"We must go home," said Mrs. Lively in a lost, bewildered way.
"Yes," assented the doctor: "there is no safety this side the river. All the engines in creation couldn't stop that fire. Why in God's name don't they pull down houses or explode them? Come!"
But the lady continued to gaze in a fascinated way at the unearthly spectacle. It was all so wild, so awful, that the brain reeled. The doomed houses in the path of the fire seemed to her to be animate things—dumb, helpless, feeling creatures, that trembled and shrank as the flames reached out cruel fingers for them. She shook off the bewildered, dazed feeling, but it came again as the tempest of flame and smoke went racing to the north. Street and house and steeple and the vast crowds seemed sailing away on some swift crescent river to a great, vague, yawning blackness beyond.
They hurried down into the street. Momently the crowds, the tumult, the terror were growing. Every house stood open, the interior as clear as at noonday. Men, women and children were moving about in eager haste, tearing up carpets, lifting furniture and loading trucks. Ruffians were pushing in at the open doors, snatching valuables and insulting the owners. There was a hasty seizing of goods, and a wild dash into the street from imperiled houses, a shouting for trucks and carriages, piteous inquiries for absent friends, distressed cries for absent protectors, screams of little children, swift, wild faces pushing eagerly in this direction and that; oaths and prayers and shoutings; women bowed beneath mattresses and heavy furniture; wheels interlocking in an inextricable mass; horses rearing and plunging in the midst of women separated from their husbands and little children from their mothers; men bearing away their sick and infirm and their clinging little ones; the shower of falling brands, and the roar of the oncoming flood of destruction.
In the next block but one to our doctor's home a brand had lodged in the turret of a little wooden Catholic church, and, pinned there by the fierce gale, was being blown and puffed at as with a blowpipe. There was no time to lose. While he stopped on the street to secure a truckman, Mrs. Lively hurried in to get together the most valuable of their belongings. For a time she proceeded with considerable system, tying in sheets and locking in trunks the best of the bedding and other necessaries. Then she got together some family relics, looked longingly at some paintings, took down a quaintly-carved Black-Forest clock from its shelf, and then set it back, feeling that something else would be more needed. But as the roar of the tempest came nearer she was seized with panic, and no longer knew what she did. When Dr. Lively came in to announce the dray at the door he found his wife making for a trunk with a tin baking-pan in one hand and a cloth duster in the other.
"For Heaven's sake, Priscilla, don't pack up such trash!" he cried. "Have you got up the parlor carpets?"
"Oh dear! no: I never thought of them. Nappy might get them up if he would. Napoleon! Where under the sun is that boy? Napoleon!" she called.
"Here," answered Napoleon through a mouthful of cake. He entered with a basket in his hand.
"Why in the world don't you go to work and help?"
"Am helping."