From the houses adjoining, and even in this one, for the upper floors have not yet been completely shattered, people are hurrying. A woman with a child on the third floor is screaming and waving her free hand frantically. A score of families in the adjoining buildings are gathering their tawdry valuables together and hastening into the street. Some policemen from neighboring beats, several from the back rooms of saloons, come running, and the fight to obtain a little order in anticipation of the fire engines begins. [Illustration: The Fire] “Get back there!” commands Officer Casey, whose one idea of natural law in a very unspiritual world is that all policemen should always be in front where they can see best. He begins pushing hard at the vitals of a slender citizen whose curiosity is out of all proportion to his strength. “Get back, I say! Ye’d think ye owned the earth, the way ye’re shovin’ in here. Get back!” “Give ’em a crack over the sconce,” advises Officer Rooney, who can see no use in wasting time bandying words. “Back with ye! I’ll not be tellin’ ye twice. Back!” And he places a brawny shoulder so as to do the utmost damage in the matter of crushing bones. It is rather good fun for a policeman who only a moment before was wondering what to do with his time. In the meanwhile the flames are sweeping upward. In the basement, where gasoline sat by kerosene, and naphtha by that, the urge of the flames is irresistible. Already one small barrel and a five-gallon measure of gasoline have gone, sacrificing to its concentrated force the lives of Halsmann’s wife and child. Now, a large half-barrel having been reached, the floors to the third level are ripped out by a terrifying crash that shatters the panes of glass in the windows in the next block and Plumber Davidson, on the third floor of the house next door, running to get his pocketbook out of a kitchen drawer and a kit of tools he had laid down before putting his head out of the front window, is seen to be caught and pinioned, and slaughtered where he stands. Street-sweeper Donnelson’s wife, a stout slattern of a woman, who had run with many agonized exclamations to a cradle to pick up her little round-headed Johnnie and then to the mantel to grab a new clock, is later found in the basement of the same building, caught midway between the iron railing of a stair and a timber. Mrs. Steinmetz, the Jewish peddler’s wife, of the fourth floor, is blown to the ceiling from her kitchen floor, and then, tumbling down, left unconscious on a stretch of planking, from which later she is rescued.