Now the Fire Kings were idle indeed. As they loafed despondent, they saw boats coming slowly across the river among the floes of ice. Newark was sending firemen to the rescue. But what could they do? There was no water. The alarm was on its way to Philadelphia. The hills of Germantown, indeed, flickered with the illumination a hundred miles away, while swift riders and men in sleighs were carrying the news of the end of New York to its old rival. Before sunset of the next day four hundred Quakers would be setting out with their engines across the white roads. When they arrived on the second day they would find the fire still ravening and the fighters overwhelmed with fatigue and hopelessness. Forty-five miles away on a steamboat from Albany returning New Yorkers hung over the rail and wondered if Judgment Day had indeed been sounded for the metropolis of the new world. Deeply as he had abhorred the town, RoBards felt his heart ache for it now. Pity turned to love, and it seemed abominable that the work and the treasure and the destinies of so many poor people should be annulled in this pure wantonness of destruction. Odd, that a man should love or hate a city or a nation, or feel sorry for a jumble of buildings or a stretch of land, a shore, or a hill. But RoBards knew a sudden tenderness for New York. His heart suffered a revulsion like that of the English soldiers, who wept for Joan of Arc when she turned beautiful and pitiful as she blistered and browned in the faggots they had heaped and lighted about her. A little after midnight Harry Chalender at his elbow shouted aloud his meditations: “Only one thing can save this poor town—gunpowder! The Brooklyn Navy Yard! There’s plenty of powder there!” CHAPTER VII RoBards and Chalender ran as long as they could; then walked a while till the agony in their lungs eased a little; then ran again. At last they reached the East River. Moored at the slip were many rowboats, lying far below and rocking in the tide that bumped them against the high piles and scraped them with sharp blocks of ice floating out into the bay. The two men lowered themselves over the edge and dropped through the dark into the nearest boat, and almost into the river. It was ticklish business when they worked their way out into the current; and the oars were of more frequent use for prodding off the onslaughts of ice than for progress. The river seemed as wide here as a Red Sea of blood, for the conflagration streaked every wave with rubric. From one wharf a cargo of turpentine had run flaming and a little Sargasso Sea, a blazing island of floating fire, sailed down the bay, singeing the wharf posts and leaving them charred and tottering. Fleeing from this pursuing island, sailboats sped seaward in the icy gale like gray owls.