeds; and glorious colors, which would have been worth a clearer recollection. The color of the midnight sky, its velvet blackness shot with crimson gleams. The waves of smoke, now like densest ink pouring up from some unseen funereal funnel—now blindingly white, flung like the plume of Navarre above the tumult of the fray. The tall, cold buildings standing almost defiantly in the winter air, lifting their immobile fronts to face the onrush—and the same buildings a little later, when the flames had passed, leaving only gnawed skeletons and heaped and smoldering ruins in their wake. The grim and terrible anguish of twisted steel girders that lay writhen like petrified snakes among the ashes, or lifted their tortured length to reach some last hold on sanity at the wall which they had once helped maintain. Great heaps and piles of ashes, and half-consumed beams and crushed and broken brick, lying in smoldering humility, punctuated by stray relics and remnants of an unburned world—pieces of furniture, by some miracle left unharmed, or bric-a-brac of some more than usual inanity. Fireproof buildings through which the flood of destruction had passed, burning all that was burnable, and leaving the gaunt frames naked in the air, their exteriors perhaps scorched and defaced, but with their vast strength unshaken and undismayed. The thousand sounds and odors of the fearful night and of the slow dawn; the fire whistles shrilling through the wintry air, the gongs on truck and cart adding their clangor to the mad mellay, the shouts of men, the bawling of orders, the screams of frightened women, the uncanny sound of the mewing of an imprisoned cat in a window, whose instinct told it what its sense could not. The hammer of horses' hoofs on the stones of the street, with the sparks flung out to left and right beneath the 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.