Not without a fearful cost, however, had this victory been gained, for the east side of Washington Street, from the _Transcript_ down, was now a flowing field of raging flame. Here there were no fireproofs to give momentary obstacles; one risk, it is true, had automatic sprinklers inside and out, but the water from these, while it lasted, only added steam to the confusion and fuel to the fire, while the great roof tank in its falling tore out the very heart of the stricken building. Hawley Street, farther on, was no barrier at all to a fire of such fury as this, and the unprotected windows at the rear of the Franklin Street row added their helpless nakedness to a situation in which nothing was a buckler. Very orderly, irresistible without vagary, now became the fire's progress. Terrible in its absolute precision, in its measured advance down the wind, this implacable river of flame rolled down the city. Far ahead of the actual fire itself ran its fatal forerunner, the sheet of gases and superheated air, sometimes level, sometimes high lifted at the whim of the breeze, but always fierce, always southward, always with annihilation in its grip. There was no staying this deadly force and no facing it; farther than any hose stream could reach sped this outrider in advance of the devastating thing whose messenger it was. Men from the United States Navy Yard at Charlestown were dynamiting buildings along Summer Street now, in the hope of gaining a respite by reducing the amount of fuel in the path of the main advance. The air was heavy with smoke, with the odor of charred embers and burning wood and merchandise, and the shock of the dynamiting added new heaviness to an almost unbreathable element. So acrid had the atmosphere become that the men in the front ranks of the struggle were compelled to breathe through rags and handkerchiefs soaked in water. Many men dropped where they stood, to be dragged back by their comrades and revived by the ambulance surgeons. Franklin Street proved no more of a southern barrier than had the others before it. On the corner of Hawley Street stood an eight-story fireproof, sprinklered building, filled principally with crockery. Upon this the conflagration advanced as relentlessly as fate. Long before the flames themselves had reached it, the windows broke under the heat of the advancing gases, and little fires began to appear on the upper floors. Soon all the windows were alight, and this building too shook beneath the force which there was no escaping. Its frame, to be sure, stood bravely up, and after the fire was still to be seen, almost intact, a tribute to its maker and design; but its contents, alas, were not fireproof, and proved pabulum most welcome to the element which welcomed almost all things.