Once there came a sudden pause. The red flare of the conflagration changed to brilliant blue.
"Milles tonnerres!" cried the French soldiers sadly, as they recommenced work. "Ahé, le bon eau-de-vie!" Their commissariat canteen store had gone.
So through the long night they worked, fighting the flames with their hands for the most part. Fatigue party after fatigue party poured into the town and one strong man after another lay down exhausted on the quays and begged someone to cool him with water.
It was just as a faint lightening over the sea in the east showed dawn was nigh that Marmaduke, wiping the sweat from his blackened forehead, said--
"I think that's done with. The magazines are safe now!"
"Yes," said a man near him, "up here it's almost over. But they've got it still down there, by the dock wharves, poor devils!"
Marmaduke, whose every thought and look had hitherto been for the magazines, turned to the lower part of the town.
"By Jove, they have!" he cried. "Here, men, follow me!"
"Let me go, sir," put in a subaltern. "You must be done--and they should all be out of their houses by now."
He might as well have saved his breath. Marmaduke, careless of fatigue, was racing to danger again. And here it was greater. The two or three story ramshackle houses almost closed in upon each other, and in one burnt-out street he had to pass through, a charred beam almost finished him. But he raced on; and here there was evidence that the fire had been faced with some method. Houses had been pulled down, the inhabitants ordered to certain open spaces, and as he neared the spot where the tenements almost overhung the water's edge, a double line of men were passing buckets. There were only two houses left in the street; one was in flames, the other, overhanging the water, must soon go. Seeing the hopelessness of saving it, or indeed the use, since evidently those were the occupants who, with shrill cries and excited gestures, were watching the destruction of their property, he was about to seek work elsewhere when a big fat woman almost overset him in her eagerness to find his feet. To these she clung, shrieking at the top of her voice--