Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/333

 The Mary Boland, especially, burned well, and the north-bound breeze wafted her across the channel, into a dock, into a lumber pile—and within half an hour the whole waterfront of Socatullo was burning brilliantly, as brilliantly as burned the waterfront of Edgewater. Other ships aflame drifted Wahpeetahway and docks there too were burning. Mills were burning—mills on both sides of the inlet. The Boland lath mill went. It was the largest, the most perfectly equipped lath mill in all the world. It burned beautifully.

Gaylord and Schuler had been trying to check this incendiary passion, "Don't burn up the mills. You burn up your jobs, you damn fools!" they shouted, fighting their way through the crowds.

"Aw, let 'em burn! They're Boland's, ain't they?" retorted men with torches of flaming waste, with buckets of kerosene or fish oil in their hands, and went on kindling new fires.

The match factory, the paper mill, the salmon cannery and the drying frames on which were stretched thousands of desiccating carcasses of Alaska cod, began to go—filling the air with a heavy odor of incinerating flesh.'

The waterfront on the Edgewater side was now ablaze from end to end. Vast sheets of flame, clouds and billows of flame, torrential canopies of fire swept up into the night. They flaunted their blazing banners at the darkness overhead. Boland General was burning up.

Revenge! The mob was getting its revenge. It cheered itself hoarse—cheered and rushed about from one scene of conflagration to another.