The Fire Kings and the Naiad Hose Company ran to their places and hurried down the nearest street to the nearest dock. The hose flopped on ice, for the ice above had dammed the current and the water was not only low but frozen. RoBards seized an axe and clambered down a slimy pile toward the surface. He smote at the ice and split it. Black water leapt at him and he felt hands clutching his ankles to drag him under. It was ungodly lonely down there in the dark and he was afraid to stay. But when he would climb up again, the slippery log refused its aid. Clinging to the cold ooze about the pile and watching the river smack its lips and wait, he felt death hideously near. He yelled for help again and again. At last a bare head was thrust out above, a hand was reached down to him. He knew by its soiled white glove that it was Chalender’s hand, but he seized it and was drawn up from the solitude of the muttering waters to the glare of the upper world. The cinders rained upon his white face now as if they were shoveled at him. He ran to join the men at the engine, gripping the long pump handles and working them up and down. It was good to be at work at something. “Jump her, boys, jump her!” they cried, and heaved and grunted, hoisted and squatted in alternate effort. But only a little water came. It hardly swelled the hose. The engine choked. Before it was put in order the hose was stopped with a mush of freezing water. They built a fire from the too abundant fuel, and stretched the hose over it like a long snake being warmed. As the taskless volunteers waited, twiddling their wintry thumbs and stupidly regarding the dark building before them, the fire subtly arrived in its eaves. Along the cornice it ran like an autumnal vine of poison ivy reddening on a wall. Soon the roof was a miter of white flame. The whole warehouse was a huge fireworks, a set piece like “the Temple of the Union” that the city displayed at Vauxhall Gardens every Fourth of July. It lacked only the 1776 in silver lace-work and the stars of the twenty-six states. Just as the set-piece frames would crack, this building became wreckage. The top floor ripped free and took the next one with it to crush a lower. Then with a drunken belch of crimson, the roof went up and back and spewed flame in a giant’s vomit upon a store that had been called fireproof. Its somber dignity was now a rabid _carmagnole_. Stone and brick and steel grew as soft as osiers, bending and twisting. Inside there were thuds of detonating barrels of spirits. The stout walls billowed, broke outwards, spilling themselves across the street. The Fire Kings fled with cries of terror, many of them battered to their knees with missiles. When they turned to look back from safety, their engine was buried in the flaming barricade that had been a street.