A few shots could still be heard from the direction of Union Square; to the left the sky was fiery red while clouds of smoke traveled over the high buildings on Broadway, shutting out the light of the stars. Robertson looked back. The street lay dark and still. Suddenly far away in the middle of the street two glaring white lights appeared and above them flared and waved the smoky flames of the petroleum torches, while gongs and sirens announced the approach of the fire-engines. And now they thundered past, the glaring lights from the acetylene lamps in front of the fire-engines lighting up the whole pavement. Streams of light and rushing black shadows played up and down the walls of the buildings. Next came the rattling hook and ladder wagons and the hosecarts, the light from the torches dancing in red and yellow stripes on the helmets of the firemen. And then another puffing, snorting engine, with hundreds of sparks and thick smoke pouring out of its wide funnel, hiding the vehicle behind it in dark clouds. They're here one moment, and gone the next, only to make way for another hook and ladder, which sways and rattles past. The clanging of the gongs and the yells of the sirens grow fainter and fainter, and finally, through the clouds of sparks and smoke the whole weird cavalcade was seen to disappear into a side-street. Little bits of smoldering wood and pieces of red-hot coal remained lying on the street and burned with quivering, quick little flames. As they walked on the man next to Robertson told him why the troops had been compelled to interfere. The excited mob which had tasted blood, as it were, in the Chinese quarter and become more and more frantic, had continued plundering in some of the downtown streets without any discrimination--simply yielding to an uncontrollable desire for destruction. As a result a regular battle ensued between this mob, which consisted chiefly of Russian and Italian rabble, on one hand, and Irish workingmen who were defending their homes, on the other. The Russian contingent seemed to consist largely of the riff-raff which had found such a ready refuge in New York during the Russian Revolution, and some of these undesirable citizens now had recourse to dynamite. Some of the bombs caused great loss of life among the Irish people living in that part of town, and several policemen had also been killed in the performance of their duty. It was at this point that the authorities deemed it advisable to call out the troops, with whose arrival affairs immediately began to take on a different turn.