midnight
It is only once perhaps in a century that fire comes to a large city as it comes to the little wooden town like Mariposa as a great Terror of the Night . That , at any rate , is what it meant in Mariposa that night in April , the night the Church of England Church burnt down . Had the fire gained but a hundred feet , or less , it could have reached from the driving shed behind the church to the backs of the wooden shops of the Main Street , and once there not all the waters of Lake Wissanotti could stay the course of its destruction . It was for that hundred feet that they fought , the men of Mariposa , from the midnight call of the bell till the slow coming of the day . They fought the fire , not to save the church , for that was doomed from the first outbreak of the flames , but to stop the spread of it and save the town . They fought it at the windows , and at the blazing doors , and through the yawning furnace of the open belfry ; fought it , with the Mariposa engine thumping and panting in the street , itself aglow with fire like a servant demon fighting its own kind , with tall ladders reaching to the very roof , and with hose that poured their streams of tossing water foaming into the flames . Most of all they fought to save the wooden driving shed behind the church from which the fire could leap into the heart of Mariposa .