It is two o’clock of a sultry summer afternoon in one of those amazingly crowded blocks on the East Side south of Fourteenth Street, which is drowsing out its commonplace existence through the long and wearisome summer. The men of the community, for it may as well be called a community since it involves all that makes a community, and that in a very small space, are away at work or in their small stores, which take up all of the ground floors everywhere. The housewives are doing their shopping in these same stores—groceries, bakeries, meat and fish markets. From the streets which bound this region people are pouring through, a busy host, coming from what sections of the city and the world and going to what sections of the city and the world no one may divine. Wagons rattle, trucks rumble by with great, creaking loads, a slot conduit trolley puts a clattering car past every fifteen or twenty seconds. The riffraff of life fills it as full as though it were the center of the world. Children, since there is no school now, are playing here. The streets are fairly alive with a noisy company of urchins who play at London Bridge and My Love’s Lover, and are constantly getting in the way of one another and of every one else who chances to pass this way. Suddenly, in the midst of an almost wearisome peace,57 comes the cry of fire. It comes from the cleanly depths of Number 358, in the middle of this block, where one Frederick Halsmann, paint-dealer and purveyor of useful oils to the inhabitants of this neighborhood, has apparently been busy measuring out a gallon of gasoline. He has been doing a fairly thriving business here for years, the rejuvenation of a certain apartment district nearby having brought him quite a demand for explosive and combustible oils, such as naphtha, gasoline and benzine, to say nothing of turpentine and some other less dangerous products, all of which he has stored in his basement. There is a law against keeping more than twenty gallons of any kind of explosive oil in a store or the basement of a store, but this law, like so many others of the great city, enjoys its evasions. What is the law between friends?
All the same, and at last, a fire has broken out—no one ever knows quite how. A passing stranger notes smoke issuing from a grating in front of the store. He calls the attention of Mr. Halsmann to it, but even before that the latter has seen it. He starts to descend an outside stairway leading to his particular basement but is halted by a terrific explosion which knocks him and some strangers down, shatters the windows in his own and other stores four or five numbers away, and tears a hole in the floor of his store through which his paints, a counter, a cash register and some other things begin to tumble. He is too astounded to quite grasp it all but recovering his feet he begins to shout: “Maria! Maria! Come quick! And the children! Come out! Come down!”
58 But his cries come too late. He has scarcely got the words out of his mouth when a second explosion, far more violent than the first, tears up the floor and the stairs leading to his home and throws the lurid fire into the rooms above. It smashes the glass in the front windows of stores across the street and blows a perfect hurricane of fire in the same direction. People run, yelling and screaming, a hundred voices raising the cry of “Fire!”
“My God! My God!” cries an old Jewish butcher over the way. He is standing in front of his store wringing his hands. “It is Halsmann’s store! Run quick!” This to a child near him. Then he also runs. An idle policeman breaks for the nearest fire alarm box, and the crowds of the neighboring thoroughfares surge in here until the walks and the paving stones are black with people. A hundred heads pop out of neighboring windows. A thousand voices take up the cry of “Fire!”
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.
 
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 where59 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 between60 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.
Outside, on the ground below, the people are gazing in terror and intense satisfaction. Here is a spectacle for you, if you please, here the end of a dull routine of many days. The fire-god has broken loose. The demon flame is trying his skill against the children of men and the demon water. He has caught them unawares. He has seized upon the place where the best of their ammunition is stored. From his fortress in the cellar he is hurling huge forks of flame and great gusts of heat. Before him now men and women stand helpless. White-faced onlookers gaze upward with expressions of mingled joy and pain.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
And the wail of a siren.
And yet another.
And yet another.
They announce the men of the Fortieth Hook and Ladder Company, of the Twenty-seventh Hook and Ladder and Fire Patrol, of the Thirty-third Engine and Hook and Ladder Company, and the Fifty-first Engine and Hose Company, down through a long list of stations covering an area of a half-dozen square miles.
In the midst of the uproar about the burning building, the metallic cry of this rescuing host is becoming more and more apparent. From every section they come, the glistening surfaces of their polished vehicles and implements61 shining in the sun, the stacks of their engines issuing volumes of smoke. Fire boxes drop fiery sparks as they speed past neighboring corners, the firemen stoking as they come. Groups of hook-and-ladder handlers are unhooking and making ready their ladders. Others, standing upright on their careening vehicles, are adjusting rubber coats and making ready to invade the precincts of danger at once. The art of balancing on one foot while tugging at great coils of hose that are being uncoiled from speeding vehicles is being deftly illustrated. These men like this sort of thing. It is something to do. They are trained men, ready to fight the fire demon at a moment’s notice, and they are going about their work with the ease and grace of those who feel the show as well as the importance of that which they do. Once more, after days of humdrum, they are the center of a tragedy, the cynosure of many eyes. It is exhilarating thus to be gazed at, as any one can see. They swing down from their machines in front of this holocaust with the nonchalance of men going to a dinner.
And the police reserves, they are here now too. This indifferent block, so recently the very heart of humdrum, is now the center of a great company of policemen. The regular width............