'
Mary did not need to be told to hasten. She had her hat in her hand
and was on the sidewalk before Rhoda had fairly finished her
sentence.
They hurried through the streets, guided by the cloud of smoke that
gushed from the top of a building in the near distance. Almost
everybody was running in the opposite direction, attracted by the
Telegraph Hill fire that flamed vermilion and gold against the grey
sky, looking from its elevation like a mammoth bonfire, or like a
hundred sunsets massed in one lurid pile of colour.
'Is it the Golden Gate tenement house?' they asked of the
neighbourhood locksmith, who was walking rapidly towards them.
'No, it's the coat factory next door,' he answered hurredly.
''Twouldn't be so much of a blaze if they could get the fire company
here to put it out before it gets headway; but it's one o' those
blind fires that's been sizzling away inside the walls for an hour.
The folks didn't know they was afire till a girl ran in and told 'em-
-your Lisa it was,--and they didn't believe her at first; but it
warn't a minute before the flames burst right through the plastering
in half a dozen places to once. I tell you they just dropped
everything where it was and run for their lives. There warn't but
one man on the premises, and he was such a blamed fool he wasted five
minutes trying to turn the alarm into the letter-box on the lamp-
post, 'stead of the right one alongside.
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