From its summit looked down the goddess of justice, who had kept her pedestal even while the ones of masonry below her feet had been toppled to the earth in huge blocks the size of a freight car.
Through the gaunt iron ribs and the dome the red glare suffusing the whole northern sky glinted like the color of blood in a hand held to the sun.
At midnight the Hibernian bank was doomed, for from the frame buildings west of it there was being swept a veritable maelstrom of sheet flame that leaped toward it in giant strides. Not a fireman was in sight.
Across the street amid the smoke stood the new postoffice, one of the few buildings saved. Turk street was the northern boundary of this V shaped zone of the flames, but at 2 o’clock this street also was crossed and the triumphant march onward continued.
At midnight another fire, which had started in front of Fisher’s Music Hall, on O’Farrell street, had gouged its terrible way through to Market street, carrying away what the morning’s blaze across the street had left miraculously undestroyed.
Into Eddy and Turk streets the flames plunged, and soon the magnificent Flood building was doomed.
The firemen made an ineffectual attempt to check the ravages of the advancing phalanx of flames, but their efforts were absolutely without avail. First from across the street shot tongues of flames which cracked the glass in one of the Flood building’s upper story windows. Then a shower of sparks was sent driving at a lace curtain which fluttered out in the draft. The flimsy whipping rag caught, a tongue of flame crept up its length and into the window casement.
“My God, let me get out of this,” said a man below who had watched the massive shape of the huge pile arise defiant before the flames. “I can’t stand to see that go, too.”
Shortly after midnight the streets about Union Square were barred by the red stripes of the fire. First Cordes Furniture Company’s store went, then Brennor’s. Next a tongue of flames crept stealthily into the rear of the City of Paris store, on the corner of Geary and Stockton streets.
Eager spectators watched for the first red streamers to appear from the windows of the great dry goods stores. Smoke eddied from under window sills and through cracks made by the earthquake in the cornices. Then the cloud grew denser. A puff of hot wind came from the west, and as if from the signal there streamed flamboyantly from every window in the top floor of the structure billowing banners, as a poppy colored silk that jumped skyward in curling, snapping breadths, a fearful heraldry of the pomp of destruction.