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Clinging to the edge of the raft, with their bodies entirely submerged, they gazed breathlessly and with blinded eyes at the grandest and most awful sight to be seen on the Mississippi. It was a huge lower-river packet, and was completely enveloped in roaring flames that poured from every opening, and streamed furiously from the tall chimneys the trailing banners of the fire-fiend.
Hold my fan betwixt thy dainty cheeks and the blaze, sweetheart, lest the fire-fiend witch thy roses into very poppy flowers. And thou, my lord, come closer to my side, lest the draught from the bay-window smite thee that thou howlest o' th' morrow with a crick i' thy neck. Well, well, be patient. All in time, in time. Soft, now!
Then women and children were aiding in the work, for it was to save their homes from destruction that they labored, and foremost among them ever was George, struggling against the fire-fiend, as if everything the world held dear to him was in danger of destruction.
It is on this great and rich city that the dark demon of destruction has now descended, as it fell on the next younger of our cities, Chicago, in 1872. It was the rage of the fire-fiend that desolated the metropolis of the lakes.
Meantime numberless bottles of precious wine were flung into the blaze, which lapped up the contents as if it loved them, and grew, like other drunkards, the merrier and fiercer for what it quaffed. Never again will the insatiable thirst of the fire-fiend be so pampered.
Already the shadows were lengthening and the gray of evening was falling. The profound woods, dense and ghostly, had closed in. The trail was so narrow that the dreary, weeping foliage often swept the sides of the cart. But these things did not occur to him. His mind was ahead, amongst those aged skeletons left by the raging fire-fiend. Progress was slow.
Firmly built, it had borne the earthquake assault unharmed, but the flames were an enemy against which it had no defense, and it was quickly added to the victims of the fire-fiend.
"Well, I'm glad the fire-fiend hasn't got Marshall & Co. yet," said the young man, restored to good-humor by the sight of another's misfortune. He used unconsciously the old firm name. "But he'd get us fast enough if the insurance was taken off," declared Jane. "Do you know, Dicky," she went on, "how much that item costs us a year?
"This was my first experience with Bob, the demon, as a fire-fiend; and I say, candidly, that until I had had that experience I never fully realised what an awful calamity it was to have an invisible monster, somewhere within the atmosphere, going from place to place about the house, gathering up old newspapers into a bundle and hiding it in the basket of soiled linen or in a closet, then go and steal matches out of the match-box in the kitchen or somebody's pocket, as he did out of mine, and after kindling a fire in the bundle, tell Esther that he had started a fire, but would not tell where; or perhaps not tell her at all, in which case the first intimation we would have was the smell of the smoke pouring through the house, and then the most intense excitement, everybody running with buckets of water.
Already was the day nearly spent, and yet the fire-fiend was raging with fury hardly abated. The trees had long since fallen before the fiery blast; the derricks and buildings of the adjacent wells were consumed, while inch by inch the oil-fed fire crept nearer the town.
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