But the firemen did not realize this. When Smith found himself once more approaching the northern end of the Common, he could see that the fire had changed its humor. It was no longer a gambler, dicing with the fire fighters to determine whether it should live or die; it had taken on surety and become a tyrant, an absolute dictator, a juggernaut--and it would not pause now till all its grim play was played, or its humor changed, or some breath mightier than its own should quell it. But the firemen did not see this. They were working like madmen now, facing a thousand hazards, unseeing yet noticing all, undirected save by words which they could hardly hear and even more hardly comprehend. There was not, however, even for their stout hearts, any longer the faintest hope of meeting their enemy face to face. The heated blast, borne on the wind's wings, entirely prevented that. All that the department could endeavor now to do was to restrict the conflagration's lateral spread, to keep the daemon in the track he had chosen, and not allow him to stray to east or west. But they reckoned without his whimsy. There was a stray puff of wind to westward; there was a sudden cry of men mortally hurt, of horses suddenly tortured. Out from the windows of the Phipps Building a flood of flame sprang west; expelled from the tottering structure by some inward impulse, perhaps by an explosion of smothered air, this sheet of heat and flame, of unburned and burning gases, leaped Tremont Street as a rabbit leaps a ditch. Simultaneously the Tremont Street face of the old Park Street Church burst into flame, and along the rear of the buildings which fringed the ancient burial ground the fire crept. Under the eaves of these buildings it ran, and a moment later the line of brick structures on Park Street was briskly ablaze, and once more the fire fighters' flank had been turned.