Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/331



T SIX o'clock the mob forgot to go home to dinner; by seven o'clock when it was hungry as well as embittered, when that venom which had distilled itself first in the veins of Titmarsh had had time to duplicate itself in several thousand venous systems; when the men were mad and the women were madder, when leadership had been unable to assert itself; when the mob was a headless monster that flung its writhing coils around first one city block and then another; when it was an angry flood that sloshed through the streets from the courthouse on the south to the docks upon the north—then it was that this instinct to avenge itself upon the property of John Boland, when it could not reach his person, cropped out again.

It broke out first down by the waterfront, opposite Whitman Avenue, where loomed a huge warehouse with the name of John Boland—a wooden warehouse and highly inflammable, for nearly everything in Edgewater was wooden that could be wooden; and highly inflammable because the chief product of Boland General was lumber made from resinous timber.

"Burn it!" somebody shouted hoarsely. "Burn the damn thing!"

How was it done? And so quickly? Nobody knew quite. Somebody found a barrel of tar on the dockside; somebody's hands rolled it against the side of the building; somebody's axe broke it in; several some-