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186 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 gray sky, looking from its elevation like a mammoth bonfire, or like a hundred sunsets massed in one lurid pile of color.

"Is it the Golden Gate tenement house?" they asked of the neighborhood locksmith, who was walking rapidly towards them.

"No, it’s the coat factory next door," he answered hurriedly. "’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