Chalender’s patent leather pumps were soon cut through and his nimble feet left bloody traces on the snow. This offended RoBards somehow. Footprints on the snow were the sacred glory of the patriot troops at Valley Forge. What right had a fop like Chalender to such martyrdom?
When the puffing Fire Kings covered the long half-mile to City Hall Park, the fire was just as far away as ever.
From here on the way was clogged with engines and hose carts plunging south and fighting through a tide of flight to the north. RoBards was reminded of the retreat from the cholera, until a wrangle for priority with a rival company engaged his thoughts, his fists, and his voice.
Wagons of every sort toppling over with goods of every sort locked wheels while their drivers fought duels with whips and curses. Merchants who had gone early to bed were scampering half-clad to open their shops and rescue what they might. Everywhere they haggled frantically for the hire or the purchase of carts. Two hundred dollars was offered in vain for an hour’s use of a dray that would not have brought so much outright that afternoon, with its team thrown in.
The commercial heart of the city was spurting flames, and the shop in Merchant Street where the volcano first erupted had spread its lava in circles. Everything was burning but the frozen river, and ice-imprisoned shipping was ablaze at the docks. Whole warehouses were emptied and their stores carried to apparent safety as far as Wall Street, where they were heaped up in the shadow of the cupola of the new Merchants’ Exchange.
Certain shopkeepers of pious mind shifted their wealth into the Dutch Reformed Church for safety. In the deeps of its gloom some invisible musician was playing on the big pipe-organ. The merchants lugging in their burdens felt that he interceded for them harmoniously against the din of the fiends whose fires danced on the windows, as if they reveled in the sacrilege of attacking the temples of both Mammon and Jehovah. First the fiends made a joke of the costly pretence that the Merchants’ Exchange was fireproof. Then they leaped across a graveyard to seize the church and sent Maypole ribbons twirling around and around its high spire. In half an hour the steeple buckled and plunged through its own roof, and the roof followed it, covering organ, pulpit, pews, and merchandise.
Pearl Street, whose luxurious shops had made lower Broadway a second-rate bazaar, was sinking into rubble. Copper roofs were melting and red icicles dripped ingots on the street.
The Fire Kings pushed on, with ardor dwindling as the magnificence of their task was revealed to them. They were scant of breath and footsore and cold, and their helmets rattled with flying embers. Embers were streaming across the river to Brooklyn and the people there sat on their roofs and wondered if their town must follow New York to destruction. On all the roofs in New York, too, shadowy bevies fought off the embers and flung them into the street.
The fire companies were driven back in all directions. They felt as tiny and futile as apes fumbling and chittering against a forest blaze.
By and by the bells ceased to ring. The tollers were too cold to pull the ropes—and what was the use of going on alarming those who were already in a panic? Yet the silence had an awe of doom in it.