“At any rate, if we die you’ll die too!” cried Katie Craigin, shaking her fist at the long green tendrils that swept across the window nearest her machine.  “Oh, you!  You’ll burn to a crisp at the roots!  You’ll wither up an’ die.  You’ll be dead an’ brown an’ ugly!  An’ I’m glad! Glad! For I hate you. I hate you! Do you hear?” And she grasped a handful of leaves that edged the window-sill, spat upon them, and stamped them under her foot, then turned to look for Susie.

But Susie had fallen once more by her machine, leaving it unguarded while it thrashed on uselessly.  Her little pinched face looked up from the dirty floor in pitiful unconsciousness amid the wild rush and whirl of the fear-maddened company.  If terror drove them they would pass over her without knowing it.  They were blind with desperation.

The room seemed about to burst with the heat.  Timbers were cracking.  All the stories they had heard of the frailty of the building came now to goad them as they hurtled from one end of their pen to the other, while intermittent clouds of smoke and darting flames conspired to bewilder their senses.

Katie sprang to seize her friend and draw her out of the path of the stampede.  As she lifted her a cry arose, like the wail of a lost world facing the judgment.  The floor swayed, the machines about seemed to totter, and the floor above seemed bending down with some great weight.  There was a cracking, wrenching, twisting, as of the whole great building in mortal pain, and just as Katie drew her unconscious friend away to the window the floor above gave way and down crashed three awful machines, like great devouring juggernauts, to crush and bear away whatever came in their way.

After that, hell itself could scarcely have presented a more terrible spectacle of writhing, tortured souls, pinned anguishing amid the flames; of white faces below looking up to ghastly ones above that gazed down with horror into the awful cavern, closed their eyes, clung to walls and windows, and knew not what to do!

The fearful noise of machinery had suddenly ceased and been succeeded by a calm in which the soft sound of rushing flames, the babble of the crowd outside, the gong of fire-engines, and the cry of firemen seemed balm of music in the ears.  Water hissed on hot machinery and burning walls.  It splashed inside the window and on the white face of Susie.  It touched the hot hands of Katie as she lifted her friend nearer to the blessed spray.  A shadow of a ladder somewhere crossed the window.  Splintered glass fell all about her, and a hand reached in and crushed the window frame.

It was Pat who lifted out the limp Susie and handed her down to Courtland, who was just below, while Katie turned and looked back at the fearful pit of fire beneath her, knowing that in but a few more seconds, if help came not, she, too, would be a part of that writhing, awful heap!  She saw the white face and staring eyes of the gray-haired woman who ran the machine next to hers lying beneath a pile of dead.  She reeled and felt her senses going.  Her hot hands clung to the hotter window-ledge.  The flames were leaping nearer!  She could not hold out—­