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Title: Darkness and Dawn
Author: George Allan England
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7463]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on May 4, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DARKNESS AND DAWN ***
Produced by Andrew Sly.
DARKNESS AND DAWN
BY
GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND
To
Robert H. Davis
Unique inspirer of plots
Do I dedicate
This my trilogy
G.A.E.
CONTENTS
BOOK I
The Vacant World
I. The Awakening
II. Realization
III. On the Tower Platform
IV. The City of Death
V. Exploration
VI. Treasure-Trove
VII. The Outer World
VIII. A Sign of Peril
IX. Headway Against Odds
X. Terror
XI. A Thousand Years!
XII. Drawing Together
XIII. The Great Experiment
XIV. The Moving Lights
XV. Portents of War
XVI. The Gathering of the Hordes
XVII. Stern's Resolve
XVIII. The Supreme Question
XIX. The Unknown Race
XX. The Curiosity of Eve
XXI. Eve Becomes an Amazon
XXII. Gods!
XXIII. The Obeah
XXIV. The Fight in the Forest
XXV. The Goal, and Through It
XXVI. Beatrice Dares
XXVII. To Work!
XXVIII. The Pulverite
XXIX. The Battle on the Stairs
XXX. Consummation
BOOK II
Beyond The Great Oblivion
I. Beginnings
II. Settling Down
III. The Maskalonge
IV. The Golden Age
V. Deadly Peril
VI. Trapped!
VII. A Night of Toil
VIII. The Rebirth of Civilization
IX. Planning the Great Migration
X. Toward the Great Cataract
XI. The Plunge!
XII. Trapped on the Ledge
XIII. On the Crest of the Maelstrom
XIV. A Fresh Start
XV. Labor and Comradeship
XVI. Finding the Biplane
XVII. All Aboard for Boston!
XVIII. The Hurricane
XIX. Westward Ho!
XX. On the Lip of the Chasm
XXI. Lost in the Great Abyss
XXII. Lights!
XXIII. The White Barbarians
XXIV. The Land of the Merucaans
XXV. The Dungeon of the Skeletons
XXVI. "You Speak English!"
XXVII. Doomed!
XXVIII. The Battle in the Dark
XXIX. Shadows of War
XXX. Exploration
XXXI. Escape?
XXXII. Preparations
XXXIII. The Patriarch's Tale
XXXIV. The Coming of Kamrou
XXXV. Face to Face with Death
XXXVI. Gage of Battle
XXXVII. The Final Struggle
XXXVIII. The Sun of Spring
BOOK III
The Afterglow
I. Death, Life, and Love
II. Eastward Ho!
III. Catastrophe!
IV. "To-Morrow is Our Wedding-Day"
V. The Search for the Records
VI. Trapped!
VII. The Leaden Chest
VIII. "Till Death Us Do Part"
IX. At Settlement Cliffs
X. Separation
XI. "Hail to the Master!"
XII. Challenged!
XIII. The Ravished Nest
XIV. On the Trail of the Monster
XV. In the Grip of Terror
XVI. A Respite from Toil
XVII. The Distant Menace
XVIII. The Annunciation
XIX. The Master of His Race
XX. Disaster!
XXI. Allan Returns Not
XXII. The Treason of H'yemba
XXIII. The Return of the Master
XXIV. "The Boy Is Gone!"
XXV. The Fall of H'yemba
XXVI. The Coming of the Horde
XXVII. War!
XXVIII. The Besom of Flame
XXIX. Allan's Narrative
XXX. Into the Fire-Swept Wilderness
XXXI. A Strange Apparition
XXXII. The Meeting of the Bands
XXXIII. Five Years Later
XXXIV. History and Roses
XXXV. The Afterglow
BOOK I
THE VACANT WORLD
CHAPTER I
THE AWAKENING
Dimly, like the daybreak glimmer of a sky long wrapped in fogs,
a sign of consciousness began to dawn in the face of the tranced girl.
Once more the breath of life began to stir in that full bosom, to
which again a vital warmth had on this day of days crept slowly back.
And as she lay there, prone upon the dusty floor, her beautiful face
buried and shielded in the hollow of her arm, a sigh welled from her
lips.
Life--life was flowing back again! The miracle of miracles was growing
to reality.
Faintly now she breathed; vaguely her heart began to throb once more.
She stirred. She moaned, still for the moment powerless to cast off
wholly the enshrouding incubus of that tremendous, dreamless sleep.
Then her hands closed. The finely tapered fingers tangled themselves
in the masses of thick, luxuriant hair which lay outspread all over
and about her. The eyelids trembled.
And, a moment later, Beatrice Kendrick was sitting up, dazed and
utterly uncomprehending, peering about her at the strangest vision
which since the world began had ever been the lot of any human
creature to behold--the vision of a place transformed beyond all power
of the intellect to understand.
For of the room which she remembered, which had been her last sight
when (so long, so very long, ago) her eyes had closed with that sudden
and unconquerable drowsiness, of that room, I say, remained only
walls, ceiling, floor of rust-red steel and crumbling cement.
Quite gone was all the plaster, as by magic. Here or there a heap of
whitish dust betrayed where some of its detritus still lay.
Gone was every picture, chart, and map--which--but an hour since, it
seemed to her--had decked this office of Allan Stern, consulting
engineer, this aerie up in the forty-eighth story of the Metropolitan
Tower.
Furniture, there now was none. Over the still-intact glass of the
windows cobwebs were draped so thickly as almost to exclude the light
of day--a strange, fly-infested curtain where once neat green
shade-rollers had hung.
Even as the bewildered girl sat there, lips parted, eyes wide with
amaze, a spider seized his buzzing prey and scampered back into a hole
in the wall.
A huge, leathery bat, suspended upside down in the far corner, cheeped
with dry, crepitant sounds of irritation.
Beatrice rubbed her eyes.
"What?" she said, quite slowly. "Dreaming? How singular! I only wish I
could remember this when I wake up. Of all the dreams I've ever had,
this one's certainly the strangest. So real, so vivid! Why, I could
swear I was awake--and yet--"
All at once a sudden doubt flashed into her mind. An uneasy expression
dawned across her face. Her eyes grew wild with a great fear; the fear
of utter and absolute incomprehension.
Something about this room, this weird awakening, bore upon her
consciousness the dread tidings this was not a dream.
Something drove home to her the fact that it was real, objective,
positive! And with a gasp of fright she struggled up amid the litter
and the rubbish of that uncanny room.
"Oh!" she cried in terror, as a huge scorpion, malevolent, and with
its tail raised to strike, scuttled away and vanished through a gaping
void where once the corridor-door had swung. "Oh, oh! Where _am_ I?
What--_what has--happened?_"
Horrified beyond all words, pale and staring, both hands clutched to
her breast, whereon her very clothing now had torn and crumbled, she
faced about.
To her it seemed as though some monstrous, evil thing were lurking in
the dim corner at her back. She tried to scream, but could utter no
sound, save a choked gasp.
Then she started toward the doorway. Even as she took the first few
steps her gown--a mere tattered mockery of garment--fell away from
her.
And, confronted by a new problem, she stopped short. About her she
peered in vain for something to protect her disarray. There was
nothing.
"Why--where's--where's my chair? My desk?" she exclaimed thickly,
starting toward the place by the window where they should have been,
and were not. Her shapely feet fell soundlessly in that strange and
impalpable dust which thickly coated everything.
"My typewriter? Is--can _that_ be my typewriter? Great Heavens! What's
the matter here, with everything? Am I mad?"
There before her lay a somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft
and punky splinters of rotten wood. Amid all this decay she saw some
bits of rust, a corroded type-bar or two--even a few rubber key-caps,
still recognizable, though with the letters quite obliterated.
All about her, veiling her completely in a mantle of wondrous gloss
and beauty, her lustrous hair fell, as she stooped to see this
strange, incomprehensible phenomenon. She tried to pick up one of the
rubber caps. At her merest touch it crumbled to an impalpable white
powder.
Back with a shuddering cry the girl sprang, terrified.
"Merciful Heavens!" she supplicated. "What--what does all this mean?"
For a moment she stood there, her every power of thought, of motion,
numbed. Breathing not, she only stared in a wild kind of cringing
amazement, as perhaps you might do if you should see a dead man move.
Then to the door she ran. Out into the hall she peered, this way and
that, down the dismantled corridor, up the wreckage of the stairs all
cumbered, like the office itself, with dust and webs and vermin.
Aloud she hailed: "Oh! Help, help, _help!_" No answer. Even the echoes
flung back only dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of awful
and incredible isolation.
What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No familiar
hum of the metropolis now rose from what, when she had fallen asleep,
had been swarming streets and miles on miles of habitations.
Instead, a blank, unbroken leaden silence, that seemed part of the
musty, choking atmosphere--a silence that weighed down on Beatrice
like funeral-palls.
Dumfounded by all this, and by the universal crumbling of every
perishable thing, the girl ran, shuddering, back into the office.
There in the dust her foot struck something hard.
She stooped; she caught it up and stared at it.
"My glass ink-well! What? Only such things remain?"
No dream, then, but reality! She knew at length that some catastrophe,
incredibly vast, some disaster cosmic in the tragedy of its sweep, had
desolated the world.
"Oh, my mother!" cried she. "My mother--_dead?_ Dead, now, how long?"
She did not weep, but just stood cowering, a chill of anguished horror
racking her. All at once her teeth began to chatter, her body to shake
as with an ague.
Thus for a moment dazed and stunned she remained there, knowing not
which way to turn nor what to do. Then her terror-stricken gaze fell
on the doorway leading from her outer office to the inner one, the one
where Stern had had his laboratory and his consultation-room.
This door now hung, a few worm-eaten planks and splintered bits of
wood, barely supported by the rusty hinges.
Toward it she staggered. About her she drew the sheltering masses of
her hair, like a Godiva of another age; and to her eyes, womanlike,
the hot tears mounted. As she went, she cried in a voice of horror.
"Mr. Stern! Oh--Mr. Stern! Are--are _you_ dead, too? You _can't_
be--it's too frightful!"
She reached the door. The mere touch of her outstretched hand
disintegrated it. Down in a crumbling mass it fell. Thick dust bellied
up in a cloud, through which a single sun-ray that entered the
cobwebbed pane shot a radiant arrow.
Peering, hesitant, fearful of even greater terrors in that other room,
Beatrice peered through this dust-haze. A sick foreboding of evil
possessed her at thought of what she might find there--yet more afraid
was she of what she knew lay behind her.
An instant she stood within the ruined doorway, her left hand resting
on the moldy jam. Then, with a cry, she started forward--a cry in
which terror had given place to joy, despair to hope.
Forgotten now the fact that, save for the shrouding of her messy hair,
she stood naked. Forgotten the wreck, the desolation everywhere.
"Oh--thank Heaven!" gasped she.
There, in that inner office, half-rising from the wrack of many things
that had been and were now no more, her startled eyes beheld the
figure of a man--of Allan Stern!
He lived!
At her he peered with eyes that saw not, yet; toward her he groped a
vague, unsteady hand.
He lived!
Not quite alone in this world-ruin, not all alone was she!
CHAPTER II
REALIZATION
The joy in Beatrice's eyes gave way to poignant wonder as she
gazed on him. Could this be _he?_
Yes, well she knew it was. She recognized him even through the
grotesquery of his clinging rags, even behind the mask of a long, red,
dusty beard and formidable mustache, even despite the wild and staring
incoherence of his whole expression.
Yet how incredible the metamorphosis! To her flashed a memory of this
man, her other-time employer--keen and smooth-shaven, alert,
well-dressed, self-centered, dominant, the master of a hundred complex
problems, the directing mind of engineering works innumerable.
Faltering and uncertain now he stood there. Then, at the sound of the
girl's voice, he staggered toward her with outflung hands. He stopped,
and for a moment stared at her.
For he had had no time as yet to correlate his thoughts, to pull
himself together.
And while one's heart might throb ten times, Beatrice saw terror in
his blinking, bloodshot eyes.
But almost at once the engineer mastered himself. Even as Beatrice
watched him, breathlessly, from the door, she saw his fear die out,
she saw his courage well up fresh and strong.
It was almost as though something tangible were limning the man's soul
upon his face. She thrilled at sight of him.
And though for a long moment no word was spoken, while the man and
woman stood looking at each other like two children in some dread and
unfamiliar attic, an understanding leaped between them.
Then, womanlike, instinctively as she breathed, the girl ran to him.
Forgetful of every convention and of her disarray, she seized his
hand. And in a voice that trembled till it broke she cried:
"What is it? What does all this mean? Tell me!"
To him she clung.
"Tell me the truth--and save me! Is it _real?_"
Stern looked at her wonderingly. He smiled a strange, wan, mirthless
smile.
All about him he looked. Then his lips moved, but for the moment no
sound came.
He made another effort, this time successful.
"There, there," said he huskily, as though the dust and dryness of the
innumerable years had got into his very voice. "There, now, don't be
afraid!
"Something seems to have taken place here while--we've been asleep.
What? What is it? I don't know yet. I'll find out. There's nothing to
be alarmed about, at any rate."
"But--_look!_" She pointed at the hideous desolation.
"Yes, I see. But no matter. You're alive. I'm alive. That's two of us,
anyhow. Maybe there are a lot more. We'll soon see. Whatever it may
be, we'll win."
He turned and, trailing rags and streamers of rotten cloth that once
had been a business suit, he waded through the confusion of wreckage
on the floor to the window.
If you have seen a weather-beaten scarecrow flapping in the wind, you
have some notion of his outward guise. No tramp you ever laid eyes on
could have offered so preposterous an appearance.
Down over his shoulders fell the matted, dusty hair. His tangled beard
reached far below his waist. Even his eyebrows, naturally rather
light, had grown to a heavy thatch above his eyes.
Save that he was not gray or bent, and that he still seemed to have
kept the resilient force of vigorous manhood, you might have thought
him some incredibly ancient Rip Van Winkle come to life upon that
singular stage, there in the tower.
But little time gave he to introspection or the matter of his own
appearance. With one quick gesture he swept away the shrouding tangle
of webs, spiders, and dead flies that obscured the window. Out he
peered.
"Good Heavens!" cried he, and started back a pace.
She ran to him.
"What is it?" she breathlessly exclaimed.
"Why, I don't know--yet. But this is something big! Something
universal! It's--it's--no, no, you'd better not look out--not just
yet."
"I must know everything. Let me see!"
Now she was at his side, and, like him, staring out into the clear
sunshine, out over the vast expanses of the city.
A moment's utter silence fell. Quite clearly hummed the protest of an
imprisoned fly in a web at the top of the window. The breathing of the
man and woman sounded quick and loud.
"All _wrecked!_" cried Beatrice. "But--then--"
"Wrecked? It looks that way," the engineer made answer, with a strong
effort holding his emotions in control. "Why not be frank about this?
You'd better make up your mind at once to accept the very worst. I see
no signs of anything else."
"The worst? You mean--"
"I mean just what we see out there. You can interpret it as well as
I."
Again the silence while they looked, with emotions that could find no
voicing in words. Instinctively the engineer passed an arm about the
frightened girl and drew her close to him.
"And the last thing I remember," whispered she, "was just--just after
you'd finished dictating those Taunton Bridge specifications. I
suddenly felt--oh, so sleepy! Only for a minute I thought I'd close my
eyes and rest, and then--then--"
"_This?_"
She nodded.
"Same here," said he. "What the deuce _can_ have struck us? Us and
everybody--and everything? Talk about your problems! Lucky I'm sane
and sound, and--and--"
He did not finish, but fell once more to studying the incomprehensible
prospect.
Their view was towards the east, but over the river and the reaches of
what had once upon a time been Long Island City and Brooklyn, as
familiar a scene in the other days as could be possibly imagined. But
now how altered an aspect greeted them!
"It's surely all wiped out, all gone, gone into ruins," said Stern
slowly and carefully, weighing each word. "No hallucination about
_that_." He swept the sky-line with his eyes, that now peered keenly
out from beneath those bushy brows. Instinctively he brought his hand
up to his breast. He started with surprise.
"What's this?" he cried. "Why, I--I've got a full yard of whiskers. My
good Lord! Whiskers on _me?_ And I used to say--"
He burst out laughing. At his beard he plucked with merriment that
jangled horribly on the girl's tense nerves. Suddenly he grew serious.
For the first time he seemed to take clear notice of his companion's
plight.
"Why, _what_ a time it must have been!" cried he. "Here's some
calculation all cut out for me, all right. But--you can't go that way,
Miss Kendrick. It--it won't do, you know. Got to have something to put
on. Great Heavens what a situation!"
He tried to peel off his remnant of a coat, but at the merest touch it
tore to shreds and fell away. The girl restrained him.
"Never mind," said she, with quiet, modest dignity. "My hair protects
me very well for the present. If you and I are all that's left of the
people in the world, this is no time for trifles."
A moment he studied her. Then he nodded, and grew very grave.
"Forgive me," he whispered, laying a hand on her shoulder. Once more
he turned to the window and looked out.
"So then, it's all gone?" he queried, speaking as to himself. "Only a
skyscraper standing here or there? And the bridges and the
islands--all changed.
"Not a sign of life anywhere; not a sound; the forests growing thick
among the ruins? A dead world if--if all the world is like this part
of it! All dead, save _you_ and _me!_"
In silence they stood there, striving to realize the full import of
the catastrophe. And Stern, deep down in his heart, caught some
glimmering insight of the future and was glad.
CHAPTER III
ON THE TOWER PLATFORM
Suddenly the girl started, rebelling against the evidence of
her own senses, striving again to force upon herself the belief that,
after all, it _could not_ be so.
"No, no, no!" she cried. "This can't be true. It mustn't be. There's a
mistake somewhere. This simply _must_ be all an illusion, a dream!
"If the whole world's dead, how does it happen _we're_ alive? How do
we know it's dead? Can we see it all from here? Why, all we see is
just a little segment of things. Perhaps if we could know the truth,
look farther, and know--"
He shook his head.
"I guess you'll find it's real enough," he answered, "no matter how
far you look. But, just the same, it won't do any harm to extend our
radius of observation.
"Come, let's go on up to the top of the tower, up to the
observation-platform. The quicker we know all the available facts the
better. Now, if I only had a telescope--!"
He thought hard a moment, then turned and strode over to a heap of
friable disintegration that lay where once his instrument case had
stood, containing his surveying tools.
Down on his ragged knees he fell; his rotten shreds of clothing tore
and ripped at every movement, like so much water-soaked paper.
A strange, hairy, dust-covered figure, he knelt there. Quickly he
plunged his hands into the rubbish and began pawing it over and over
with eager haste.
"Ah!" he cried with triumph. "Thank Heaven, brass and lenses haven't
crumbled yet!"
Up he stood again. In his hand the girl saw a peculiar telescope.
"My 'level,' see?" he exclaimed, holding it up to view. "The wooden
tripod's long since gone. The fixtures that held it on won't bother me
much.
"Neither will the spirit-glass on top. The main thing is that the
telescope itself seems to be still intact. Now we'll see."
Speaking, he dusted off the eye-piece and the objective with a bit of
rag from his coat-sleeve.
Beatrice noted that the brass tubes were all eaten and pitted with
verdigris, but they still held firmly. And the lenses, when Stern had
finished cleaning them, showed as bright and clear as ever.
"Come, now; come with me," he bade.
Out through the doorway into the hall he made his way while the girl
followed. As she went she gathered her wondrous veil of hair more
closely about her.
In this universal disorganization, this wreck of all the world, how
little the conventions counted!
Together, picking their way up the broken stairs, where now the
rust-bitten steel showed through the corroded stone and cement in a
thousand places, they cautiously climbed.
Here, spider-webs thickly shrouded the way, and had to be brushed
down. There, still more bats bung and chippered in protest as the
intruders passed.
A fluffy little white owl blinked at them from a dark niche; and, well
toward the top of the climb, they flushed up a score of mud-swallows
which had ensconced themselves comfortably along a broken balustrade.
At last, however, despite all unforeseen incidents of this sort, they
reached the upper platform, nearly a thousand feet above the earth.
Out through the relics of the revolving door they crept, he leading,
testing each foot of the way before the girl. They reached the narrow
platform of red tiling that surrounded the tower.
Even here they saw with growing amazement that the hand of time and of
this maddening mystery had laid its heavy imprint.
"Look!" he exclaimed, pointing. "What this all means we don't know
yet. How long it's been we can't tell. But to judge by the appearance
up here, it's even longer than I thought. See, the very tiles are
cracked and crumbling.
"Tilework is usually considered highly recalcitrant--but _this_ is
gone. There's grass growing in the dust that's settled between the
tiles. And--why, here's a young oak that's taken root and forced a
dozen slabs out of place."
"The winds and birds have carried seeds up here, and acorns," she
answered in an awed voice. "Think of the time that must have passed.
Years and years.
"But tell me," and her brow wrinkled with a sudden wonder, "tell me
how we've ever lived so long? _I_ can't understand it.
"Not only have we escaped starvation, but we haven't frozen to death
in all these bitter winters. How can _that_ have happened?"
"Let it all go as suspended animation till we learn the facts, if we
ever do," he replied, glancing about with wonder.
"You know, of course, how toads have been known to live embedded in
rock for centuries? How fish, hard-frozen, have been brought to life
again? Well--"
"But we are human beings."
"I know. Certain unknown natural forces, however, might have made no
more of us than of non-mammalian and less highly organized creatures.
"Don't bother your head about these problems yet a while. On my word,
we've got enough to do for the present without much caring about how
or why.
"All we definitely know is that some very long, undetermined period of
time has passed, leaving us still alive. The rest can wait."
"How long a time do you judge it?" she anxiously inquired.
"Impossible to say at once. But it must have been something
extraordinary--probably far longer than either of us suspect.
"See, for example, the attrition of everything up here exposed to the
weather." He pointed at the heavy stone railing. "See how _that_ is
wrecked, for instance."
A whole segment, indeed, had fallen inward. Its debris lay in
confusion, blocking all the southern side of the platform.
The bronze bars, which Stern well remembered--two at each corner,
slanting downward and bracing a rail--had now wasted to mere
pockmarked shells of metal.
Three had broken entirely and sagged wantonly awry with the
displacement of the stone blocks, between which the vines and grasses
had long been carrying on their destructive work.
"Look out!" Stern cautioned. "Don't lean against any of those stones."
Firmly he held her back as she, eagerly inquisitive, started to
advance toward the railing.
"Don't go anywhere near the edge. It may all be rotten and undermined,
for anything we know. Keep back here, close to the wall."
Sharply he inspected it a moment.
"Facing stones are pretty well gone," said he, "but, so far as I can
see, the steel frame isn't too bad. Putting everything together, I'll
probably be able before long to make some sort of calculation of the
date. But for now we'll have to call it 'X,' and let it go at that."
"The year X!" she whispered under her breath. "Good Heavens, am I as
old as that?"
He made no answer, but only drew her to him protectingly, while all
about them the warm summer wind swept onward to the sea, out over the
sparkling expanses of the bay--alone unchanged in all that universal
wreckage.
In the breeze her heavy masses of hair stirred luringly. He felt its
silken caress on his half-naked shoulder, and in his ears the blood
began to pound with strange insistence.
Quite gone now the daze and drowsiness of the first wakening. Stern
did not even feel weak or shaken. On the contrary, never had life
bounded more warmly, more fully, in his veins.
The presence of the girl set his heart throbbing heavily, but he bit
his lip and restrained every untoward thought.
Only his arm tightened a little about that warmly clinging body.
Beatrice did not shrink from him. She needed his protection as never
since the world began had woman needed man.
To her it seemed that come what might, his strength and comfort could
not fail. And, despite everything, she could not--for the moment--find
unhappiness within her heart.
Quite vanished now, even in those brief minutes since their awakening,
was all consciousness of their former relationship--employer and
employed.
The self-contained, courteous, yet unapproachable engineer had
disappeared.
Now, through all the extraneous disguise of his outer self, there
lived and breathed just a man, a young man, thewed with the vigor of
his plentitude. All else had been swept clean away by this great
change.
The girl was different, too. Was this strong woman, eager-eyed and
brave, the quiet, low-voiced stenographer he remembered, busy only
with her machine, her file-boxes, and her carbon-copies? Stern dared
not realize the transmutation. He ventured hardly fringe it in his
thoughts.
To divert his wonderings and to ease a situation which oppressed him,
he began adjusting the "level" telescope to his eye.
With his back planted firmly against the tower, he studied a wide
section of the dead and buried world so very far below them. With
astonishment he cried:
"It _is_ true, Beatrice! Everything's swept clean away. Nothing left,
nothing at all--no signs of life!
"As far as I can reach with these lenses, universal ruin. We're all
alone in this whole world, just you and I--and everything belongs to
us!"
"Everything--all ours?"
"Everything! Even the future--the future of the human race!"
Suddenly he felt her tremble at his side. Down at her he looked, a
great new tenderness possessing him. He saw that tears were forming in
her eyes.
Beatrice pressed both hands to her face and bowed her head. Filled
with strange emotions, the man watched her for a moment.
Then in silence, realizing the uselessness of any words, knowing that
in this monstrous Ragnarok of all humanity no ordinary relations of
life could bear either cogency or meaning, he took her in his arms.
And there alone with her, far above the ruined world, high in the pure
air of mid-heaven, he comforted the girl with words till then
unthought-of and unknown to him.
CHAPTER IV
THE CITY OF DEATH
Presently Beatrice grew calmer. For though grief and terror
still weighed upon her soul, she realized that this was no fit time to
yield to any weakness--now when a thousand things were pressing for
accomplishment, if their own lives, too, were not presently to be
snuffed out in all this universal death.
"Come, come," said Stern reassuringly. "I want you, too, to get a
complete idea of what has happened. From now on you must know all,
share all, with me." And, taking her by the hand he led her along the
crumbling and uncertain platform.
Together, very cautiously, they explored the three sides of the
platform still unchoked by ruins.
Out over the incredible mausoleum of civilization they peered. Now and
again they fortified their vision by recourse to the telescope.
Nowhere, as he had said, was any slightest sign of life to be
discerned. Nowhere a thread of smoke arose; nowhere a sound echoed
upward.
Dead lay the city, between its rivers, whereon now no sail glinted in
the sunlight, no tug puffed vehemently with plumy jets of steam, no
liner idled at anchor or nosed its slow course out to sea.
The Jersey shore, the Palisades, the Bronx and Long Island all lay
buried in dense forests of conifers and oak, with only here and there
some skeleton mockery of a steel structure jutting through.
The islands in the harbor, too, were thickly overgrown. On Ellis, no
sign of the immigrant station remained. Castle William was quite gone.
And with a gasp of dismay and pain, Beatrice pointed out the fact that
no longer Liberty held her bronze torch aloft.
Save for a black, misshapen mass protruding through the tree-tops, the
huge gift of France was no more.
Fringing the water-front, all the way round, the mournful remains of
the docks and piers lay in a mere sodden jumble of decay, with an
occasional hulk sunk alongside.
Even over these wrecks of liners, vegetation was growing rank and
green. All the wooden ships, barges and schooners had utterly
vanished.
The telescope showed only a stray, lolling mast of steel, here or
yonder, thrusting up from the desolation, like a mute appealing hand
raised to a Heaven that responded not.
"See," remarked Stern, "up-town almost all the buildings seem to have
crumbled in upon themselves, or to have fallen outward into the
streets. What an inconceivable tangle of detritus those streets must
be!
"And, do you notice the park hardly shows at all? Everything's so
overgrown with trees you can't tell where it begins or ends. Nature
has her revenge at last, on man!"
"The universal claim, made real," said Beatrice. "Those rather clearer
lines of green, I suppose, must be the larger streets. See how the
avenues stretch away and away, like ribbons of green velvet?"
"Everywhere that roots can hold at all, Mother Nature has set up her
flags again. Hark! What's that?"
A moment they listened intently. Up to them, from very far, rose a
wailing cry, tremulous, long-drawn, formidable.
"Oh! Then there _are_ people, after all?" faltered the girl, grasping
Stern's arm.
He laughed.
"No, hardly!" answered he. "I see you don't know the wolf-cry. I
didn't till I heard it in the Hudson Bay country, last winter--that
is, last winter, plus X. Not very pleasant, is it?"
"Wolves! Then--there are--"
"Why not? Probably all sorts of game on the island now. Why shouldn't
there be? All in Mother Nature's stock-in-trade, you know.
"But come, come, don't let that worry you. We're safe, for the
present. Time enough to consider hunting later. Let's creep around
here to the other side of the tower, and see what we can see."
Silently she acquiesced. Together they reached the southern part of
the platform, making their way as far as the jumbled rocks of the
fallen railing would permit.
Very carefully they progressed, fearful every moment lest the support
break beneath them and hurl them down along the sloping side of the
pinnacle to death.
"Look!" bade Stern, pointing. "That very long green line there used to
be Broadway. Quite a respectable Forest of Arden now, isn't it?" He
swept his hand far outward.
"See those steel cages, those tiny, far-off ones with daylight shining
through? You know them--the Park Row, the Singer, the Woolworth and
all the rest. And the bridges, look at those!"
She shivered at the desolate sight. Of the Brooklyn Bridge only the
towers were visible.
The watchers, two isolated castaways on their island in the sea of
uttermost desolation, beheld a dragging mass of wreckage that drooped
from these towers on either shore, down to the sparkling flood.
The other bridges, newer and stronger far, still remained standing.
But even from that distance Stern could quite plainly see, without the
telescope, that the Williamsburg Bridge had "buckled" downward and
that the farther span of the Blackwell's Island Bridge was in ruinous
disrepair.
"How horrible, how ghastly is all this waste and ruin!" thought the
engineer. "Yet, even in their overthrow, how wonderful are the works
of man!"
A vast wonder seized him as he stood there gazing; a fierce desire to
rehabilitate all this wreckage, to set it right, to start the wheels
of the world-machinery running once more.
At the thought of his own powerlessness a bitter smile curled his
lips.
Beatrice seemed to share something of his wonder.
"Can it be possible," whispered she, "that you and--and I--are really
like Macaulay's lone watcher of the world-wreck on London Bridge?"
"That we are actually seeing the thing so often dreamed of by prophets
and poets? That 'All this mighty heart is lying still,' at
last--forever? The heart of the world, never to beat again?"
He made no answer, save to shake his head; but fast his thoughts were
running.
So then, could he and Beatrice, just they two, be in stern reality the
sole survivors of the entire human race? That race for whose material
welfare he had, once on a time, done such tremendous work?
Could they be destined, he and she, to witness the closing chapter in
the long, painful, glorious Book of Evolution? Slightly he shivered
and glanced round.
Till he could adjust his reason to the facts, could learn the truth
and weigh it, he knew he must not analyze too closely; he felt he must
try not to think. For _that_ way lay madness!
Far out she gazed.
The sun, declining, shot a broad glory all across the sky. Purple and
gold and crimson lay the light-bands over the breast of the Hudson.
Dark blue the shadows streamed across the ruined city with its
crowding forests, its blank-staring windows and sagging walls, its
thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood and stone and brick had
crumbled down--the city where once the tides of human life had ebbed
and flowed, roaring resistlessly.
High overhead drifted a few rosy clouds, part of that changeless
nature which alone did not repel or mystify these two beleaguered
waifs, these chance survivors, this man, this woman, left alone
together by the hand of fate.
They were dazed, fascinated by the splendor of that sunset over a
world devoid of human life, for the moment giving up all efforts to
judge or understand.
Stern and his mate peered closer, down at the interwoven jungles of
Union Square, the leafy frond-masses that marked the one-time course
of Twenty-Third Street, the forest in Madison Square, and the
truncated column of the tower where no longer Diana turned her
huntress bow to every varying breeze.
They heard their own hearts beat. The intake of their breath sounded
strangely loud. Above them, on a broken cornice, some resting swallows
twittered.
All at once the girl spoke.
"See the Flatiron Building over there!" said she. "What a hideous
wreck!"
From Stern she took the telescope, adjusted it, and gazed minutely at
the shattered pile of stone and metal.
Blotched as with leprosy stood the walls, whence many hundreds of
blocks had fallen into Broadway forming a vast moraine that for some
distance choked that thoroughfare.
In numberless places the steel frame peered through. The whole roof
had caved in, crushing down the upper stories, of which only a few
sparse upstanding metal beams remained.
The girl's gaze was directed at a certain spot which she knew well.
"Oh, I can even see--into some of the offices on the eighteenth
floor!" cried she. "There, _look?_" And she pointed. "That one near
the front! I--I used to know--"
She broke short off. In her trembling hands the telescope sank. Stern
saw that she was very pale.
"Take me down!" she whispered. "I can't stand it any longer--I can't,
possibly! The sight of that wrecked office! Let's go down where I
can't see _that!_"
Gently, as though she had been a frightened child, Stern led her round
the platform to the doorway, then down the crumbling stairs and so to
the wreckage and dust-strewn confusion of what had been his office.
And there, his hand upon her shoulder, he bade her still be of good
courage.
"Listen now, Beatrice," said he. "Let's try to reason this thing out
together, let's try to solve this problem like two intelligent human
beings.
"Just what's happened, we don't know; we can't know yet a while, till
I investigate. We don't even know what year this is.
"Don't know whether anybody else is still alive, anywhere in the
world. But we can find out--after we've made provision for the
immediate present and formed some rational plan of life.
"If all the rest _are_ gone, swept away, wiped out clean like figures
on a slate, then why _we_ should have happened to survive whatever it
was that struck the earth, is still a riddle far beyond our
comprehension."
He raised her face to his, noble despite all its grotesque
disfigurements; he looked into her eyes as though to read the very
soul of her, to judge whether she could share this fight, could brave
this coming struggle.
"All these things may yet be answered. Once I get the proper data for
this series of phenomena, I can find the solution, never fear!
"Some vast world-duty may be ours, far greater, infinitely more vital
than anything that either of us has ever dreamed. It's not our place,
now, to mourn or fear! Rather it is to read this mystery, to meet it
and to conquer!"
Through her tears the girl smiled up at him, trustingly, confidingly.
And in the last declining rays of the sun that glinted through the
window-pane, her eyes were very beautiful.
CHAPTER V
EXPLORATION
Came now the evening, as they sat and talked together, talked
long and earnestly, there within that ruined place. Too eager for some
knowledge of the truth, they, to feel hunger or to think of their lack
of clothing.
Chairs they had none, nor even so much as a broom to clean the floor
with. But Stern, first-off, had wrenched a marble slab from the
stairway.
And with this plank of stone still strong enough to serve, he had
scraped all one corner of the office floor free of rubbish. This gave
them a preliminary camping-place wherein to take their bearings and
discuss what must be done.
"So then," the engineer was saying as the dusk grew deeper, "so then,
we'll apparently have to make this building our headquarters for a
while.
"As nearly as I can figure, this is about what must have happened.
Some sudden, deadly, numbing plague or cataclysm must have struck the
earth, long, long ago.
"It may have been an almost instantaneous onset of some new and highly
fatal micro-organism, propagating with such marvelous rapidity that it
swept the world clean in a day--doing its work before any resistance
could be organized or thought of.
"Again, some poisonous gas may have developed, either from a fissure
in the earth's crust, or otherwise. Other hypotheses are possible, but
of what practical value are they now?
"We only know that here, in this uppermost office of the Tower, you
and I have somehow escaped with only a long period of completely
suspended animation. How long? God alone knows! That's a query I can't
even guess the answer to as yet."
"Well, to judge by all the changes," Beatrice suggested thoughtfully,
"it can't have been less than a hundred years. Great Heavens!" and she
burst into a little satiric laugh. "Am _I_ a hundred and twenty-four
years old? Think of that!"
"You underestimate," Stern answered. "But no matter about the time
question for the present; we can't solve it now.
"Neither can we solve the other problem about Europe and Asia and all
the rest of the world. Whether London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and every
other city, every other land, all have shared this fate, we simply
don't know.
"All we _can_ have is a feeling of strong probability that life, human
life I mean, is everywhere extinct--save right here in this room!
"Otherwise, don't you see, men would have made their way back here
again, back to New York, where all these incalculable treasures seem
to have perished, and--"
He broke short off. Again, far off, they heard a faint re-echoing roar.
For a moment they both sat speechless. What could it be? Some distant
wall toppling down? A hungry beast scenting its prey? They could not
tell. But Stern smiled.
"I guess," said he, "guns will be about the first thing I'll look for,
after food. There ought to be good hunting down in the jungles of
Fifth Avenue and Broadway!
"You shoot, of course? No? Well, I'll soon teach you. Lots of things
both of us have got to learn now. No end of them!"
He rose from his place on the floor, went over to the window and stood
for a minute peering out into the gloom. Then suddenly he turned.
"What's the matter with me, anyhow?" he exclaimed with irritation.
"What right have I to be staying here, theorizing, when there's work
to do? I ought to be busy this very minute!
"In some way or other I've got to find food, clothing, tools, arms--a
thousand things. And above all, water! And here I've been speculating
about the past, fool that I am!"
"You--you aren't going to leave me--not to-night?" faltered the girl.
Stern seemed not to have heard her, so strong the imperative of action
lay upon him now. He began to pace the floor, sliding and stumbling
through the rubbish, a singular figure in his tatters and with his
patriarchal hair and beard, a figure dimly seen by the faint light
that still gloomed through the window:
"In all that wreckage down below," said he, as though half to himself,
"in all that vast congeries of ruin which once was called New York,
surely enough must still remain intact for our small needs. Enough
till we can reach the land, the country, and raise food of our own!"
"Don't go _now!_" pleaded Beatrice. She, too, stood up, and out she
stretched her hands to him. "Don't, please! We can get along some way
or other till morning. At least, _I_ can!"
"No, no, it isn't right! Down in the shops and stores, who knows but
we might find--"
"But you're unarmed! And in the streets--in the forest, rather--"
"Listen!" he commanded rather abruptly. "This is no time for
hesitating or for weakness. I know you'll stand your share of all that
we must suffer, dare and do together.
"Some way or other I've got to make you comfortable. I've got to
locate food and drink immediately. Got to get my bearings. Why, do you
think I'm going to let you, even for one night, go fasting and
thirsty, sleep on bare cement, and all that sort of thing?
"If so, you're mistaken! No, you must spare me for an hour or two.
Inside of that time I ought to make a beginning!"
"A whole hour?"
"Two would probably be nearer it. I promise to be back inside of that
time."
"But," and her voice quivered just a trifle, "but suppose some wolf or
bear--"
"Oh, I'm not quite so foolhardy as all that!" he retorted. "I'm not
going to venture outside till to-morrow. My idea is that I can find at
least a few essentials right here in this building.
"It's a city in itself--or was. Offices, stores, shops, everything
right here together in a lump. It can't possibly take me very long to
go down and rummage out something for your comfort.
"Now that the first shock and surprise of our awakening are over, we
can't go on in this way, you know--h'm!--dressed in--well, such
exceedingly primitive garb!"
Silently she looked at his dim figure in the dusk. Then she stretched
out her hand.
"I'll go too," said she quite simply.
"You'd better stay. It's safer here."
"No, I'm going."
"But if we run into dangers?"
"Never mind. Take me with you."
Over to her he came. He took her hand. In silence he pressed it. Thus
for a moment they stood. Then, arousing himself to action, he said:
"First of all, a light."
"A light? How can you make a light? Why, there isn't a match left
anywhere in this whole world."
"I know, but there are other things. Probably my chemical flasks and
vials aren't injured. Glass is practically imperishable. And if I'm
not mistaken, the bottles must be lying somewhere in that rubbish heap
over by the window."
He left her wondering, and knelt among the litter. For a while he
silently delved through the triturated bits of punky wood and rust-red
metal that now represented the remains of his chemical cabinet.
All at once he exclaimed: "Here's one! And here's another! This
certainly _is_ luck! H-m! I shouldn't wonder if I got almost all of
them back."
One by one he found a score of thick, ground-glass vials. Some were
broken, probably by the shock when they and the cabinet had fallen,
but a good many still remained intact.
Among these were the two essential ones. By the last dim ghost of
light through the window, and by the sense of touch, Stern was able to
make out the engraved symbols "P" and "S" on these bottles.
"Phosphorus and sulphur," he commented. "Well, what more could I
reasonably ask? Here's alcohol, too, hermetically sealed. Not too bad,
eh?"
While the girl watched, with wondering admiration, Stern thought hard
a moment. Then he set to work.
First he took a piece of the corroded metal framework of the cabinet,
a steel strip about eighteen inches long, frail in places, but still
sufficiently strong to serve his purpose.
Tearing off some rags from his coat-sleeve, he wadded them together
into a ball as big as his fist. Around this ball he twisted the metal
strip, so that it formed at once a holder and a handle for the
rag-mass.
With considerable difficulty he worked the glass stopper out of the
alcohol bottle, and with the fluid saturated the rags. Then, on a
clear bit of the floor, he spilled out a small quantity of the
phosphorus and sulphur.
"This beats getting fire by friction all hollow," he cheerfully
remarked. "I've tried that, too, and I guess it's only in books a
white man ever succeeds at it. But this way you see, it's simplicity
itself."
Very moderate friction, with a bit of wood from the wreckage of the
door, sufficed to set the phosphorus ablaze. Stern heaped on a few
tiny lumps of sulphur. Then, coughing as the acrid fumes arose from
the sputter of blue flame, he applied the alcohol-soaked torch.
Instantly a puff of fire shot up, colorless and clear, throwing no
very satisfactory light, yet capable of dispelling the thickest of the
gloom.
The blaze showed Stern's eager face, long-bearded and dusty, as he
bent over this crucial experiment.
The girl, watching closely, felt a strange new thrill of confidence
and solace. Some realization of the engineer's resourcefulness came to
her, and in her heart she had confidence that, though the whole wide
world had crumbled into ruin, yet _he_ would find a way to smooth her
path, to be a strength and refuge for her.
But Stern had no time for any but matters of intensest practicality.
From the floor he arose, holding the flambeau in one hand, the bottle
of alcohol in the other.
"Come now," bade he, and raised the torch on high to light her way,
"You're still determined to go?"
For an answer she nodded. Her eyes gleamed by the uncanny light.
And so, together, he leading out of the room and along the wrecked
hall, they started on their trip of exploration out into the unknown.
CHAPTER VI
TREASURE-TROVE
Never before had either of them realized just what the meaning
of forty-eight stories might be. For all their memories of this height
were associated with smooth-sliding elevators that had whisked them up
as though the tremendous height had been the merest trifle.
This night, however, what with the broken stairs, the debris-cumbered
hallways, the lurking darkness which the torch could hardly hold back
from swallowing them, they came to a clear understanding of the
problem.
Every few minutes the flame burned low and Stern had to drop on more
alcohol, holding the bottle high above the flame to avoid explosion.
Long before they had compassed the distance to the ground floor the
girl lagged with weariness and shrank with nameless fears.
Each black doorway that yawned along their path seemed ominous with
memories of life that had perished there, of death that now reigned
all-supreme.
Each corner, every niche and crevice, breathed out the spirit of the
past and of the mystic tragedy which in so brief a time had wiped the
human race from earth, "as a mother wipes the milky lips of her
child."
And Stern, though he said little save to guide Beatrice and warn her
of unusual difficulties, felt the somber magic of the place. No poet,
he; only a man of hard and practical details. Yet he realized that,
were he dowered with the faculty, here lay matter for an Epic of Death
such as no Homer ever dreamed, no Virgil ever could have penned.
Now and then, along the corridors and down the stairways, they chanced
on curious little piles of dust, scattered at random in fantastic
shapes.
These for a few minutes puzzled Stern, till stooping, he stirred one
with his hand. Something he saw there made him start back with a
stifled exclamation.
"What is it?" cried the girl, startled. "Tell me!"
But he, realizing the nature of his discovery--for he had seen a human
incisor tooth, gold-filled, there in the odd little heap--straightened
up quickly and assumed to smile.
"It's nothing, nothing at all!" he answered. "Come, we haven't got any
time to waste. If we're going to provide ourselves with even a few
necessaries before the alcohol's all gone, we've got to be at work!"
And onward, downward, ever farther and farther, he led her through the
dark maze of ruin, which did not even echo to their barefoot tread.
Like disheveled wraiths they passed, soundlessly, through eerie
labyrinths and ways which might have served as types of Coleridge's
"caverns measureless to man," so utterly drear they stretched out in
their ghostly desolation.
At length, after an eternal time of weariness and labor, they managed
to make their way down into the ruins of the once famous and beautiful
arcade which had formerly run from Madison Avenue to the square.
"Oh, how horrible!" gasped Beatrice, shrinking, as they clambered down
the stairs and emerged into this scene of chaos, darkness, death.
Where long ago the arcade had stretched its path of light and life and
beauty, of wealth and splendor, like an epitome of civilization all
gathered in that constricted space, the little light disclosed stark
horror.
Feeble as a will-o'-the-wisp in that enshrouding dark, the torch
showed only hints of things--here a fallen pillar, there a shattered
mass of wreckage where a huge section of the ceiling had fallen,
yonder a gaping aperture left by the disintegration of a wall.
Through all this rubbish and confusion, over and through a score of
the little dust-piles which Stern had so carefully avoided explaining
to Beatrice, they climbed and waded, and with infinite pains slowly
advanced.
"What we need is more light!" exclaimed the engineer presently. "We've
got to have a bonfire here!"
And before long he had collected a considerable pile of wood, ripped
from the door-ways and window-casings of the arcade. This he set fire
to, in the middle of the floor.
Soon a dull, wavering glow began to paint itself upon the walls, and
to fling the comrades' shadows, huge and weird, in dancing mockery
across the desolation.
Strangely enough, many of the large plate-glass windows lining the
arcade still stood intact. They glittered with the uncanny reflections
of the fire as the man and woman slowly made way down the passage.
"See," exclaimed Stern, pointing. "See all these ruined shops?
Probably almost everything is worthless. But there must be some things
left that we can use.
"See the post-office, down there on the left? Think of the millions in
real money, gold and silver, in all these safes here and all over the
city--in the banks and vaults! Millions! Billions!
"Jewels, diamonds, wealth simply inconceivable! Yet now a good water
supply, some bread, meat, coffee, salt, and so on, a couple of beds, a
gun or two and some ordinary tools would outweigh them all!"
"Clothes, too," the girl suggested. "Plain cotton cloth is worth ten
million dollars an inch now."
"Right," answered Stern, gazing about him with wonder.
"And I offer a bushel of diamonds for a razor and a pair of scissors."
Grimly he smiled as he stroked his enormous beard.
"But come, this won't do. There'll be plenty of time to look around
and discuss things in the morning. Just now we've got a definite
errand. Let's get busy!"
Thus began their search for a few prime necessities of life, there in
that charnel-house of civilization, by the dull reflections of the
firelight and the pallid torch glow.
Though they forced their way into ten or twelve of the arcade shops,
they found no clothing, no blankets or fabric of any kind that would
serve for coverings or to sleep upon. Everything at all in the nature
of cloth had either sunk back into moldering annihilation or had at
best grown far too fragile to be of the slightest service.
They found, however, a furrier's shop, and this they entered eagerly.
From rusted metal hooks a few warped fragments of skins still hung,
moth-eaten, riddled with holes, ready to crumble at the merest touch.
"There's nothing in any of these to help us," judged Stern. "But maybe
we might find something else in here."
Carefully they searched the littered place, all dust and horrible
disarray, which made sad mockery of the gold-leaf sign still visible
on the window: "Lange, Importer. All the Latest Novelties."
On the floor Stern discovered three more of those little dust-middens
which meant human bodies, pitiful remnants of an extinct race, of
unknown people in the long ago. What had he now in common with them?
The remains did not even inspire repugnance in him. All at once
Beatrice uttered a cry of startled gladness. "Look here! A storage
chest!"
True enough, there stood a cedar box, all seamed and cracked and
bulging, yet still retaining a semblance of its original shape.
The copper bindings and the lock were still quite plainly to be seen,
as the engineer held the torch close, though green and corroded with
incredible age.
One effort of Stern's powerful arms sufficed to tip the chest quite
over. As it fell it burst. Down in a mass of pulverized, worm-eaten
splinters it disintegrated.
Out rolled furs, many and many of them, black, and yellow, and
striped--the pelts of the grizzly, of the leopard, the chetah, the
royal Bengal himself.
"Hurray!" shouted the man, catching up first one, then another, and
still a third. "Almost intact. A little imperfection here and there
doesn't matter. Now we've got clothes and beds.
"What's that? Yes, maybe they are a trifle warm for this season of the
year, but this is no time to be particular. See, now, how do you like
_that?_"
Over the girl's shoulders, as he spoke, he flung the tiger-skin.
"Magnificent!" he judged, standing back a pace or two and holding up
the torch to see her better. "When I find you a big gold pin or clasp
to fasten that with at the throat you'll make a picture of another and
more splendid Boadicea!"
He tried to laugh at his own words, but merriment sat ill there in
that place, and with such a subject. For the woman, thus clad, had
suddenly assumed a wild, barbaric beauty.
Bright gleamed her gray eyes by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and
deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken
out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the
robe, made colorful contrasts, barbarous, seductive.
Half hidden, the woman's perfect body, beautiful as that of a
wood-nymph or a pagan dryad, roused atavistic passions in the
engineer.
He dared speak no other word for the moment, but bent beside the
shattered chest again and fell to looking over the furs.
A polar-bear skin attracted his attention, and this he chose. Then,
with it slung across his shoulder, he stood up.
"Come," said he, steadying his voice with an effort; "come, we must be
going now. Our light won't hold out very much longer. We've got to
find food and drink before the alcohol's all gone; got to look out for
practical affairs, whatever happens. Let's be going."
Fortune favored them.
In the wreck of a small fancy grocer's booth down toward the end of
the arcade, where the post-office had been, they came upon a stock of
goods in glass jars.
All the tinned foods had long since perished, but the impermeable
glass seemed to have preserved fruits and vegetables of the finer
sort, and chipped beef and the like, in a state of perfect soundness.
Best of all, they discovered the remains of a case of mineral water.
The case had crumbled to dust, but fourteen bottles of water were
still intact.
"Pile three or four of these into my fur robe here," directed Stern.
"Now, a few of the other jars--that's right. To-morrow we'll come down
and clean up the whole stock. But we've got enough for now."
"We'd best be getting back up the stairs again," said he. And so they
started.
"Are you going to leave that fire burning?" asked the girl, as they
passed the middle of the arcade.
"Yes. It can't do any harm. Nothing to catch here; only old metal and
cement. Besides, it would take too much time and labor to put it out."
Thus they abandoned the gruesome place and began the long, exhausting
climb.
It must have taken them an hour and a half at least to reach their
eerie. Both found their strength taxed to the utmost.
Before they were much more than halfway up, the ultimate drop of
alcohol had been burned.
The last few hundred feet had to be made by slow, laborious feeling,
aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered
through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some break in the walls.
At length, however--for all things have an end--breathless and spent,
they found their refuge. And soon after that, clad in their savage
robes, they supped.
Allan Stern, consulting engineer, and Beatrice Kendrick, stenographer,
now king and queen of the whole wide world domain (as they feared),
sat together by a little blaze of punky wood fragments that flickered
on the eroded floor.
They ate with their fingers and drank out of the bottles, _sans_
apology. Strange were their speculations, their wonderings, their
plans--now discussed specifically, now half-voiced by a mere word that
thrilled them both with sudden, poignant emotion.
An so an hour passed, and the night deepened toward the birth of
another day. The fire burned low and died, for they had little to
replenish it with.
Down sank the moon, her pale light dimming as she went, her faint
illumination wanly creeping across the disordered, wrack-strewn floor.
And at length Stern, in the outer office, Beatrice in the other, they
wrapped themselves within their furs and laid them down to sleep.
Despite the age-long trance from which they both had but so recently
emerged, a strange lassitude weighed on them.
Yet long after Beatrice had lost herself in dreams, Stern lay and
thought strange thoughts, yearning and eager thoughts, there in the
impenetrable gloom.
CHAPTER VII
THE OUTER WORLD
Before daybreak the engineer was up again, and active. Now that
he faced the light of morning, with a thousand difficult problems
closing in on every hand, he put aside his softer moods, his visions
and desires, and--like the scientific man he was--addressed himself to
the urgent matters in hand.
"The girl's safe enough alone, here, for a while," thought he, looking
in upon her where she lay, calm as a child, folded within the clinging
masses of the tiger-skin.
"I must be out and away for two or three hours, at the very least. I
hope she'll sleep till I get back. If not--what then?"
He thought a moment; then, coming over to the charred remnants of last
night's fire, chose a bit of burnt wood. With this he scrawled in
large, rough letters on a fairly smooth stretch of the wall:
"Back soon. All O. K. Don't worry."
Then, turning, he set out on the long, painful descent again to the
earth-level.
Garish now, and doubly terrible, since seen with more than double
clearness by the graying dawn, the world-ruin seemed to him.
Strong of body and of nerve as he was, he could not help but shudder
at the numberless traces of sudden and pitiless death which met his
gaze.
Everywhere lay those dust-heaps, with here or there a tooth, a ring, a
bit of jewelry showing--everywhere he saw them, all the way down the
stairs, in every room and office he peered into, and in the
time-ravished confusion of the arcade.
But this was scarcely the time for reflections of any sort. Life
called, and labor, and duty; not mourning for the dead world, nor even
wonder or pity at the tragedy which had so mysteriously--befallen.
And as the man made his way over and through the universal wreckage,
he took counsel with himself.
"First of all, water!" thought he. "We can't depend on the bottled
supply. Of course, there's the Hudson; but it's brackish, if not
downright salt. I've got to find some fresh and pure supply, close at
hand. That's the prime necessity of life.
"What with the canned stuff, and such game as I can kill, there's
bound to be food enough for a while. But a good water-supply we must
have, and at once!"
Yet, prudent rather for the sake of Beatrice than for his own, he
decided that he ought not to issue out, unarmed, into this new and
savage world, of which he had as yet no very definite knowledge. And
for a while he searched hoping to find some weapon or other.
"I've got to have an ax, first of all," said he. "That's mans first
need, in any wilderness. Where shall I find one?"
He thought a moment.
"Ah! In the basements!" exclaimed he. "Maybe I can locate an
engine-room, a store-room, or something of that sort. There's sure to
be tools in a place like that." And, laying off the bear-skin, he
prepared to explore the regions under the ground-level.
He used more than half an hour, through devious ways and hard labor,
to make his way to the desired spot. The ancient stair-way, leading
down, he could not find.
But by clambering down one of the elevator-shafts, digging toes and
fingers into the crevices in the metal framework and the cracks in the
concrete, he managed at last to reach a vaulted sub-cellar, festooned
with webs, damp, noisome and obscure.
Considerable light glimmered in from a broken sidewalk-grating above,
and through a gaping, jagged hole near one end of the cellar, beneath
which lay a badly-broken stone.
The engineer figured that this block had fallen from the tower and
come to rest only here; and this awoke him to a new sense of
ever-present peril. At any moment of the night or day, he realized,
some such mishap was imminent.
"Eternal vigilance!" he whispered to himself. Then, dismissing useless
fears, he set about the task in hand.
By the dim illumination from above, he was able to take cognizance of
the musty-smelling place, which, on the whole, was in a better state
of repair than the arcade. The first cellar yielded nothing of value
to him, but, making his way through a low vaulted door, he chanced
into what must have been one of the smaller, auxiliary engine-rooms.
This, he found, contained a battery of four dynamos, a small
seepage-pump, and a crumbling marble switch-board with part of the
wiring still comparatively intact.
At sight of all this valuable machinery scaled and pitted with rust,
Stern's brows contracted with a feeling akin to pain. The engineer
loved mechanism of all sorts; its care and use had been his life.
And now these mournful relics, strange as that may seem, affected him
more strongly than the little heaps of dust which marked the spots
where human beings had fallen in sudden, inescapable death.
Yet even so, he had no time for musing.
"Tools!" cried he, peering about the dimwit vault. "Tools--I must have
some. Till I find tools, I'm helpless!"
Search as he might, he discovered no ax in the place, but in place of
it he unearthed a sledge-hammer. Though corroded, it was still quite
serviceable. Oddly enough, the oak handle was almost intact.
"Kyanized wood, probably," reflected he, as he laid the sledge to one
side and began delving into a bed of dust that had evidently been a
work-bench. "Ah! And here's a chisel! A spanner, too! A heap of rusty
old wire nails!"
Delightedly he examined these treasures.
"They're worth more to me," he exulted; "than all the gold between
here and what's left of San Francisco!"
He found nothing more of value in the litter. Everything else was
rusted beyond use. So, having convinced himself that nothing more
remained, he gathered up his finds and started back whence he had
come.
After some quarter-hour of hard labor, he managed to transport
everything up into the arcade.
"Now for a glimpse of the outer world!" quoth he.
Gripping the sledge well in hand, he made his way through the confused
nexus of ruin. Disguised as everything now was, fallen and disjointed,
murdering, blighted by age incalculable, still the man recognized many
familiar features.
Here, he recalled, the telephone-booths had been; there the
information desk. Yonder, again, he remembered the little curved
counter where once upon a time a man in uniform had sold tickets to
such as had wanted to visit the tower.
Counter now was dust; ticket-man only a crumble of fine, grayish
powder. Stern shivered slightly, and pressed on.
As he approached the outer air, he noticed that many a grassy tuft and
creeping vine had rooted in the pavement of the arcade, up-prying the
marble slabs and cracking the once magnificent floor.
The doorway itself was almost choked by a tremendous Norway pine which
had struck root close to the building, and now insolently blocked that
way where, other-time many thousand men and women every day had come
and gone.
But Stern clambered out past this obstacle, testing the floor with his
sledge, as he went, lest he fall through an unseen weak spots into the
depths of coal-cellars below. And presently he reached the outer air,
unharmed.
"But--but, the sidewalk?" cried he, amazed. "The street--the Square?
Where are they?" And in astonishment he stopped, staring.
The view from the tower, though it had told him something of the
changes wrought, had given him no adequate conception of their
magnitude.
He had expected some remains of human life to show upon the earth,
some semblance of the metropolis to remain in the street. But no,
nothing was there; nothing at all on the ground to show that he was in
the heart of a city.
He could, indeed, catch glimpses of a building here or there. Through
the tangled thickets that grew close up to the age-worn walls of the
Metropolitan, he could make out a few bits of tottering construction
on the south side of what had been Twenty-Third Street.
But of the street itself, no trace remained--no pavement, no sidewalk,
no curb. And even so near and so conspicuous an object as the wreck of
the Flatiron was now entirely concealed by the dense forest.
Soil had formed thickly over all the surface. Huge oaks and pines
flourished there as confidently as though in the heart of the Maine
forest, crowding ash and beech for room.
Under the man's feet, even as he stood close by the building--which
was thickly overgrown with ivy and with ferns and bushes rooted in the
crannies--the pine-needles bent in deep, pungent beds.
Birch, maple, poplar and all the natives of the American woods
shouldered each other lustily. By the state of the fresh young leaves,
just bursting their sheaths, Stern knew the season was mid-May.
Through the wind-swayed branches, little flickering patches of morning
sunlight met his gaze, as they played and quivered on the forest moss
or over the sere pine-spills.
Even upon the huge, squared stones which here and there lay in
disorder, and which Stern knew must have fallen from the tower, the
moss grew very thick; and more than one such block had been rent by
frost and growing things.
"How long has it been, great Heavens! How long?" cried the engineer, a
sudden fear creeping into his heart. For this, the reasserted
dominance of nature, bore in on him with more appalling force than
anything he had yet seen.
About him he looked, trying to get his bearings in that strange
milieu.
"Why," said he, quite slowly, "it's--it's just as though some cosmic
jester, all-powerful, had scooped up the fragments of a ruined city
and tossed them pell-mell into the core of the Adirondacks! It's
horrible--ghastly--incredible!"
Dazed and awed, he stood as in a dream, a strange figure with his mane
of hair, his flaming, trailing beard, his rags (for he had left the
bear-skin in the arcade), his muscular arm, knotted as he held the
sledge over his shoulder.
Well might he have been a savage of old times; one of the early
barbarians of Britain, perhaps, peering in wonder at the ruins of some
deserted Roman camp.
The chatter of a squirrel high up somewhere in the branches of an oak,
recalled him to his wits. Down came spiralling a few bits of bark and
acorn-shell, quite in the old familiar way.
Farther off among the woods, a robin's throaty morning notes drifted
to him on the odorous breeze. A wren, surprisingly tame, chippered
busily. It hopped about, not ten feet from him, entirely fearless.
Stern realized that it was now seeing a man for the first time in its
life, and that it had no fear. His bushy brows contracted as he
watched the little brown body jumping from twig to twig in the pine
above him.
A deep, full breath he drew. Higher, still higher he raised his head.
Far through the leafy screen he saw the overbending arch of sky in
tiny patches of turquoise.
"The same old world, after all--the same, in spite of
everything--thank God!" he whispered, his very tone a prayer of
thanks.
And suddenly, though why he could not have told, the grim engineer's
eyes grew wet with tears that ran, unheeded, down his heavy-bearded
cheeks.
CHAPTER VIII
A SIGN OF PERIL
Stern's weakness--as he judged it--lasted but a minute. Then,
realizing even more fully than ever the necessity for immediate labor
and exploration, he tightened his grip upon the sledge and set forth
into the forest of Madison Square.
Away from him scurried a cotton-tail. A snake slid, hissing, out of
sight under a jungle of fern. A butterfly, dull brown and ocher,
settled upon a branch in the sunlight, where it began slowly opening
and shutting its wings.
"Hem! That's a _Danaus plexippus_, right enough," commented the man.
"But there are some odd changes in it. Yes, indeed, certainly some
evolutionary variants. Must be a tremendous time since we went to
sleep, for sure; probably very much longer than I dare guess. That's a
problem I've got to go to work on, before many days!"
But now for the present he dismissed it again; he pushed it aside in
the press of urgent matters. And, parting the undergrowth, he broke
his crackling way through the deep wood.
He had gone but a few hundred yards when an exclamation of surprised
delight burst from his lips.
"Water! Water!" he cried. "What? A spring, so close? A pool, right
here at hand? Good luck, by Jove, the very first thing!"
And, stopping where he stood, he gazed at it with keen, unalloyed
pleasure.
There, so near to the massive bulk of the tower that the vast shadow
lay broadly across it, Stern had suddenly come upon as beautiful a
little watercourse as ever bubbled forth under the yews of Arden or
lapped the willows of Hesperides.
He beheld a roughly circular depression in the woods, fern-banked and
fringed with purple blooms; at the bottom sparkled a spring,
leaf-bowered, cool, Elysian.
From this, down through a channel which the water must have worn for
itself by slow erosion, a small brook trickled, widening out into a
pool some fifteen feet across; whence, brimming over, it purled away
through the young sweet-flags and rushes with tempting little woodland
notes.
"What a find!" cried the engineer. Forward he strode. "So, then?
Deer-tracks?" he exclaimed, noting a few dainty hoof-prints in the
sandy margin. "Great!" And, filled with exultation, he dropped beside
the spring.
Over it he bent. Setting his bearded lips to the sweet water, he drank
enormous, satisfying drafts.
Sated at last, he stood up again and peered about him. All at once he
burst out into joyous laughter.
"Why, this is certainly an old friend of mine, or I'm a liar!" he
cried out. "This spring is nothing more or less than the lineal
descendant of Madison Square fountain, what? But good Lord, what a
change!
"It would make a splendid subject for an article in the 'Annals of
Applied Geology.' Only--well, there aren't any annals, now, and what's
more, no readers!"
Down to the wider pool he walked.
"Stern, my boy," said he, "here's where you get an A-1, first-class
dip!"
A minute later, stripped to the buff, the man lay splashing vigorously
in the water. From top to toe he scrubbed himself vigorously with the
fine, white sand. And when, some minutes later, he rose up again, the
tingle and joy of life filled him in every nerve.
For a minute he looked contemptuously at his rags, lying there on the
edge of the pool. Then with a grunt he kicked them aside.
"I guess we'll dispense with those," judged he. "The bear-skin, back
in the building, there, will be enough." He picked up his sledge, and,
heaving a mighty breath of comfort, set out for the tower again.
"Ah, but that was certainly fine!" he exclaimed. "I feel ten years
younger, already. Ten, from what? X minus ten, equals--?"
Thoughtfully, as he walked across the elastic moss and over the
pine-needles, he stroked his beard.
"Now, if I could only get a hair-cut and shave!" said he. "Well, why
not? Wouldn't that surprise _her_, though?"
The idea strong upon him, he hastened his steps, and soon was back at
the door close to the huge Norway pine. But here he did not enter.
Instead, he turned to the right.
Plowing through the woods, climbing over fallen columns and shattered
building-stones, flushing a covey of loud-winged partridges, parting
the bushes that grew thickly along the base of the wall, he now found
himself in what had long ago been Twenty-Third Street.
No sign, now of paving or car-tracks--nothing save, on the other side
of the way, crumbling lines of ruin. As he worked his way among the
detritus of the Metropolitan, he kept sharp watch for the wreckage of
a hardware store.
Not until he had crossed the ancient line of Madison Avenue and
penetrated some hundred yards still further along Twenty-Third Street,
did he find what he sought. "Ah!" he suddenly cried. "Here's something
now!"
And, scrambling over a pile of grass-grown rubbish with a couple of
time-bitten iron wheels peering out--evidently the wreckage of an
electric car--he made his way around a gaping hole where a side-walk
had caved in and so reached the interior of a shop.
"Yes, prospects here, certainly prospects!" he decided carefully
inspecting the place. "If this didn't use to be Currier & Brown's
place, I'm away off my bearings. There ought to be _something_ left."
"Ah! Would you?" and he flung a hastily-snatched rock at a rattlesnake
that had begun its dry, chirring defiance on top of what once had been
a counter.
The snake vanished, while the rock rebounding, crashed through glass.
Stern wheeled about with a cry of joy. For there, he saw, still stood
near the back of the shop a showcase from within which he caught a
sheen of tarnished metal.
Quickly he ran toward this, stumbling over the loose dooring, mossy
and grass-grown. There in the case, preserved as you have seen
Egyptian relics two or three thousand years old, in museums, the
engineer beheld incalculable treasures. He thrilled with a savage,
strange delight.
Another blow, with the sledge, demolished the remaining glass.
He trembled with excitement as he chose what he most needed.
"I certainly do understand now," said he, "why the New Zealanders took
Captain Cook's old barrel-hoops and refused his cash. Same here! All
the money in this town couldn't buy this rusty knife--" as he seized a
corroded blade set in a horn handle, yellowed with age. And eagerly he
continued the hunt.
Fifteen minutes later he had accumulated a pair of scissors, two
rubber combs, another knife, a revolver, an automatic, several
handfuls of cartridges and a Cosmos bottle.
All these he stowed in a warped, mildewed remnant of a Gladstone bag,
taken from a corner where a broken glass sign, "Leather Goods," lay
among the rank confusion.
"I guess I've got enough, now, for the first load," he judged, more
excited than if he had chanced upon a blue-clay bed crammed with
Cullinan diamonds. "It's a beginning, anyhow. Now for Beatrice!"
Joyously as a schoolboy with a pocketful of new-won marbles, he made
his exit from the ruins of the hardware store, and started back toward
the tower.
But hardly had he gone a hundred feet when all at once he drew back
with a sharp cry of wonder and alarm.
There at his feet, in plain view under a little maple sapling, lay
something that held him frozen with astonishment.
He snatched it up, dropping the sledge to do so.
"What? _What?_" he stammered; and at the thing he stared with widened,
uncomprehending eyes.
"Merciful God! How--what--?" cried he.
The thing he held in his hand was a broad, fat, flint assegai-point!
CHAPTER IX
HEADWAY AGAINST ODDS
Stern gazed at this alarming object with far more trepidation
than he would have eyed a token authentically labeled: "Direct from
Mars."
For the space of a full half-minute he found no word, grasped no
coherent thought, came to no action save to stand there,
thunder-struck, holding the rotten leather bag in one hand, the
spear-head in the other.
Then, suddenly, he shouted a curse and made as though to fling it
clean away. But ere it had left his grasp, he checked himself.
"No, there's no use in _that_," said he, quite slowly. "If this thing
is what it appears to be, if it isn't merely some freakish bit of
stone weathered off somewhere, why, it means--my God, what _doesn't_
it mean?"
He shuddered, and glanced fearfully about him; all his calculations
already seemed crashing down about him; all his plans, half-formulated,
appeared in ruin.
New, vast and unknown factors of the struggle broadened rapidly before
his mental vision, _if_ this thing were really what it looked to be.
Keenly he peered at the bit of flint in his palm. There it lay, real
enough, an almost perfect specimen of the flaker's art, showing
distinctly where the wood had been applied to the core to peel off the
many successive layers.
It could not have been above three and a half inches long, by one and
a quarter wide, at its broadest part. The heft, where it had been
hollowed to hold the lashings, was well marked.
A diminutive object and a skilfully-formed one. At any other time or
place, the engineer would have considered the finding a good fortune;
but now--!
"Yet after all," he said aloud, as if to convince himself, "it's only
a bit of stone! What can it prove?"
His subconsciousness seemed to make answer: "So, too, the sign that
Robinson Crusoe found on the beach was only a human foot-mark. Do not
deceive yourself!"
In deep thought the engineer stood there a moment or two. Then, "Bah!"
cried he. "What does it matter, anyhow? Let it come--whatever it is!
If I hadn't just happened to find this, I'd have been none the wiser."
And he dropped the bit of flint into the bag along with the other
things.
Again he picked up his sledge, and, now more cautiously, once more
started forward.
"All I can do," he thought, "is just to go right ahead as though this
hadn't happened at all. If trouble comes, it comes, that's all. I
guess I can meet it. Always _have_ got away with it, so far. We'll
see. What's on the cards has got to be played to a finish, and the
best hand wins!"
He retraced his way to the spring, where he carefully rinsed and
filled the Cosmos bottle for Beatrice. Then back to the Metropolitan
he came, donned his bear--skin, which he fastened with a wire nail,
and started the long climb. His sledge he carefully hid on the second
floor, in an office at the left of the stairway.
"Don't think much of this hammer, after all," said he. "What I need is
an ax. Perhaps this afternoon I can have another go at that hardware
place and find one.
"If the handle's gone, I can heft it with green wood. With a good ax
and these two revolvers--till I find some rifles--I guess we're safe
enough, spearheads or not!"
About him he glanced at the ever-present molder and decay. This
office, he could easily see, had been both spacious and luxurious, but
now it offered a sorry spectacle. In the dust over by a window
something glittered dully.
Stern found it was a fragment of a beveled mirror, which had probably
hung there and, when the frame rotted, had dropped. He brushed it off
and looked eagerly into it.
A cry of amazement burst from him.
"Do I look like _that?_" he shouted. "Well, I won't, for long!"
He propped the glass up on the steel beam of the window-opening, and
got the scissors out of the bag. Ten minutes later, the face of Allan
Stern bore some resemblance to its original self. True enough, his
hair remained a bit jagged, especially in the back, his brows were
somewhat uneven, and the point to which his beard was trimmed was far
from perfect.
But none the less his wild savagery had given place to a certain
aspect of civilization that made the white bearskin over his shoulders
look doubly strange.
Stern, however, was well pleased. He smiled in satisfaction.
"What will _she_ think, and say?" he wondered, as he once more took up
the bag and started on the long, exhausting climb.
Sweating profusely, badly "blown,"--for he had not taken much time to
rest on the way--the engineer at last reached his offices in the
tower.
Before entering, he called the girl's name.
"Beatrice! Oh, Beatrice! Are you awake, and visible?"
"All right, come in!" she answered cheerfully, and came to meet him in
the doorway. Out to him she stretched her hand, in welcome; and the
smile she gave him set his heart pounding.
He had to laugh at her astonishment and naive delight over his changed
appearance; but all the time his eyes were eagerly devouring her
beauty.
For now, freshly-awakened, full of new life and vigor after a sound
night's sleep, the girl was magnificent.
The morning light disclosed new glints of color in her wondrous hair,
as it lay broad and silken on the tiger-skin.
This she had secured at the throat and waist with bits of metal taken
from the wreckage of the filing-cabinet.
Stern promised himself that ere long he would find her a profusion of
gold pins and chains, in some of the Fifth Avenue shops, to serve her
purposes till she could fashion real clothing.
As she gave him her hand, the Bengal skin fell back from her round,
warm, cream-white arm.
At sight of it, at vision of that messy crown of hair and of those
gray, penetrant, questioning eyes, the man's spent breath quickened.
He turned his own eyes quickly away, lest she should read his thought,
and began speaking--of what? He hardly knew. Anything, till he could
master himself.
But through it all he knew that in his whole life, till now
self-centered, analytical, cold, he never had felt such real,
spontaneous happiness.
The touch of her fingers, soft and warm, dispelled his every anxiety.
The thought that he was working, now, for her; serving her; striving
to preserve and keep her, thrilled him with joy.
And as some foregleam of the future came to him, his fears dropped
from him like those outworn rags he had discarded in the forest.
"Well, so we're both up and at it, again," he exclaimed,
common-placely enough, his voice a bit uncertain. Stern had walked
narrow girders six hundred feet sheer up; he had worked in caissons
under tide-water, with the air-pumps driving full tilt to keep death
out.
He had swung in a bosun's-chair down the face of the Yosemite Canyon
at Cathedral Spires. But never had he felt emotions such as now. And
greatly he marveled.
"I've had luck," he continued. "See here, and here?"
He showed her his treasures, all the contents of the bag, except the
spear-point. Then, giving her the Cosmos bottle, he bade her drink.
Gratefully she did so, while he explained to her the finding of the
spring.
Her face aglow with eagerness and brave enthusiasts, she listened. But
when he told her about the bathing-pool, an envious expression came to
her.
"It's not fair," she protested, "for you to monopolize that. If you'll
show me the place--and just stay around in the woods, to see that
nothing hurts me--"
"You'll take a dip, too?"
Eagerly she nodded, her eyes beaming.
"I'm just dying for one!" she exclaimed. "Think! I haven't had a bath,
now, for _x_ years!"
"I'm at your service," declared the engineer. And for a moment a
little silence came between them, a silence so profound that they
could even hear the faint, far cheepings of the mud-swallows in the
tower stair, above.
At the back of Stern's brain still lurked a haunting fear of the wood,
of what the assegai-point might portend, but he dispelled it.
"Well, come along down," bade he. "It's getting late, already. But
first, we must take just one more look, by this fresh morning light,
from the platform up above, there?"
She assented readily. Together, talking of their first urgent needs,
of their plans for this new day and for this wonderful, strange life
that now confronted them, they climbed the stairs again. Once more
they issued out on to the weed-grown platform of red tiles.
There they stood a moment, looking out with wonder over that vast,
still, marvelous prospect of life-in-death. Suddenly the engineer
spoke.
"Tell me," said he, "where did you get that line of verse you quoted
last night? The one about this vast city--heart all lying still, you
know?"
"That? Why, that was from Wordsworth's Sonnet on London Bridge, of
course," she smiled up at him. "You remember it now, don't you?"
"No-o," he disclaimed a trifle dubiously. "I--that is, I never was
much on poetry, you understand. It wasn't exactly in my line. But
never mind. How did it go? I'd like to hear it, tremendously."
"I don't just recall the whole poem," she answered thoughtfully. "But
I know part of it ran:
'......This city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning. Silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.'"
A moment she paused to think. The sun, lancing its long and level rays
across the water and the vast dead city, irradiated her face.
Instinctively, as she looked abroad over that wondrous panorama, she
raised both bare arms; and, clad in the tiger-skin alone, stood for a
little space like some Parsee priestess, sun-worshiping, on her tower
of silence.
Stern looked at her, amazed.
Was this, could this indeed be the girl he had employed, in the old
days--the other days of routine and of tedium, of orders and
specifications and dry-as-dust dictation? As though from a strange
spell he aroused himself.
"The poem?" exclaimed he. "What next?"
"Oh, that? I'd almost forgotten about that; I was dreaming. It goes
this way, I think:
'Never did the sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill,
Ne'er saw I, never felt a calm so deep;
The river glideth at his own sweet will.
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep,
And all this mighty heart is standing still!......'"
She finished the tremendous classic almost in a whisper.
They both stood silent a moment, gazing out together on that strange,
inexplicable fulfilment of the poet's vision.
Up to them, through the crystal morning air, rose a faint, small sound
of waters, from the brooklet in the forest. The nesting birds, below,
were busy "in song and solace"; and through the golden sky above, a
swallow slanted on sharp wing toward some unseen, leafy goal.
Far out upon the river, faint specks of white wheeled and hovered--a
flock of swooping gulls, snowy and beautiful and free. Their pinions
flashed, spiralled and sank to rest on the wide waters.
Stern breathed a sigh. His right arm slipped about the sinuous,
fur-robed body of the girl.
"Come, now!" said he, with returning practicality. "Bath for you,
breakfast for both of us--then we must buckle down to work. _Come!_"
CHAPTER X
TERROR
Noon found them far advanced in the preliminaries of their hard
adventuring.
Working together in a strong and frank companionship--the past
temporarily forgotten and the future still put far away--half a day's
labor advanced them a long distance on the road to safety.
Even these few hours sufficed to prove that, unless some strange,
untoward accident befell, they stood a more than equal chance of
winning out.
Realizing to begin with, that a home on the forty-eighth story of the
tower was entirely impractical, since it would mean that most of their
time would have to be used in laborious climbing, they quickly changed
their dwelling.
They chose a suite of offices on the fifth floor, looking directly out
over and into the cool green beauty of Madison Forest. In an hour or
so, they cleared out the bats and spiders, the rubbish and the dust,
and made the place very decently presentable.
"Well, that's a good beginning, anyhow," remarked the engineer,
standing back and looking critically at the finished work.
"I don't see why we shouldn't make a fairly comfortable home out of
this, for a while. It's not too high for ease, and it's high enough
for safety--to keep prowling bears and wolves and--and other things
from exploring us in the night."
He laughed, but memories of the spear-head tinged his merriment with
apprehension. "In a day or two I'll make some kind of an outer door,
or barricade. But first, I need that ax and some other things. Can you
spare me for a while, now?"
"I'd _rather_ go along, too," she answered wistfully, from the
window-sill where she sat resting.
"No, not this time, please!" he entreated. "First I've got to go 'way
to the top of the tower and bring down my chemicals and all the other
things up there.
"Then I'm going out on a hunt for dishes, a lamp, some oil and no end
of things. You save your strength for a while; stay here and keep
house and be a good girl!"
"All right," she acceded, smiling a little sadly. "But really, I feel
quite able to go."
"This afternoon, perhaps; not now. Good-by!" And he started for the
door. Then a thought struck him. He turned and came back.
"By the way," said he, "if we can fix up some kind of a holster, I'll
take one of those revolvers. With the best of this leather here,"
nodding at the Gladstone bag, "I should imagine we could manufacture
something serviceable."
They planned the holster together, and he cut it out with his knife,
while she slit leather thongs to lash it with. Presently it was done,
and a strap to tie it round his waist with--a crude, rough thing, but
just as useful as though finished with the utmost skill.
"We'll make another for you when I get home this noon," he remarked
picking up the automatic and a handful of cartridges. Quickly he
filled the magazine. The shells were green with verdigris, and many a
rust-spot disfigured the one-time brightness of the arm.
As he stepped over to the window, aimed and pulled the trigger, a
sharp and welcome report burst from the weapon. And a few leaves,
clipped from an oak in the forest, zigzagged down in the bright, warm
sunlight.
"I guess she'll do all right!" he laughed, sliding the ugly weapon
into his new holster. "You see, the powder and fulminate, sealed up in
the cartridges, are practically imperishable. Here, let me load yours,
too.
"If you want something to do, you can practice on that dead limb out
there, see? And don't be afraid of wasting ammunition. There must be
millions of cartridges in this old burg--millions--all ours!"
Again he laughed, and handing her the other pistol, now fully loaded,
took his leave. Before he had climbed a hundred feet up the tower
stair, he heard a slow, uneven pop--pop--popping, and with
satisfaction knew that Beatrice was already perfecting herself in the
use of the revolver.
"And she may need it, too--we both may, badly--before we know it!"
thought he, frowning, as he kept upon his way.
This reflection weighed in so heavily upon him, all due to the flint
assegai-point, that he made still another excuse that afternoon and so
got out of taking the girl into the forest with him on his exploring
trip.
The excuse was all the more plausible inasmuch as he left her enough
work at home to do, making some real clothing and some sandals for
them both. This task, now that the girl had scissors to use, was not
too hard.
Stern brought her great armfuls of the furs from the shop in the
arcade, and left her busily and happily employed.
He spent the afternoon in scouting through the entire neighborhood
from Sixth Avenue as far east as Third and from Twenty-Seventh Street
down through Union Square.
Revolver in his left hand, knife in his right to cut away troublesome
bush or brambles, or to slit impeding vine-masses, he progressed
slowly and observantly.
He kept his eyes open for big game, but--though he found moose-tracks
at the corner of Broadway and Nineteenth--he ran into nothing more
formidable than a lynx which snarled at him from a tree overhanging
the mournful ruins of the Farragut monument.
One shot sent it bounding and screaming with pain, out of view. Stern
noted with satisfaction that blood followed its trail.
"Guess I haven't forgotten how to shoot in all these _x_ years!" he
commented, stooping to examine the spoor. "That may come in handy
later!"
Then, still wary and watchful, he continued his exploration.
He found that the city, as such, had entirely ceased to be.
"Nothing but lines and monstrous rubbish-heaps of ruins," he sized up
the situation, "traversed by lanes of forest and overgrown with every
sort of vegetation.
"Every wooden building completely wiped out. Brick and stone ones
practically gone. Steel alone standing, and _that_ in rotten shape.
Nothing at all intact but the few concrete structures.
"Ha! ha!" And he laughed satirically. "If the builders of the
twentieth century could have foreseen this they wouldn't have thrown
quite such a chest, eh? And _they_ talked of engineering!"
Useless though it was, he felt a certain pride in noting that the
Osterhaut Building, on Seventeenth Street, had lasted rather better
than the average.
"_My_ work!" said he, nodding with grim satisfaction, then passed on.
Into the Subway he penetrated at Eighteenth Street, climbing with
difficulty down the choked stairway, through bushes and over masses of
ruin that had fallen from the roof. The great tube, he saw, was choked
with litter.
Slimy and damp it was, with a mephitic smell and ugly pools of water
settled in the ancient road-bed. The rails were wholly gone in places.
In others only rotten fragments of steel remained.
A goggle-eyed toad stared impudently at him from a long tangle of
rubbish that had been a train--stalled there forever by the final
block-signal of death.
Through the broken arches overhead the rain and storms of ages had
beaten down, and lush grasses flourished here and there, where
sunlight could penetrate.
No human dust-heaps here, as in the shelter of the arcade. Long since
every vestige of man had been swept away. Stern shuddered, more
depressed by the sight here than at any other place so far visited.
"And they boasted of a work for all time!" whispered he, awed by the
horror of it. "They boasted--like the financiers, the churchmen, the
merchants, everybody! Boasted of their institutions, their city, their
country. And _now_--"
Out he clambered presently, terribly depressed by what he had
witnessed, and set to work laying in still more supplies from the
wrecked shops. Now for the first time, his wonder and astonishment
having largely abated, he began to feel the horror of this loneliness.
"No life here! Nobody to speak to--except the girl..." he exclaimed
aloud, the sound of his own voice uncanny in that woodland street of
death. "All gone, everything! My Heavens, suppose I didn't have _her?_
How long could I go on alone, and keep my mind?"
The thought terrified him. He put it resolutely away and went to work.
Wherever he stumbled upon anything of value he eagerly seized it.
The labor, he found, kept him from the subconscious dread of what
might happen to Beatrice or to himself if either should meet with any
mishap. The consequences of either one dying, he knew, must be
horrible beyond all thinking for the survivor.
Up Broadway he found much to keep--things which he garnered in the
up-caught hem of his bearskin, things of all kinds and uses. He found
a clay pipe--all the wooden ones had vanished from the shop--and a
glass jar of tobacco.
These he took as priceless treasures. More jars of edibles he
discovered, also a stock of rare wines. Coffee and salt he came upon.
In the ruins of the little French brass-ware shop, opposite the
Flatiron, he made a rich haul of cups and plates and a still
serviceable lamp.
Strangely enough, it still had oil in it. The fluid hermetically
sealed in, had not been able to evaporate.
At last, when the lengthening shadows in Madison Forest warned him
that day was ending, he betook himself, heavy laden, once more back
past the spring, and so through the path which already was beginning
to be visible back to the shelter of the Metropolitan.
"Now for a great surprise for the girl!" thought he, laboriously
toiling up the stair with his burden: "What will she say, I wonder,
when she sees all these housekeeping treasures?" Eagerly he hastened.
But before he had reached the third story he heard a cry from above.
Then a spatter of revolver-shots punctured the air.
He stopped, listening in alarm.
"Beatrice! Oh, Beatrice!" he hailed, his voice falling flat and
stifled in those ruinous passages.
Another shot.
"Answer!" panted Stern. "What's the matter _now?_"
Hastily he put down his burden, and, spurred by a great terror,
bounded up the broken stairs.
Into their little shelter, their home, he ran, calling her name.
No reply came!
Stern stopped short, his face a livid gray.
"Merciful Heaven!" stammered he.
_The girl was gone!_
CHAPTER XI
A THOUSAND YEARS!
Sickened with a numbing anguish of fear such as in all his life
he had never known, Stern stood there a moment, motionless and lost.
Then he turned. Out into the hall he ran, and his voice, re-echoing
wildly, rang through those long-deserted aisles.
All at once he heard a laugh behind him--a hail.
He wheeled about, trembling and spent. Out his arms went, in eager
greeting. For the girl, laughing and flushed, and very beautiful, was
coming down the stair at the end of the hall.
Never had the engineer beheld a sight so wonderful to him as this
woman, clad in the Bengal robe; this girl who smiled and ran to meet
him.
"What? Were you frightened?" she asked, growing suddenly serious, as
he stood there speechless and pale. "Why--what could happen to me
here?"
His only answer was to take her in his arms and whisper her name. But
she struggled to be free.
"Don't! you mustn't!" she exclaimed. "I didn't mean to alarm you.
Didn't even know you were here!"
"I heard the shots--I called--you didn't answer. Then--"
"You found me gone? I didn't hear you. It was nothing, after all.
Nothing--much!"
He led her back into the room.
"What happened? Tell me!"
"It was really too absurd!"
"What was it?"
"Only this," and she laughed again. "I was getting supper ready, as
you see," with a nod at their provision laid out upon the
clean-brushed floor. "When--"
"Yes?"
"Why, a blundering great hawk swooped in through the window there,
circled around, pounced on the last of our beef and tried to fly away
with it."
Stern heaved a sigh of relief. "So that was all?" asked he. "But the
shots? And your absence?"
"I struck at him. He showed fight. I blocked the window. He was
determined to get away with the food. I was determined he _shouldn't_.
So I snatched the revolver and opened fire."
"And then?"
"That confused him. He flapped out into the hall. I chased him. Away
up the stairs he circled. I shot again. Then I pursued. Went up two
stories. But he must have got away through some opening or other. Our
beef's all gone!" And Beatrice looked very sober.
"Never mind, I've got a lot more stuff down-stairs. But tell me, did
you wing him?"
"I'm afraid not," she admitted. "There's a feather or two on the
stairs, though."
"Good work!" cried he laughing, his fear all swallowed in the joy of
having found her again, safe and unhurt. "But please don't give me
another such panic, will you? It's all right this time, however.
"And now if you'll just wait here and not get fighting with any more
wild creatures, I'll go down and bring my latest finds. I like your
pluck," he added slowly, gazing earnestly at her.
"But I don't want you chasing things in this old shell of a building.
No telling what crevice you might fall into or what accident might
happen. Au revoir!"
Her smile as he left her was inscrutable, but her eyes, strangely
bright, followed him till he had vanished once more down the stairs.
* * * * *
Broad strokes, a line here, one there, with much left to the
imagining--such will serve best for the painting of a picture like
this--a picture wherein every ordinary bond of human life, the nexus
of man's society, is shattered. Where everything must strive to
reconstruct itself from the dust. Where the future, if any such there
may be, must rise from the ashes of a crumbling past.
Broad strokes, for detailed ones would fill too vast a canvas.
Impossible to describe a tenth of the activities of Beatrice and Stern
the next four days. Even to make a list of their hard-won possessions
would turn this chapter into a mere catalogue.
So let these pass for the most part. Day by day the man, issuing forth
sometimes alone, sometimes with Beatrice, labored like a Titan among
the ruins of New York.
Though more than ninety per cent. of the city's one-time wealth had
long since vanished, and though all standards of worth had wholly
changed, yet much remained to harvest.
Infinitudes of things, more or less damaged, they bore up to their
shelter, up the stairs which here and there Stern had repaired with
rough-hewn logs.
For now he had an ax, found in that treasure-house of Currier &
Brown's, brought to a sharp edge on a wet, flat stone by the spring,
and hefted with a sapling.
This implement was of incredible use, and greatly enheartened the
engineer. More valuable it was than a thousand tons of solid gold.
The same store yielded also a well-preserved enameled water-pail and
some smaller dishes of like ware, three more knives, quantities of
nails, and some small tools; also the tremendous bonanza of a magazine
rifle and a shotgun, both of which Stern judged would come into shape
by the application of oil and by careful tinkering. Of ammunition,
here and elsewhere, the engineer had no doubt he could unearth
unlimited quantities.
"With steel," he reflected, "and with my flint spearhead, I can make
fire at any time. Wood is plenty, and there's lots of 'punk.' So the
first step in reestablishing civilization is secure. With fire,
everything else becomes possible.
"After a while, perhaps, I can get around to manufacturing matches
again. But for the present my few ounces of phosphorus and the flint
and steel will answer very well."
Beatrice, like the true woman she was, addressed herself eagerly to
the fascinating task of making a real home out of the barren
desolation of the fifth floor offices. Her splendid energy was no less
than the engineer's. And very soon a comfortable air pervaded the
place.
Stern manufactured a broom for her by cutting willow withes and
lashing them with hide strips onto a trimmed branch. Spiders and dust
all vanished. A true housekeeping appearance set in.
To supplement the supply of canned food that accumulated along one of
the walls, Stern shot what game he could--squirrels, partridges and
rabbits.
Metal dishes, especially of solid gold, ravished from Fifth Avenue
shops, took their place on the crude table he had fashioned with his
ax. Not for esthetic effect did they now value gold, but merely
because that metal had perfectly withstood the ravages of time.
In the ruins of a magnificent store near Thirty-First Street, Stern
found a vault burst open by frost and slow disintegration of the
steel.
Here something over a quart of loose diamonds, big and little, rough
and cut, were lying in confusion all about. Stern took none of these.
Their value now was no greater than that of any pebble.
But he chose a massive clasp of gold for Beatrice, for that could
serve to fasten her robe. And in addition he gathered up a few rings
and onetime costly jewels which could be worn. For the girl, after
all, was one of Eve's daughters.
Bit by bit he accumulated many necessary articles, including some
tooth-brushes which he found sealed in glass bottles, and a variety of
gold toilet articles. Use was his first consideration now. Beauty came
far behind.
In the corner of their rooms, after a time, stood a fair variety of
tools, some already serviceable, others waiting to be polished, ground
and hefted, and in some cases retempered. Two rough chairs made their
appearance.
The north room, used only for cooking, became their forge and oven all
in one. For here, close to a window where the smoke could drift out,
Stern built a circular stone fireplace.
And here Beatrice presided over her copper casseroles and saucepans
from the little shop on Broadway. Here, too, Stern planned to
construct a pair of skin bellows, and presently to set up the altars
of Vulcan and of Tubal Cain once more.
Both of them "thanked whatever gods there be" that the girl was a good
cook. She amazed the engineer by the variety of dishes she managed to
concoct from the canned goods, the game that Stern shot, and fresh
dandelion greens dug near the spring. These edibles, with the blackest
of black coffee, soon had them in fine fettle.
"I certainly have begun to put on weight," laughed the man after
dinner on the fourth day, as he lighted his fragrant pipe with a roll
of blazing birch-bark.
"My bearskin is getting tight. You'll have to let it out for me, or
else stop such magic in the kitchen."
She smiled back at him, sitting there at ease in the sunshine by the
window, sipping her coffee out of a gold cup with a solid gold spoon.
Stern, feeling the May breeze upon his face, hearing the bird-songs in
the forest depths, felt a well-being, a glow of health and joy such as
he had never in his whole life known--the health of outdoor labor and
sound sleep and perfect digestion, the joy of accomplishment and of
the girl's near presence.
"I suppose we do live pretty well," she answered, surveying the
remnants of the feast. "Potted tongue and peas, fried squirrel,
partridge and coffee ought to satisfy anybody. But still--"
"What is it?"
"I _would_ like some buttered toast and some cream for my coffee, and
some sugar."
Stern laughed heartily.
"You don't want much!" he exclaimed, vastly amused, the while he blew
a cloud of Latakia smoke. "Well, you be patient, and everything will
come, in time.
"You mustn't expect me to do magic. On the fourth day you don't
imagine I've had time enough to round up the ten thousandth descendant
of the erstwhile cow, do you?
"Or grow cane and make sugar? Or find grain for seed, clear some land,
plow, harrow, plant, hoe, reap, winnow, grind and bolt and present you
with a bag of prime flour? Now really?"
She pouted at his raillery. For a moment there was silence, while he
drew at his pipe. At the girl he looked a little while. Then, his eyes
a bit far-away, he remarked in a tone he tried to render casual:
"By the way, Beatrice, it occurs to me that we're doing rather well
for old people--very old."
She looked up with a startled glance.
"_Very?_" she exclaimed. "You know how old then?"
"Very, indeed!" he answered. "Yes, I've got some sort of an idea about
it. I hope it won't alarm you when you know."
"Why--how so? Alarm me?" she queried with a strange expression.
"Yes, because, you see, it's rather a long time since we went to
sleep. Quite so. You see, I've been doing a little calculating, off
and on, at odd times. Been putting two and two together, as it were.
"First, there was the matter of the dust in sheltered places, to guide
me. The rate of deposition of what, in one or two spots, can't have
been anything less than cosmic or star-dust, is fairly certain.
"Then again, the rate of this present deterioration of stone and steel
has furnished another index. And last night I had a little peek at the
pole-star, through my telescope, while you were asleep.
"The good old star has certainly shifted out of place a bit.
Furthermore, I've been observing certain evolutionary changes in the
animals and plants about us. Those have helped, too."
"And--and what have you found out?" asked she with tremulous interest.
"Well, I think I've got the answer, more or less correctly. Of course
it's only an approximate result, as we say in engineering. But the
different items check up with some degree of consistency.
"And I'm safe in believing I'm within at least a hundred years of the
date one way or the other. Not a bad factor of safety, that, with my
limited means of working."
The girl's eyes widened. From her hand fell the empty gold cup; it
rolled away across the clean-swept floor.
"What?" cried she. "You've got it, within a hundred years! Why,
then--you mean it's _more_ than a hundred?"
Indulgently the engineer smiled.
"Come, now," he coaxed. "Just guess, for instance, how old you really
are--and growing younger every day?"
"Two hundred maybe? Oh surely not as old as that! It's horrible to
think of!"
"Listen," bade he. "If I count your twenty-four years, when you went
to sleep, you're now--"
"What?"
"You're now at the very minimum calculation, just about one thousand
and twenty-four! Some age, that, eh?"
Then, as she stared at him wide-eyed he added with a smile.
"No disputing that fact, no dodging it. The thing's as certain as that
you're now the most beautiful woman in the whole wide world!"
CHAPTER XII
DRAWING TOGETHER
Days passed, busy days, full of hard labor and achievement,
rich in experience and learning, in happiness, in dreams of what the
future might yet bring.
Beatrice made and finished a considerable wardrobe of garments for
them both. These, when the fur had been clipped close with the
scissors, were not oppressively warm, and, even though on some days a
bit uncomfortable, the man and woman tolerated them because they had
no others.
Plenty of bathing and good food put them in splendid physical
condition, to which their active exercise contributed much. And thus,
judging partly by the state of the foliage, partly by the height of
the sun, which Stern determined with considerable accuracy by means of
a simple, home-made quadrant--they knew mid-May was past and June was
drawing near.
The housekeeping by no means took up all the girl's time. Often she
went out with him on what he called his "pirating expeditions," that
now sometimes led them as far afield as the sad ruins of the wharves
and piers, or to the stark desolation and wreckage of lower Broadway
and the onetime busy hives of newspaperdom, or up to Central Park or
to the great remains of the two railroad terminals.
These two places, the former tide-gates of the city's life, impressed
Stern most painfully of anything. The disintegrated tracks, the
jumbled remains of locomotives and luxurious Pullmans with weeds
growing rank upon them, the sunlight beating down through the caved-in
roof of the Pennsylvania station "concourse," where millions of human
beings once had trod in all the haste of men's paltry, futile affairs,
filled him with melancholy, and he was glad to get away again leaving
the place to the jungle, the birds and beasts that now laid claim to
it.
"Sic transit gloria mundi!" he murmured, as with sad eyes he mused
upon the down-tumbled columns along the facade, the overgrown
entrance-way, the cracked and falling arches and architraves. "And
_this_, they said, was builded for all time!"
It was on one of these expeditions that the engineer found and
pocketed--unknown to Beatrice--another disconcerting relic.
This was a bone, broken and splintered, and of no very great age,
gnawed with perfectly visible tooth-marks. He picked it up, by chance,
near the west side of the ruins of the old City Hall.
Stern recognized the manner in which the bone had been cracked open
with a stone to let the marrow be sucked out. The sight of this
gruesome relic revived all his fears, tenfold more acutely than ever,
and filled him with a sense of vague, impending evil, of peril deadly
to them both.
This was the more keen, because the engineer knew at a glance that the
bone was the upper end of a human femur--human, or, at the very least,
belonging to some highly anthropoid animal. And of apes or gorillas he
had, as yet, found no trace in the forests of Manhattan.
Long he mused over his find. But not a single word did he ever say to
Beatrice concerning it or the flint spear-point. Only he kept his eyes
and ears well open for other bits of corroborative evidence.
And he never ventured a foot from the building unless his rifle and
revolver were with him, their magazines full of high-power shells.
The girl always went armed, too, and soon grew to be such an expert
shot that she could drop a squirrel from the tip of a fir, or wing a
heron in full flight.
Once her quick eyes spied a deer in the tangles of the one-time
Gramercy Park, now no longer neatly hedged with iron palings, but
spread in wild confusion that joined the riot of growth beyond.
On the instant she fired, wounding the creature.
Stern's shot, echoing hers, missed. Already the deer was away, out of
range through the forest. With some difficulty they pursued down a
glen-like strip of woods that must have once been Irving Place.
Two hundred yards south of the park they sighted the animal again. And
the girl with a single shot sent it crashing to earth.
"Bravo, Diana!" hurrahed Stern, running forward with enthusiasm. The
"deer fever" was on him, as strong as in his old days in the Hudson
Bay country. Hot was the pleasure of the kill when that meant food. As
he ran he jerked his knife from the skin sheath the girl had made for
him.
Thus they had fresh venison to their heart's content--venison broiled
over white-hot coals in the fireplace, juicy and savory--sweet beyond
all telling.
A good deal of the meat they smoked and salted down for future use.
Stern undertook to tan the hide with strips of hemlock bark laid in a
water pit dug near the spring. He added also some oak-bark, nut-galls
and a good quantity of young sumac shoots.
"I guess _that_ ought to hit the mark if anything will," remarked he,
as he immersed the skin and weighed it down with rocks.
"It's like the old 'shotgun' prescriptions of our extinct doctors--a
little of everything, bound to do the trick, one way or another."
The great variety of labors now imposed upon him began to try his
ingenuity to the full. In spite of all his wealth of practical
knowledge and his scientific skill, he was astounded at the huge
demands of even the simplest human life.
The girl and he now faced these, without the social cooperation which
they had formerly taken entirely for granted, and the change of
conditions had begun to alter Stern's concepts of almost everything.
He was already beginning to realize how true the old saying was: "One
man is no man!" and how the world had _been_ the world merely because
of the interrelations, the interdependencies of human beings in vast
numbers.
He was commencing to get a glimpse of the vanished social problems
that had enmeshed civilization, in their true light, now that all he
confronted and had to struggle with was the unintelligent and
overbearing dominance of nature.
All this was of huge value to the engineer. And the strong
individualism (essentially anarchistic) on which he had prided himself
a thousand years ago, was now beginning to receive some mortal blows,
even during these first days of the new, solitary, unsocialized life.
But neither he nor the girl had very much time for introspective
thought. Each moment brought its immediate task, and every day seemed
busier than the last had been.
At meals, however, or at evening, as they sat together by the light of
their lamp in the now homelike offices, Stern and Beatrice found
pleasure in a little random speculation. Often they discussed the
catastrophe and their own escape.
Stern brought to mind some of Professor Raoul Pictet's experiments
with animals, in which the Frenchman had suspended animation for long
periods by sudden freezing. This method seemed to answer, in a way,
the girl's earlier questions as to how they had escaped death in the
many long winters since they had gone to sleep.
Again, they tried to imagine the scenes just following the
catastrophe, the horror of that long-past day, and the slow,
irrevocable decay of all the monuments of the human race.
Often they talked till past midnight, by the glow of their stone
fireplace, and many were the aspects of the case that they developed.
These hours seemed to Stern the happiest of his life.
For the rapprochement between this beautiful woman and himself at
such times became very close and fascinatingly intimate, and Stern
felt, little by little, that the love which now was growing deep
within his heart for her was not without its answer in her own.
But for the present the man restrained himself and spoke no overt
word. For that, he understood, would immediately have put all things
on a different basis--and there was urgent work still waiting to be
done.
"There's no doubt in my mind," said he one day as they sat talking,
"that you and I are absolutely the last human beings--civilized I
mean--left alive anywhere in the world.
"If anybody else had been spared, whether in Chicago or San Francisco,
in London, Paris or Hong-Kong, they'd have made some determined effort
before now to get in touch with New York. This, the prime center of
the financial and industrial world, would have been their first
objective point."
"But suppose," asked she, "there _were_ others, just a few here or
there, and they'd only recently waked up, like ourselves. Could they
have succeeded in making themselves known to us so soon?"
He shook a dubious head.
"There may be some one else, somewhere," he answered slowly, "but
there's nobody else in this part of the world, anyhow. Nobody in this
particular Eden but just you and me. To all intents and purposes I'm
Adam. And you--well, you're Eve! But the tree? We haven't found
that--yet."
She gave him a quick, startled glance, then let her head fall, so that
he could not see her eyes. But up over her neck, her cheek and even to
her temples, where the lustrous masses of hair fell away, he saw a
tide of color mount.
And for a little space the man forgot to smoke. At her he gazed, a
strange gleam in his eyes.
And no word passed between them for a while. But their thoughts--?
CHAPTER XIII
THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
The idea that there might possibly be others of their kind in
far-distant parts of the earth worked strongly on the mind of the
girl. Next day she broached the subject again to her companion.
"Suppose," theorized she, "there might be a few score of others, maybe
a few hundred, scattered here and there? They might awaken one by one,
only to die, if less favorably situated than we happen to be. Perhaps
thousands may have slept, like us, only to wake up to starvation!"
"There's no telling, of course," he answered seriously. "Undoubtedly
that may be very possible. Some may have escaped the great death, on
high altitudes--on the Eiffel Tower, for instance, or on certain
mountains or lofty plateaus. The most we can do for the moment is just
to guess at the probabilities. And--"
"But if there _are_ people elsewhere?" she interrupted eagerly, her
eyes glowing with hope, "isn't there any way to get in touch with
them? Why don't _we_ hunt? Suppose only one or two in each country
should have survived; if we could get them all together again in a
single colony--don't you see?"
"You mean the different languages and arts and all the rest might
still be preserved? The colony might grow and flourish, and mankind
again take possession of the earth and conquer it, in a few decades?
Yes, of course. But even though there shouldn't be anybody else,
there's no cause for despair. Of that, however, we won't speak now."
"But why don't we try to find out about it?" she persisted. "If there
were only the remotest chance--"
"By Jove, I _will_ try it!" exclaimed the engineer, fired with a new
thought, a fresh ambition. "How? I don't know just yet, but I'll see.
There'll be a way, right enough, if I can only think it out!"
That afternoon he made his way down Broadway, past the copper-shop, to
the remains of the telegraph office opposite the Flatiron.
Into it he penetrated with some difficulty. A mournful sight it was,
this one-time busy ganglion of the nation's nerve-system. Benches and
counters were quite gone, instruments corroded past recognition,
everything in hideous disorder.
But in a rear room Stern found a large quantity of copper wire. The
wooden drums on which it had been wound were gone; the insulation had
vanished, but the coils of wire still remained.
"Fine!" said the explorer, gathering together several coils. "Now when
I get this over to the Metropolitan, I think the first step toward
success will have been taken."
By nightfall he had accumulated enough wire for his tentative
experiments. Next day he and the girl explored the remains of the old
wireless station on the roof of the building, overlooking Madison
Avenue.
They reached the roof by climbing out of a window on the east side of
the tower and descending a fifteen-foot ladder that Stern had built
for the purpose out of rough branches.
"You see it's fairly intact as yet," remarked the engineer, gesturing
at the bread expanse. "Only, falling stones have made holes here and
there. See how they yawn down into the rooms below! Well, come on,
follow me. I'll tap with the ax, and if the roof holds me you'll be
safe."
Thus, after a little while, they found a secure path to the little
station.
This diminutive building, fortunately constructed of concrete, still
stood almost unharmed. Into it they penetrated through the crumbling
door. The winds of heaven had centuries ago swept away all trace of
the ashes of the operator.
But there still stood the apparatus, rusted and sagging and
disordered, yet to Stern's practiced eye showing signs of promise. An
hour's careful overhauling convinced the engineer that something might
yet be accomplished.
And thus they set to work in earnest.
First, with the girl's help, he strung his copper-wire antennae from
the tiled platform of the tower to the roof of the wireless station.
Rough work this was, but answering the purpose as well as though of
the utmost finish.
He connected up the repaired apparatus with these antennae, and made
sure all was well. Then he dropped the wires over the side of the
building to connect with one of the dynamos in the sub-basement.
All this took two and a half days of severe labor, in intervals of
food-getting, cooking and household tasks. At last, when it was done--
"Now for some power!" exclaimed the engineer. And with his lamp he
went down to inspect the dynamos again and to assure himself that his
belief was correct, his faith that one or two of them could be put
into running order.
Three of the machines gave little promise, for water had dripped in on
them and they were rusted beyond any apparent rehabilitation. The
fourth, standing nearest Twenty-Third Street, had by some freak of
chance been protected by a canvas cover.
This cover was now only a mass of rotten rags, but it had at least
safeguarded the machine for so long that no very serious deterioration
had set in.
Stern worked the better part of a week with such tools as he could
find or make--he had to forge a wrench for the largest nuts--"taking
down" the dynamo, oiling, filing, polishing and repairing it, part by
part.
The commutator was in bad shape and the brushes terribly corroded. But
he tinkered and patched, hammered and heated and filed away, and at
last putting the machine together again with terrible exertion,
decided that it would run.
"Steam now!" was his next watchword, when he had wired the dynamo to
connect with the station on the roof. And this was on the eighth day
since he had begun his labor.
An examination of the boiler-room, which he reached by moving a ton of
fallen stone-work from the doorway into the dynamo-room, encouraged
him still further. As he penetrated into this place, feeble-shining
lamp held on high, eyes eager to behold the prospect, he knew that
success was not far away.
Down in these depths, almost as in the interior of the great Pyramid
of Gizeh--though the place smelled dank and close and stifling--time
seemed to have lost much of its destructive power. He chose one boiler
that looked sound, and began looking for coal.
Of this he found a plentiful supply, well-preserved, in the bunkers.
All one afternoon he labored, wheeling it in a steel barrow and
dumping it in front of the furnace.
Where the smoke-stack led to and what condition it was in he knew not.
He could not tell where the gases of combustion would escape to; but
this he decided to leave to chance.
He grimaced at sight of the rusted flues and the steam-pipes
connecting with the dynamo-room-pipes now denuded of their asbestos
packing and leaky at several joints.
A strange, gnome-like picture he presented as he poked and pried in
those dim regions, by the dim rays of the lamp. Spiders, roaches and a
great gray rat or two were his only companions--those, and hope.
"I don't know but I'm a fool to try and carry this thing out," said
he, dubiously surveying the pipe. "I'm liable to start something here
that I can't stop. Water-glasses leaky, gauges plugged up,
safety-valve rusted into its seat--the devil!"
But still he kept on. Something drove him inexorably forward. For he
was an engineer--and an American.
His next task was to fill the boiler. This he had to do by bringing
water, two pails at a time from the spring. It took him three days.
Thus, after eleven days of heart-breaking lonely toil in that grimy
dungeon, hampered for lack of tools, working with rotten materials,
naked and sweaty, grimed, spent, profane, exhausted, everything was
ready for the experiment--the strangest, surely, in the annals of the
human race.
He lighted up the furnace with dry wood, then stoked it full of coal.
After an hour and a half his heart thrilled with mingled fear and
exultation at sight of the steam, first white, then blue and thin,
that began to hiss from the leaks in the long pipe.
"No way to estimate pressure, or anything," remarked he. "It's bull
luck whether I go to hell or not!" And he stood back from the blinding
glare of the furnace. With his naked arm he wiped the sweat from his
streaming forehead.
"Bull luck!" repeated he. "But by the Almighty, I'll send that Morse,
or bust!"
CHAPTER XIV
THE MOVING LIGHTS
Panting with exhaustion and excitement, Stern made his way back
to the engine-room. It was a strangely critical moment when he seized
the corroded throttle-wheel to start the dynamo. The wheel stuck, and
would not budge.
Stern, with a curse of sheer exasperation, snatched up his long
spanner, shoved it through the spokes, and wrenched.
Groaning, the wheel gave way. It turned. The engineer hauled again.
"Go on!" shouted the man. "Start! Move!"
With a hissing plaint, as though rebellious against this awakening
after its age-long sleep, the engine creaked into motion.
In spite of all Stern's oiling, every journal and bearing squealed in
anguish. A rickety tremble possessed the engine as it gained speed.
The dynamo began to hum with wild, strange protests of racked metal.
The ancient "drive" of tarred hemp strained and quivered, but held.
And like the one-hoss shay about to collapse, the whole fabric of the
resuscitated plant, leaking at a score of joints, creaking, whistling,
shaking, voicing a hundred agonized mechanic woes, revived in a
grotesque, absurd and shocking imitation of its one-time beauty and
power.
At sight of this ghastly resurrection, the engineer (whose whole life
had been passed in the love and service of machinery) felt a strange
and sad emotion.
He sat down, exhausted, on the floor. In his hand the lamp trembled.
Yet, all covered with sweat and dirt and rust as he was, this moment
of triumph was one of the sweetest he had ever known.
He realized that this was now no time for inaction. Much yet remained
to be done. So up he got again, and set to work.
First he made sure the dynamo was running with no serious defect and
that his wiring had been made properly. Then he heaped the furnace
full of coal, and closed the door, leaving only enough draft to insure
a fairly steady heat for an hour or so.
This done, he toiled back up to where Beatrice was eagerly awaiting
him in the little wireless station on the roof.
In he staggered, all but spent. Panting for breath, wild-eyed, his
coal-blackened arms stretching out from the whiteness of the
bear-skin, he made a singular picture.
"It's going!" he exclaimed. "I've got current--it's good for a while,
anyhow. Now--now for the test!"
For a moment he leaned heavily against the concrete bench to which the
apparatus was clamped. Already the day had drawn close to its end. The
glow of evening had begun to fade a trifle, along the distant skyline;
and beyond the Palisades a dull purple pall was settling down.
By the dim light that filtered through the doorway, Beatrice looked at
his deep-lined, bearded face, now reeking with sweat and grimed with
dust and coal. An ugly face--but not to her. For through that mask she
read the dominance, the driving force, the courage of this versatile,
unconquerable man.
"Well," suddenly laughed Stern, with a strange accent in his voice,
"well then, here goes for the operator in the Eiffel Tower, eh?"
Again he glanced keenly, in the failing light, at the apparatus there
before him.
"She'll do, I guess," judged he, slipping on the rusted head-receiver.
He laid his hand upon the key and tried a few tentative dots and
dashes.
Breathless, the girl watched, daring no longer to question him. In the
dielectric, the green sparks and spurts of living flame began to
crackle and to hiss like living spirits of an unknown power.
Stern, feeling again harnessed to his touch the life-force of the
world that once had been, exulted with a wild emotion. Yet,
science-worshiper that he was, something of reverent awe tinged the
keen triumph. A strange gleam dwelt within his eyes; and through his
lips the breath came quick as he flung his very being into this
supreme experiment.
He reached for the ondometer. Carefully, slowly, he "tuned up" the
wave-lengths; up, up to five thousand metres, then back again; he ran
the whole gamut of the wireless scale.
Out, ever out into the thickening gloom, across the void and vacancy
of the dead world, he flung his lightnings in a wild appeal. His face
grew hard and eager.
"Anything? Any answer?" asked Beatrice, laying a hand upon his
shoulder--a hand that trembled.
He shook his head in negation. Again he switched the roaring current
on; again he hurled out into ether his cry of warning and distress,
of hope, of invitation--the last lone call of man to man--of the
last New Yorker to any other human being who, by the merest chance,
might possibly hear him in the wreck of other cities, other lands.
"S. O. S.!" crackled the green flame. "S. O. S.! _S. O. S.!_--"
Thus came night, fully, as they waited, as they called and listened;
as, together there in that tiny structure on the roof of the
tremendous ruin, they swept the heavens and the earth with their wild
call--in vain.
Half an hour passed and still the engineer, grim as death, whirled the
chained lightnings out and away.
"Nothing yet?" cried Beatrice at last, unable to keep silence any
longer. "Are you quite sure you can't--"
The question was not finished.
For suddenly, far down below them, as though buried in the entrails of
the earth, shuddered a stifled, booming roar.
Through every rotten beam and fiber the vast wreck of the building
vibrated. Some wall or other, somewhere, crumbled and went crashing
down with a long, deep droning thunder that ended in a sliding
diminuendo of noise.
"The boiler!" shouted Stern.
Off he flung the head-piece. He leaped up; he seized the girl.
Out of the place he dragged her. She screamed as a huge weight from
high aloft on the tower smashed bellowing through the roof, and with a
shower of stones ripped its way down through the rubbish of the floors
below, as easily as a bullet would pierce a newspaper.
The crash sent them recoiling. The whole roof shook and trembled like
honey-combed ice in a spring thaw.
Down below, something rumbled, jarred, and came to rest.
Both of them expected nothing but that the entire structure would
collapse like a card-house and shatter down in ruins that would be
their death.
But though it swayed and quivered, as in the grasp of an earthquake,
it held.
Stern circled Beatrice with his arm.
"Courage, now! Steady now, _steady!_" cried he.
The grinding, the booming of down-hurled stones and walls died away;
the echoes ceased. A wind-whipped cloud of steam and smoke burst up,
fanlike, beyond the edge of the roof. It bellied away, dim in the
night, upon the stiff northerly breeze.
"Fire?" ventured the girl.
"No! Nothing to burn. But come, come; let's get out o' this anyhow.
There's nothing doing, any more. All through! Too much risk staying up
here, now."
Silent and dejected, they made their cautious way over the shaken
roof. They walked with the greatest circumspection, to avoid falling
through some new hole or freshly opened crevasse.
To Stern, especially, this accident was bitter. After nearly a
fortnight's exhausting toil, the miserable fiasco was maddening.
"Look!" suddenly exclaimed the engineer, pointing. A vast, gaping
canyon of blackness opened at their very feet--a yawning gash forty
feet long and ten or twelve broad, with roughly jagged edges, leading
down into unfathomed depths below.
Stern gazed at it, puzzled, a moment, then peered up into the darkness
above.
"H-m!" said he. "One of the half-ton hands of the big clock up there
has just taken a drop, that's all. One drop too much, I call it. Now
if we--or our rooms--had just happened to be underneath? Some
excitement, eh?"
They circled the opening and approached the tower wall. Stern picked
up the rough ladder, which had been shaken down from its place, and
once more set it to the window through which they were to enter.
But even as Beatrice put her foot on the first rung, she started with
a cry. Stern felt the grip of her trembling hand on his arm.
"What is it?" exclaimed he.
"Look! _Look!_"
Immobile with astonishment and fear, she stood pointing out and away,
to westward, toward the Hudson.
Stern's eyes followed her hand.
He tried to cry out, but only stammered some broken, unintelligible
thing.
There, very far away and very small, yet clearly visible in swarms
upon the inky-black expanse of waters, a hundred, a thousand little
points of light were moving.
CHAPTER XV
PORTENTS OF WAR
Stern and Beatrice stood there a few seconds at the foot of the
ladder, speechless, utterly at a loss for any words to voice the
turmoil of confused thoughts awakened by this inexplicable apparition.
But all at once the girl, with a wordless cry, sank on her knees
beside the vast looming bulk of the tower. She covered her face with
both hands, and through her fingers the tears of joy began to flow.
"Saved--oh, we're saved!" cried she. "There _are_ people--and they're
coming for us!"
Stern glanced down at her, an inscrutable expression on his face,
which had grown hard and set and ugly. His lips moved, as though he
were saying something to himself; but no sound escaped them.
Then, quite suddenly, he laughed a mirthless laugh. To him vividly
flashed back the memory of the flint spear-head and the gnawed
leg-bone, cracked open so the marrow could be sucked out, all gashed
with savage tooth-marks.
A certain creepy sensation began to develop along his spine. He felt a
prickling on the nape of his neck, as the hair stirred there.
Instinctively he reached for his revolver.
"So, then," he sneered at himself, "we're up against it, after all?
And all my calculations about the world being swept clear, were so
much punk? Well, well, this _is_ interesting! Oh, I see it coming, all
right--good and plenty--and soon!"
But the girl interrupted his ugly thoughts as he stood there straining
his eyes out into the dark.
"How splendid! How glorious!" cried she. "Only to think that we're
going to see people again! Can you imagine it?"
"Hardly."
"Why, what's the matter? You--speak as though you weren't--_saved!_"
"I didn't mean to. It's--just surprise, I guess."
"Come! Let's signal them with a fire from the tower top. _I'll_ help
carry wood. Let's hurry down and run and meet them!"
Highly excited, the girl had got to her feet again, and now, clutched
the engineer's arm in burning eagerness.
"Let's go! Go--at once! This minute!"
But he restrained her.
"You don't really think that would be quite prudent, do you?" asked
he. "Not just yet?"
"Why not?"
"Why, can't you see? We--that is, there is no way to tell--"
"But they're coming to save us, can't you see? Somehow, somewhere,
they must have caught that signal! And shall we wait, and perhaps let
them lose us, after all?"
"Certainly not. But first we--why, we ought to make quite sure, you
understand. Sure that they--they're really civilized, you know."
"But they _must_ be, to have read the wireless!"
"Oh, you're counting on that, are you? Well, that's a big assumption.
It won't do. No, we've got to go slow in this game. Got to wait. Wait,
and see. Easy does it!"
He tried to speak boldly and with nonchalance, but the girl's keen ear
detected at least a little of the emotion that was troubling him. She
kept a moment's silence, while the quivering lights drew on and on,
steadily, slowly, like a host of fireflies on the bosom of the night.
"Why don't you get the telescope, and see?" she asked, at length.
"No use. It isn't a night-glass. Couldn't see a thing."
"But anyhow, those lights mean _men_, don't they?"
"Naturally. But until we know what kind, we're better off right where
we are. I'm willing to welcome the coming guest, all right, if he's
peaceful. Otherwise, it's powder and ball, hot water, stones and
things for him!"
The girl stared a moment at the engineer, while this new idea took
root within her brain.
"You--you don't mean," she faltered at last, "that these may
be--_savages!_"
He started at the word. "What makes you think that?" he parried,
striving to spare her all needless alarm.
She pondered a moment, while the fire-dots, like a shoal of swimming
stars, drew slowly nearer, nearer the Manhattan shore.
"Tell me, _are_ they savages?"
"How do I know?"
"It's easy enough to see you've got an opinion about it. You _think_
they're savages, don't you?"
"I think it's very possible."
"And if so--what then?"
"What then? Why, in case they aren't mighty nice and kind, there'll be
a hot time in the old town, that's all. And somebody'll get hurt. It
won't be _us!_"
Beatrice asked no more, for a minute or two, but the engineer felt her
fingers tighten on his arm.
"I'm with you, till the end!" she whispered.
Another pregnant silence, while the nightwind stirred her hair and
wafted the warm feminine perfume of her to his nostrils. Stern took a
long, deep breath. A sort of dizziness crept over him, as from a glass
of wine on an empty stomach. The Call of Woman strove to master him,
but he repelled it. And, watching the creeping lights, he spoke; spoke
to himself as much as to the girl; spoke, lest he think too much.
"There's a chance, a mere possibility," said he, "that those boats,
canoes, coracles or whatever they may be, belong to white people, far
descendants of the few suppositions survivors of the cataclysm.
There's some slight chance that these people may be civilized, or
partly so.
"Why they're coming across the Hudson, at this time o' night, with
what object and to what place, we can't even guess. All we can do is
wait, and watch and--be ready for anything."
"For anything!" she echoed. "You've seen me shoot! You know!"
He took her hand, and pressed it. And silence fell again, as the long
vigil started, there in the shadow of the tower, on the roof.
For some quarter of an hour, neither spoke. Then at last, said Stern:
"See, now! The lights seem to be winking out. The canoes must have
come close in toward the shore of the island. They're being masked
behind the trees. The people--whoever they are--will be landing
directly now!"
"And then?"
"Wait and see!"
They resigned themselves to patience. The girl's breath came quickly,
as she watched. Even the engineer felt his heart throb with
accelerated haste.
Now, far in the east, dim over the flat and dreary ruins of Long
Island, the sky began to silver, through a thin veil of cirrus cloud.
A pallid moon was rising. Far below, a breeze stirred the tree-fronds
in Madison Forest. A bat staggered drunkenly about the tower, then
reeled away into the gloom; and, high aloft, an owl uttered its
melancholy plaint.
Beatrice shuddered.
"They'll be here pretty soon!" whispered she. "Hadn't we better go
down, and get our guns? In case--"
"Time enough," he answered. "Wait a while."
"Hark! What's that?" she exclaimed suddenly, holding her breath.
Off to northward, dull, muffled, all but inaudible, they both heard a
rhythmic pulsing, strangely barbaric.
"Heavens!" ejaculated Stern. "War-drums! Tom-toms, as I live!"
CHAPTER XVI
THE GATHERING OF THE HORDES
"Tom-toms? So they _are_ savages?" exclaimed the girl, taking a quick
breath. "But--what _then?_"
"Don't just know, yet. It's a fact, though; they're certainly savages.
Two tribes, one with torches, one with drums. Two different kinds, I
guess. And they're coming in here to parley or fight or something.
Regular powwow on hand. Trouble ahead, whichever side wins!"
"For us?"
"That depends. Maybe we'll be able to lie hidden, here, till this
thing blows over, whatever it may be. If not, and if they cut off our
water-supply, well--"
He ended with a kind of growl. The sound gave Beatrice a strange
sensation. She kept a moment's silence, then remarked:
"They're up around Central Park now, the drums are, don't you think
so? How far do you make that?"
"Close on to two miles. Come, let's be moving."
In silence they climbed the shaky ladder, reached the tower stairs and
descended the many stories to their dwelling.
Here, the first thing Stern did was to strike a light, which he masked
in a corner, behind a skin stretched like a screen from one wall to
the other. By this illumination, very dim yet adequate, he minutely
examined all their firearms.
He loaded every one to capacity and made sure all were in working
order. Then he satisfied himself that the supply of cartridges was
ample. These he laid carefully along by the windows overlooking
Madison Forest, by the door leading into the suite of offices, and by
the stair-head that gave access to the fifth floor.
Then he blew out the light again.
"Two revolvers, one shotgun, and one rifle, all told," said he. "All
magazine arms. I guess that'll hold them for a while, if it comes down
to brass tacks! How's your nerve, Beatrice?"
"Never better!" she whispered, from the dark. He saw the dim white
blur that indicated her face, and it was very dear to him, all of a
sudden--dearer, far, than he had ever realized.
"Good little girl!" he exclaimed, giving her the rifle. A moment his
hand pressed hers. Then with a quick intake of the breath, he strode
over to the window and once more listened. She followed.
"Much nearer, now!" judged he. "Hear _that_, will you?"
Again they listened.
Louder now the drums sounded, dull, ominous, pulsating like the
hammering of a fever-pulse inside a sick man's skull. A dull, confused
hum, a noise as of a swarming mass of bees, drifted down-wind.
"Maybe they'll pass by?" whispered Beatrice.
"It's Madison Forest they're aiming at!" returned the engineer. "See
there!"
He pointed to westward.
There, far off along the forest-lane of Fourteenth Street, a sudden
gleam of light flashed out among the trees, vanished, reappeared, was
joined by two, ten, a hundred others. And now the whole approach to
Madison Forest, by several streets, began to sparkle with these
feux-follets, weaving and flickering unsteadily toward the square.
Here, there, everywhere through the dense masses of foliage, the
watchers could already see a dim and moving mass, fitfully illuminated
by torches that now burned steady, now flared into red and smoky
tourbillons of flame in the night-wind.
"Like monster glow-worms, crawling among the trees!" the girl
exclaimed. "We _could_ mow them down, from here, already! God grant we
sha'n't have to fight!"
"S-h-h-h! Wait and see what's up!"
Now, from the other horde, coming from the north, sounds of warlike
preparation were growing ever louder.
With quicker beats the insistent tom-toms throbbed their rhythmic
melancholy rune, hollow and dissonant. Then all at once the drums
ceased; and through the night air drifted a minor chant; a wail, that
rose, fell, died, and came again, lagging as many strange voices
joined it.
And from the square, below, a shrill, high-pitched, half-animal cry
responded. Creeping shudders chilled the flesh along the engineer's
backbone.
"What I need, now," thought he, "is about a hundred pounds of
high-grade dynamite, or a gallon of nitroglycerin. Better still, a
dozen capsules of my own invention, my 'Pulverite!'
"I guess _that_ would settle things mighty quick. It would be the
joker in this game, all right! Well, why not make some? With what
chemicals I've got left, couldn't I work up a half-pint? Bottled in
glass flasks, I guess it would turn the trick on 'em!"
"Why, they look black!" suddenly interrupted the girl. "See there--and
there?"
She pointed toward the spring. Stern saw moving shadows in the dark.
Then, through an opening, he got a blurred impression of a hand,
holding a torch. He saw a body, half-human.
The glimpse vanished, but he had seen enough.
"Black--yes, blue-black! They seem so, anyhow. And--why, did you see
the _size_ of them? No bigger than apes! Good Heaven!"
Involuntarily he shuddered. For now, like a dream-horde of hideous
creatures seen in a nightmare, the torch-bearers had spread all
through the forest at the base of the Metropolitan.
Away from the building out across by the spring and even to Fifth
Avenue the mob extended, here thick, there thin, without order or
coherence--a shifting, murmuring, formless, seemingly planless
congeries of dull brutality.
Here or there, where the swaying of the trees parted the branches a
little, the wavering lights brought some fragment of the mass to view.
No white thing showed anywhere. All was dark and vague. Indistinctly,
waveringly as in a vision, dusky heads could be made out. There showed
a naked arm, greasily shining for a second in the ruddy glow which now
diffused itself through the whole wood. Here the watchers saw a
glistening back; again, an out-thrust leg, small and crooked, apelike
and repulsive.
And once again the engineer got a glimpse of a misshapen hand, a long,
lean, hideous hand that clutched a spear. But, hardly seen, it
vanished into obscurity once more.
"Seems as though malformed human members, black and bestial, had been
flung at random into a ghastly kaleidoscope, turned by a madman!"
whispered Stern. The girl answering nothing, peered out in fascinated
horror.
Up, up to the watchers rose a steady droning hum; and from the
northward, ever louder, ever clearer, came now the war-song of the
attacking party. The drums began again, suddenly. A high-pitched,
screaming laugh echoed and died among the woods beyond the ruins of
Twenty-eighth street.
Still in through the western approaches of the square, more and more
lights kept straggling. Thicker and still more thick grew the press
below. Now the torch-glow was strong enough to cast its lurid
reflections on the vacant-staring wrecks of windows and of walls,
gaping like the shattered skulls of a civilization which was no more.
To the nostrils of the man and woman up floated an acrid, pitchy
smell. And birds, dislodged from sleep, began to zigzag about,
aimlessly, with frightened cries. One even dashed against the
building, close at hand; and fell, a fluttering, broken thing, to
earth.
Stern, with a word of hot anger, fingered his revolver. But Beatrice
laid her hand upon his arm.
"Not yet!" begged she.
He glanced down at her, where she stood beside him at the empty
embrasure of the window. The dim light from the vast and empty
overarch of sky, powdered with a wonder of stars, showed him the vague
outline of her face. Wistful and pale she was, yet very brave. Through
Stern welled a sudden tenderness.
He put his arm around her, and for a moment her head lay on his
breast.
But only a moment.
For, all at once, a snarling cry rang through the wood; and, with a
northward surge of the torch-bearers, a confused tumult of shrieks,
howls, simian chatterings and dull blows, the battle joined between
those two vague, strange forces down below in the black forest.
CHAPTER XVII
STERN'S RESOLVE
How long it lasted, what its meaning, its details, the watchers
could not tell. Impossible, from that height and in that gloom, broken
only by an occasional pale gleam of moonlight through the drifting
cloud-rack, to judge the fortunes of this primitive war.
They knew not the point at issue nor yet the tide of victory or loss.
Only they knew that back and forth the torches flared, the war-drums
boomed and rattled, the yelling, slaughtering, demoniac hordes surged
in a swirl of bestial murder-lust.
And so time passed, and fewer grew the drums, yet the torches flared
on; and, as the first gray dawn went fingering up the sky there came a
break, a flight, a merciless pursuit.
Dimly the man and woman, up aloft, saw things that ran and shrieked
and were cut down--saw things, there in the forest, that died even as
they killed, and mingled the howl of triumph with the bubbling gasp of
dissolution.
"Ugh! A beast war!" shuddered the engineer, at length, drawing
Beatrice away from the window. "Come, it's getting light, again. It's
too clear, now--come away!"
She yielded, waking as it were from the horrid fascination that had
held her spell-bound. Down she sat on her bed of furs, covered her
eyes with her hands, and for a while remained quite motionless. Stern
watched her. And again his hand sought the revolver-butt.
"I ought to have waded into that bunch, long ago," thought he. "We
both ought to have. What it's all about, who could tell? But it's an
outrage against the night itself, against the world, even dead though
it be. If it hadn't been for wasting good ammunition for nothing--!"
A curious, guttural whine, down there in the forest, attracted his
attention. Over to the window he strode, and once again peered down.
A change had come upon the scene, a sudden, radical change. No more
the sounds of combat rose; but now a dull, conclamant murmur as of
victory and preparation for some ghastly rite.
Already in the center of the wood, hard by the spring, a little fire
had been lighted. Even as Stern looked, dim, moving figures heaped on
wood. The engineer saw whirling droves of sparks spiral upward; he saw
dense smoke, followed by a larger flame.
And, grouped around this, already some hundreds of the now paling
torches cast their livid glare.
Off to one side he could just distinguish what seemed to be a group
engaged in some activity--but what this might be, he could not
determine. Yet, all at once a scream of pain burst out, therefrom; and
then a gasping cry that ended quickly and did not come again.
Another shriek, and still a third; and now into the leaping flames
some dark, misshapen things were flung, and a great shout arose.
Then rose, also, a shrill, singsong whine; and suddenly drams roared,
now with a different cadence.
"Hark!" said the engineer. "The torchmen must have exterminated the
other bunch, and got possession of the drums. They're using 'em,
themselves--and badly!"
By the firelight vague shapes came and went, their shadows grotesquely
flung against the leafy screens. The figures quickened their paces and
their gestures; then suddenly, with cries, flung themselves into wild
activity. And all about the fire, Stern saw a wheeling, circling,
eddying mob of black and frightful shapes.
"The swine!" he breathed. "Wait--wait till I make a pint or two of
Pulverite!"
Even as he spoke, the concourse grew quiet with expectancy. A silence
fell upon the forest. Something was being led forward toward the
fire--something, for which the others all made way.
The wind freshened. With it, increased the volume of smoke. Another
frightened bird, cheeping forlornly, fluttered above the tree-tops.
Then rose a cry, a shriek long-drawn and ghastly, that climbed till it
broke in a bubbling, choking gasp.
Came a sharp clicking sound, a quick scuffle, a grunt; then silence
once more.
And all at once the drums crashed; and the dance began again, madder,
more obscenely hideous than ever.
"Voodoo!" gulped Stern. "Obeah-work! And--and the quicker I get my
Pulverite to working, the better!"
Undecided no longer, determined now on a course of definite action
without further delay, the engineer turned back into the room. Upon
his forehead stood a cold and prickling sweat, of horror and disgust.
But to his lips he forced a smile, as, in the half light of the red
and windy dawn, he drew close to Beatrice.
Then all at once, to his unspeakable relief, he saw the girl was
sleeping.
Utterly worn out, exhausted and spent with the long strain, the
terrible fatigues of the past thirty-six hours, she had lain down and
had dropped off to sleep. There she lay at full length. Very beautiful
she looked, half seen in the morning gloom. One arm crossed her full
bosom; the other pillowed her cheek. And, bending close, Stern watched
her a long minute.
With strange emotion he heard her even breathing; he caught the
perfume of her warm, ripe womanhood. Never had she seemed to him so
perfect, so infinitely to be loved, to be desired.
And at thought of that beast-horde in the wood below, at realization
of what _might_ be, if they two should chance to be discovered and
made captive, his face went hard as iron. An ugly, savage look
possessed him, and he clenched both fists.
For a brief second he stooped still closer; he laid his lips
soundlessly, gently upon her hair. And when again he stood up, the
look in his eyes boded scant good to anything that might threaten the
sleeping girl.
"So, now to work!" said he.
Into his own room he stepped quietly, his room where he had collected
his various implements and chemicals. First of all he set out, on the
floor, a two-quart copper tea-kettle; and beside this, choosing
carefully, he ranged the necessary ingredients for a "making" of his
secret explosive.
"Now, the wash-out water," said he, taking another larger dish.
Over to the water-pail he walked. Then he stopped, suddenly, frowning
a black and puzzled frown.
"What?" he exclaimed. "But--there isn't a pint left, all together!
Hem! Now then, here _is_ a situation."
Hastily he recalled how the great labors of the previous day, the
wireless experiments and all, had prevented him from going out to the
spring to replenish his supply. Now, though he bitterly cursed himself
for his neglect, that did no good. The fact remained, there was no
water.
"Scant pint, maybe!" said he. "And I've got to have a gallon, at the
very least. To say nothing of drink for two people! _And_ the horde,
there, camping round the spring. Je-ru-salem!"
Softly he whistled to himself; then, trying to solve this vital,
unexpected problem, fell to pacing the floor.
Day, slowly looming through the window, showed his features set and
hard. Close at hand, the breath of morning winds stirred the treetops.
But of the usual busy twitter and gossip of birds among the branches,
now there was none. For down below there, in the forest, the ghoulish
vampire revels still held sway.
Stern, at a loss, swore hotly under his breath.
Then suddenly he found himself; he came to a decision.
"_I'm_ going down," he vowed. "I'm going down, to _see!_"
CHAPTER XVIII
THE SUPREME QUESTION
Now that his course lay clear before him, the man felt an
instant and a huge relief. Whatever the risks, the dangers, this
adventuring was better than a mere inaction, besieged there in the
tower by that ugly, misshapen horde.
First of all, as he had done on the first morning of the awakening,
when he had left the girl asleep, he wrote a brief communication to
forestall any possible alarm on her part. This, scrawled with charcoal
on a piece of smooth hide, ran:
"Have had to go down to get water and lay of the land. Absolutely
necessary. Don't be afraid. Am between you and them, well armed. Will
leave you both the rifle and the shotgun. Stay here, and have no fear.
Will come back as soon as possible. ALLAN."
He laid this primitive letter where, on awakening, she could not fail
to see it. Then, making sure again that all the arms were fully
charged, he put the rifle and the gun close beside his "note," and saw
to it that his revolvers lay loosely and conveniently in the holsters
she had made for him.
One more reconnaissance he made at the front window. This done, he
took the water-pail and set off quietly down the stairs. His feet were
noiseless as a cat's.
At every landing he stopped, listening intently. Down, ever down,
story by story he crept.
To his chagrin--though he had half expected worse--he found that the
boiler-explosion of the previous night had really made the way
impassible, from the third story downward. These lowest flights of
steps had been so badly broken, that now they gave no access to the
arcade.
All that remained of them was a jumbled mass of wreckage, below the
gaping hole in the third-floor hallway.
"_That_ means," said Stern to himself, "I've got to find another way
down. And quick, too!"
He set about the task with a will. Exploration of several lateral
corridors resulted in nothing; but at last good fortune led him to
stairs that had remained comparatively uninjured. And down these he
stole, pail in one hand, revolver ready in the other, listening,
creeping, every sense alert.
He found himself, at length, in the shattered and dismembered wreckage
of the once-famed "Marble Court." Fallen now were the carved and
gilded pillars; gone, save here or there for a fragment, the wondrous
balustrade. One of the huge newel-posts at the bottom lay on the
cracked floor of marble squares; the other, its metal chandelier still
clinging to it, lolled drunkenly askew.
But Stern had neither time nor inclination to observe these woful
changes. Instead, he pressed still forward, and, after a certain time
of effort, found himself in the arcade once more.
Here the effects of the explosion were very marked. A ghastly hole
opened into the subcellar below; masses of fallen ceiling blocked the
way; and every pane of glass in the shop-fronts had shattered down.
Smoke had blackened everything. Ashes and dirt, ad infinitum,
completed the dreary picture, seen there by the still insufficient
light of morning.
But Stern cared nothing for all this. It even cheered him a trifle.
"In case of a mix-up," thought he, "there couldn't be a better place
for ambushing these infernal cannibals--for mowing them down,
wholesale--for sending them skyhooting to Tophet, in bunches!"
And with a grim smile, he worked his way cautiously toward Madison
Forest and the pine-tree gate.
As he drew near, his care redoubled. His grip on the revolver-butt
tightened.
"They mustn't see me--_first!_" said he to himself.
Into a littered wreck of an office at the right of the exit he
silently crept. Here, he knew, the outer wall of the building was
deeply fissured. He hoped he might be able to find some peep-hole
where, unseen, he could peer out on the bestial mob.
He set his water-pail down, and on hands and knees, hardly breathing,
taking infinite pains not to stir the loose rubbish on the floor, not
even to crunch the fallen lumps of mortar, forward he crawled.
Yes, there _was_ a glimmer of light through the crack in the wall.
Stern silently wormed in between a corroded steel I-beam and a cracked
granite block, about the edges of which the small green tendrils of a
vine had laid their hold.
This way, then that, he craned his neck. And all at once, with a sharp
breath, he grew rigid in horrified, eager attention.
"Great Lord!" he whispered. "_What?_"
Though, from the upper stories and by torch-light, he had already
formed some notion of the Horde, he had in no wise been prepared for
what he now was actually beholding through a screen of sumacs that
grew along the wall outside.
"Why--why, this can't be real!" thought he. "It--must be some damned
hallucination. Eh? Am I awake? What the deuce!"
Paling a little, his eyes staring, mouth agape, the engineer stayed
there for a long minute unable to credit his own senses. For now he,
he, the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century, was
witnessing the strangest sight that ever a civilized being had looked
upon in the whole history of the world.
No vision of DeQuincey, no drug-born dream of Poe could equal it for
grisly fascination. Frankenstein, de Maupassant's "Horla," all the
fantastic literary monsters of the past faded to tawdry, childish
bogeys beside the actual observations of Stern, the engineer, the man
of science and cold fact.
"Why--what _are_ these?" he asked himself, shuddering despite himself
at the mere sight of what lay outside there in the forest. "What? Men?
Animals? Neither! God help me, what--_what are these things?_"
CHAPTER XIX
THE UNKNOWN RACE
An almost irresistible repugnance, a compelling aversion, more
of the spirit than of the flesh, instantly seized the man at sight of
even the few members of the Horde which lay within his view.
Though he had been expecting to see something disgusting, something
grotesque and horrible, his mind was wholly unprepared for the real
hideousness of these creatures, now seen by the ever-strengthening
light of day.
And slowly, as he stared, the knowledge dawned on him that here was a
monstrous problem to face, far greater and more urgent than he had
foreseen; here were factors not yet understood; here, the product of
forces till then not even dreamed of by his scientific mind.
"I--I certainly did expect to find a small race," thought he. "Small,
and possibly misshapen, the descendants, maybe, of a few survivors of
the cataclysm. But _this--!_"
And again, fascinated by the ghastly spectacle, he laid his eye to the
chink in the wall, and looked.
A tenuous fog still drifted slowly among the forest trees, veiling the
deeper recesses. Yet, near at hand, within the limited segment of
vision which the engineer commanded, everything could be made out with
reasonable distinctness.
Some of the Things (for so he mentally named them, knowing no better
term) were squatting, lying or moving about, quite close at hand. The
fire by the spring had now almost died down. It was evident that the
revel had ceased, and that the Horde was settling down to
rest--glutted, no doubt, with the raw and bleeding flesh of the
conquered foe.
Stern could easily have poked his pistol muzzle through the crack in
the wall and shot down many of them. For an instant the temptation lay
strong upon him to get rid of at least a dozen or a score; but
prudence restrained his hand.
"No use!" he told himself. "Nothing to be gained by that. But, once I
get my proper chance at them--!"
And again, striving to observe them with the cool and calculating eye
of science, he studied the shifting, confused picture out there before
him.
Then he realized that the feature which, above all else, struck him as
ghastly and unnatural, was the _color_ of the Things.
"Not black, not even brown," said he. "I thought so, last night, but
daylight corrects the impression. Not red, either, or copper-colored.
_What_ color, then? For Heaven's sake, what?"
He could hardly name it. Through the fog, it struck him as a dull
slate-gray, almost a blue. He recalled that once he had seen a child's
modeling-clay, much-used and very dirty, of the same shade, which
certainly had no designation in the chromatic scale. Some of the
Things were darker, some a trifle lighter--these, no doubt, the
younger ones--but they all partook of this same characteristic tint.
And the skin, moreover, looked dull and sickly, rather mottled and
wholly repulsive, very like that of a Mexican dog.
Like that dog's hide, too, it was sparsely overgrown with whitish
bristles. Here or there, on the bodies of some of the larger Things,
bulbous warts had formed, somewhat like those on a toad's back; and on
these warts the bristles clustered thickly. Stern saw the hair, on the
neck of one of these creatures, crawl and rise like a jackal's, as a
neighbor jostled him; and from the Thing's throat issued a clicking
grunt of purely animal resentment.
"Merciful Heavens! What _are_ they?" wondered Stern, again, utterly
baffled for any explanation. "What _can_ they be?"
Another, in the group close by, attracted his attention. It was lying
on its side, asleep maybe, its back directly toward the engineer.
Stern clearly saw the narrow shoulders and the thin, long arms,
covered with that white bristling hair.
One sprawling, spatulate, clawlike hand lay on the forest moss. The
twisted little apelike legs, disproportionately short, were curled up;
the feet, prehensile and with a well-marked thumb on each, twitched a
little now and then. The head, enormously too big for the body, to
which it was joined by a thin neck, seemed to be scantily covered with
a fine, curling down, of a dirty yellowish drab color.
"What a target!" thought the engineer. "At this distance, with my .38,
I could drill it without half trying!"
All at once, another of the group sat up, shoved away a burned-out
torch, and yawned with a noisy, doglike whine Stern got a quick yet
definite glimpse of the sharp canine teeth; he saw that the Thing's
fleshless lips and retreating chin were caked with dried blood. The
tongue he saw was long and lithe and apparently rasped.
Then the creature stood up, balancing on its absurd bandy legs, a
spear in its hand--a flint-pointed spear of crude workmanship.
At full sight of the face, Stern shrank for a moment.
"I've known savages, as such," thought he. "I understand them. I know
animals. They're animals, that's all. But _this_ creature--merciful
Heaven!"
And at the realization that it was neither beast nor man, the
engineer's blood chilled within his veins.
Yet he forced himself still to look and to observe, unseen. There was
practically no forehead at all. The nose was but a formless lump of
cartilage, the ears large and pendulous and hairy. Under heavy
brow-ridges, the dull, lackluster eyes blinked stupidly, bloodshot and
cruel. As the mouth closed, Stern noted how the under incisors closed
up over the upper lip, showing a gleam of dull yellowish ivory; a
slaver dripped from the doglike corner of the mouth.
Stern shivered, and drew back.
He realized now that he was in the presence of an unknown semi-human
type, different in all probability from any that had ever yet existed.
It was less their bestiality that disgusted him, than their utter,
hopeless, age-long degeneration from the man-standard.
What race had they descended from? He could not tell. He thought he
could detect a trace of the Mongol in the region of the eye, in the
cheek-bones and the general contour of what, by courtesy, might be
called the face. There were indications, also, of the negroid type,
still stronger. But the color--whence could _that_ have come? And the
general characteristics, were not these distinctly simian?
Again he looked. And now one of the pot-bellied little horrors,
shambling and bulbous-kneed, was scratching its warty, blue hide with
its black claws as it trailed along through the forest. It looked up,
grinning and jabbering; Stern saw the teeth that should have been
molars. With repulsion he noted that they were not flat-crowned, but
sharp like a dog's. Through the blue lips they clearly showed.
"Nothing herbivorous here," thought the scientist. "All flesh--food
of--who knows what sort!"
Quickly his mind ran over the outlines of the problem. He knew at once
that these Things were lower than any human race ever recorded, far
lower even than the famed Australian bushmen, who could not even count
as high as five. Yet, strange and more than strange, they had the use
of fire, of the tom-tom, of some sort of voodooism, of flint, of
spears, and of a rude sort of tanning--witness the loin-clouts of hide
which they all wore.
"Worse than any troglodyte!" he told himself. "Far lower than De
Quatrefage's Neanderthal man, to judge from the cephalic index--worse
than that Java skull, the pithecanthropus erectus, itself! And I am
with my living eyes beholding them!"
A slight sound, there behind him in the room, set his heart flailing
madly.
His hand froze to the butt of the automatic as he drew back from the
cleft in the wall, and, staring, whirled about, ready to shoot on the
second.
Then he started back. His jaw dropped, his eyes widened and limply
fell his arm. The pistol swung loosely at his side.
"_You?_--" he soundlessly breathed, "You--_here?_"
There at the door of the great empty room, magnificent m her
tiger-skin, the Krag gripped in her supple hand, stood Beatrice.
CHAPTER XX
THE CURIOSITY OF EVE
At him the girl peered eagerly, a second, as though to make
quite sure he was not hurt in any way, to satisfy herself that he was
safe and sound.
Then with a little gasp of relief, she ran to him. Her sandaled feet
lightly disturbed the rubbish on the floor; dust rose. Stern checked
her with an upraised hand.
"Back! Back! Go back, quick!" he formed the words of command on his
trembling lips. The idea of this girl's close proximity to the
beast-horde terrified him, for the moment. "Back! What on earth are
you _here_ for?"
"I--I woke up. I found you gone!" she whispered.
"Yes, but didn't you read my letter? _This_ is no place for you!"
"I had to come! How could I stay up there, alone, when you--were--oh!
maybe in danger--maybe in need of me?"
"Come!" he commanded, in his perturbation heedless of the look she
gave him. He took her hand. "Come, we must get out of this! It's
too--too near the--"
"The _what?_ What _is_ it, Allan? Tell me, have you seen them? Do you
know?"
Even excited as the engineer was, he realized that for the first time
the girl had called him by his Christian name. Not even the perilous
situation could stifle the thrill that ran through him at the sound of
it. But all he answered was:
"No, I don't know _what_ to call them. Have no idea, as yet. I've seen
them, yes; but what they are, Heaven knows--maybe!"
"Let me see, too!" she pleaded eagerly. "Is it through that crack in
the wall? Is that the place to look?"
She moved toward it, her face blanched with excitement, eyes shining,
lips parted. But Stern held her back. By the shoulder he took her.
"No, no, little girl!" he whispered. "You--you mustn't! Really must
_not_, you know. It's too awful!"
Up at him she looked, knowing not what to think or say for a moment.
Their eyes met, there in that wrecked and riven place, lighted by the
dull, misty, morning gray. Then Stern spoke, for in her gaze abode
questions unnumbered.
"I'd much rather you wouldn't look out at them, not just yet," said
he, speaking very low, fearful lest the murmur of his voice might
penetrate the wall. "Just what they are, frankly, there's no telling."
"You mean--?"
"Come back into the arcade, where we'll be safer from discovery, and
we can talk. Not here. Come!"
She obeyed. Together they retreated to the inner court.
"You see," he commented, nodding at the empty water-pail, "I haven't
been to the spring yet. Not very likely to get there for a while,
either, unless--well, unless something pretty radical happens. I think
these chaps have settled down for a good long stay in their happy
hunting-ground, after the fight and the big feast. It's sort of a
notion I've got, that this place, here, is some ancient, ceremonial
ground of theirs."
"You mean, on account of the tower?"
He nodded.
"Yes, if they've got any religious ideas at all, or rather
superstitions, such would very likely center round the most
conspicuous object in their world. Probably the spring is a regular
voodoo hangout. The row, last night, must have been a sort of periodic
argument to see who was going to run the show."
"But," exclaimed the girl, in alarm--"but if they _do_ stay a while,
what about us? We simply must have water!"
"True enough. And, inasmuch as we can't drink brine and don't know
where there's any other spring, it looks as though we'd either have to
make up to these fellows or wade into them, doesn't it? But we'll get
water safe enough, never fear. Just now, for the immediate present, I
want to get my bearings a little, before going to work. _They_ seem to
be resting up, a bit, after their pleasant little soiree. Now, if
they'd only all go to sleep, it'd be a walk-over!"
The girl looked at him, very seriously.
"You mustn't go out there alone, whatever happens!" she exclaimed. "I
just won't let you! But tell me," she questioned again, "how much have
you really found out about them--whatever they are."
"Not much. They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human
things, that's about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white and
yellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving only a few
scattered blacks. You know blacks _are_ immune to several
germ-infections that destroy other races."
"Yes. And you mean--?"
"It's quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degenerate
survivors of that other time."
"So the whole world may have gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti
and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased?"
"Yes, only a million times more so. I see you know your history! _If_
my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, you
can easily imagine what must have happened."
"For a while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some
sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a
while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have
been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads,
steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of
that wonderfully complex system we once knew. But after a while--"
"Yes? What _then?_"
"Why, the whole false shell crumbled, that's all. It must have!
History shows it. It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint
L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off
French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice--to
make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods
districts, at any rate. And _we_--have had a thousand, Beatrice, since
the white man died!"
She thought a moment, and shook her head.
"What a story," she murmured, "what an incredible, horribly
fascinating story that would make, if it could ever be known, or
written! Think of the ebb-tide of everything! Railroads abandoned and
falling to pieces, cities crumbling, ships no longer sailing, language
and arts and letters forgotten, agriculture shrinking back to a few
patches of corn and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everything
changing, dying, stopping--and the ever-increasing yet degenerating
people leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild--taking to
the fields, the forests, the mountains--going down, down, back toward
the primeval state, down through barbarism, through savagery,
to--what?"
"To what we see!" answered the engineer, bitterly. "To animals,
retaining by ghastly mockery some use of fire and of tools. All this,
according to _one_ theory."
"Is there another?" she asked eagerly.
"Yes, and I wish we had the shade of Darwin, of Haeckel or of Clodd
here with us to help us work it out!"
"How do you imagine it?"
"Why, like this. Maybe, after all, even the entire black race was
swept out along with the others, too. Perhaps you and I were really
the only two human beings left alive in the world."
"Yes, but in that case, how--?"
"How came _they_ here? Listen! May they not be the product of some
entirely different process of development? May not some animal stock,
under changed environment, have easily evolved them? May not some
other semi-human or near-human race be now in process of arising, here
on earth, eventually to conquer and subdue it all again?"
For a moment she made no answer. Her breath came a little quickly as
she tried to grasp the full significance of this tremendous concept.
"In a million years, or so," the engineer continued, "may not the
descendants of these things once more be men, or something very like
them? In other words, aren't we possibly witnessing the recreation of
the human type? Aren't _these_ the real pithecanthropi erecti,
rather than the brown-skinned, reddish-haired creatures of the
biological text-books? There's our problem!"
She made no answer, but a sudden overmastering curiosity leaped into
her eyes.
"Let me see them for myself! I must! I will!"
And before he could detain her, the girl had started back into the
room whence they had come.
"No, no! No, Beatrice!" he whispered, but she paid no heed to him.
Across the littered floor she made her way. And by the time Stern
could reach her side, she had set her face to the long, crumbling
crack in the wall and with a burning eagerness was peering out into
the forest.
CHAPTER XXI
EVE BECOMES AN AMAZON
Stern laid a hand on her shoulder, striving to draw her away.
This spectacle, it seemed to him, was no fit sight for her to gaze on.
But she shrugged her shoulders as if to say: "I'm not a child! I'm
your equal, now, and I must see!" So the engineer desisted. And he,
too, set his eye to the twisting aperture.
At sight of the narrow segment of forest visible through it, and of
the several members of the Horde, a strong revulsion came upon him.
Up welled a deep-seated love for the memory of the race of men and
women as they once had been--the people of the other days. Stern
almost seemed to behold them again, those tall, athletic,
straight-limbed men; those lithe, deep-breasted women, fair-skinned
and with luxuriant hair; all alike now plunged for a thousand years in
the abyss of death and of eternal oblivion.
Never before had the engineer realized how dear, how infinitely close
to him his own race had been. Never had he so admired its diverse
types of force and beauty, as now, now when all were but a dream.
"Ugh!" thought he, disgusted beyond measure at the sight before him.
"And all _these_ things are just as much alike as so many ants in a
hill! I question if they've got the reason and the socialized
intelligence of ants!"
He heard the girl breathe quick, as she, too, watched what was going
on outside. A certain change had taken place there. The mist had
somewhat thinned away, blown by the freshening breeze through Madison
Forest and by the higher-rising sun. Both watchers could new see
further into the woods; and both perceived that the Horde was for the
most part disposing itself to sleep.
Only a few vague, uncertain figures were now moving about, with a
strangely unsteady gait, weak-kneed and simian.
In the nearest group, which Stern had already had a chance to study,
all save one of the creatures had lain down. The man and woman could
quite plainly hear the raucous and bestial snoring of some half-dozen
of the gorged Things.
"Come away, you've seen enough, more than enough!" he whispered in the
girl's ear.
She shook her head.
"No, no!" she answered, under her breath. "How horrible--and yet, how
wonderful!"
Then a misfortune happened; trivial yet how direly pregnant!
For Stern, trying to readjust his position, laid his right hand on the
wall above his head.
A little fragment of loose marble, long since ready to fall, dislodged
itself and bounced with a sharp click against the steel I-beam over
which they were both peeking.
The sound, perhaps, was no greater than you would make in snapping an
ordinary lead-pencil in your fingers; yet on the instant three of the
Things raised their bulbous and exaggerated heads in an attitude of
intense, suspicious listening. Plain to see that their senses, at
least, excelled those of the human being, even as a dog's might.
The individual which, alone of them all, had been standing, wheeled
suddenly round and made a step or two toward the building. Both
watchers saw him with terrible distinctness, there among the sumacs
and birches, with the beauty of which he made a shocking contrast.
Plain now was the simian aspect, plain the sidelong and uncertain
gait, bent back and crooked legs, the long, pendulous arms and dully
ferocious face.
And as the Thing listened, its hair bristling, it thrust its
villainous, apelike head well forward. Open fell the mouth, revealing
the dog-teeth and the blue, shriveled-looking gums.
A wrinkle creased the low, dull brow. Watching with horrified
fascination, Stern and Beatrice beheld--and heard--the creature sniff
the air, as though taking up some scent of danger or of the hunt.
Then up came the right arm; they saw the claw-hand with a spear, poise
itself a moment. From the open mouth burst with astounding force and
suddenness a snarling yowl, inarticulate, shrill, horrible beyond all
thinking.
An instant agitation took place all through the forest. The watchers
could see only a small, fan-like space of it--and even this, only a
few rods from the building--yet by the confused, vague noise that
began, they knew the alarm had been given to the whole Horde.
Here, there, the cry was repeated. A shifting, moving sound began. In
the visible group, the Things were getting to their handlike feet,
standing unsteadily on their loose-skinned, scaly legs, gawping about
them, whining and clicking with disgusting sounds.
Sudden, numbing fear seized Beatrice. Now for the first time she
realized the imminent peril; now she regretted her insistence on
seeing the Horde at close range.
She turned, pale and shaken; and her trembling hand sought the
engineer's.
He still, for a moment, kept his eye to the crack, fascinated by the
very horror of the sight. Then all at once another figure shambled
into view.
"A female one!" he realized, shuddering. Too monstrously hideous, this
sight, to be endured. With a gasp, the man turned back.
About Beatrice he drew his arm. Together, almost as soundlessly as
wraiths, they stole away, out through the office, out to the hallway,
into the dim light of the arcade once more.
Here, for a few moments, they knew that they were safe. Retreat
through the Marble Court and up the stairs was fairly clear. There was
but one entrance open into the arcade, the one through Pine Tree Gate;
and this was blocked so narrowly by the giant bole that Stern knew
there could be no general mob-rush through it--no attack which he
could not for a while hold back, so long as his ammunition and the
girl's should last.
Thus they breathed more freely now. Most of the tumult outside had
been cut off from their hearing, by the retirement into the arcade.
They paused, to plan their course.
At Stern the girl looked eagerly.
"Oh, oh, Allan--how horrible!" she whispered. "It was all my fault for
having been so headstrong, for having insisted on a look at them!
Forgive me!"
"S-h!" he cautioned again. "No matter about that. The main thing, now,
is whether we attack or wait?"
"Attack? Now?"
"I don't think much of going up-stairs without that pail of water.
We'll have a frightful time with thirst, to say nothing of not being
able to make the Pulverite. Water we must have! If it weren't for your
being here, I'd mighty soon wade into that bunch and see who wins!
But--well, I haven't any right to endanger--"
Beatrice seized his hand and pulled him toward the doorway.
"Come on!" cried she. "If you and I aren't a match for _them_, we
don't deserve to live, that's all. You know how I can shoot now! Come
along!"
Her eyes gleamed with the light of battle, battle for liberty, for
life; her cheeks glowed with the tides of generous blood that coursed
beneath the skin. Never had Stern beheld her half so beautiful, so
regal in that clinging, barbaric Bengal robe of black and yellow,
caught at the throat with the clasp of raw gold.
A sudden impulse seized him, dominant, resistless. For a brief moment
he detained her; he held her back; about her supple body his arm
tightened.
She raised her face in wonder. He bent, a little, and on the brow he
kissed her rapturously.
"Thank God for such a comrade and a--friend!" said he.
CHAPTER XXII
GODS!
Some few minutes later, together they approached Pine Tree
Gate, leading directly out into the Horde.
The girl, rosier than ever, held her Krag loosely in the hollow of her
bare, warm right arm. One of Stern's revolvers lay in its holster. The
other balanced itself in his right hand. His left held the precious
water-pail, so vital now to all their plans and hopes.
Girt in his garb of fur, belted and sandaled, well over six feet tall
and broad of shoulder, the man was magnificent. His red beard and
mustache, close-cropped, gave him a savage air that now well fitted
him. For Stern was mad--mad clear through.
That Beatrice should suffer in any way, even from temporary thirst,
raised up a savage resentment in his breast. The thought that perhaps
it might _not_ be possible to gain access to the spring at all, that
these foul Things might try to blockade them and siege them to death,
wrought powerfully on him.
For himself he cared nothing. The girl it was who now preoccupied his
every thought. And as they made their way through the litter of the
explosion, toward the exit, slowly and cautiously, he spied out every
foot of the place for possible danger.
If fight he must, he knew now it would be a brutal, utterly merciless
fight--slaughter, extermination without any limit, to the end.
But there was scant time for thought. Already they could see daylight
glimmering in through the gate, past me massive column of the conifer.
Daylight--and with it came a thin and acrid smoke--and sounds of the
uproused Horde in Madison Forest.
"Slow! Slow, now!" whispered Stern. "Don't let 'em know a thing until
we've got 'em covered! If we surprise 'em just right, who knows but
the whole infernal mob may duck and run? Don't shoot till you have to;
but when you _do_--!"
"I know!" breathed she.
Then, all at once, there they were at the gate, at the big tree,
standing out there in the open, on the thick carpet of pine-spills.
And before them lay the mossy, shaded forest aisles--with what a
horror camped all through that peaceful, wondrous place!
"Oh!" gasped Beatrice. The engineer stopped as though frozen. His hand
tightened on the revolver-butt till the knuckles whitened. And thus,
face to face with the Horde, they stood for a long minute.
Neither of them realized exactly the details of that first impression.
The narrow slit of view which they had already got through the crack
in the wall had only very imperfectly prepared them for any
understanding of what these Things really were, en masse.
But both Beatrice and the engineer understood, even at the first
moment of their exit there, that they had entered an adventure whereof
the end could not be foreseen; that here before them lay possibilities
infinitely more serious than any they had contemplated.
For one thing, they had underestimated the numbers of the Horde. They
had thought, perhaps, there might be five hundred in all.
The torches had certainly numbered no more than that. But now they
realized that the torch-bearers had been but a very small fraction of
the whole; for, as their eyes swept out through the forest, whence the
fog had almost wholly risen, they beheld a moving, swarming mass of
the creatures on every hand. A mass that seemed to extend on, on to
indefinite vistas. A mass that moved, clicked, shifted, grunted,
stank, snarled, quarreled. A mass of frightful hideousness, of
inconceivable menace.
The girl's first impulse was to turn, to retreat back into the
building once more; but her native courage checked it. For Stern, she
saw, had no such purpose.
Surprised though he was, he stood there like a rock, head up, revolver
ready, every muscle tense and ready for whatsoever might befall. And
through the girl flashed a thrill of admiration for this virile,
indomitable man, coping with every difficulty, facing every peril--for
her sake.
Yet the words he uttered now were not of classic heroism. They were
simple, colloquial, inelegant. For Stern, his eyes blazing, said only:
"We're in bad, girl! They're on--we've got to bluff--bluff like the
devil!"
Have you ever seen a herd of cattle on the prairie, a herd of
thousands, shift and face and, as by instinct, lower their horned
heads against some enemy--a wolf-pack, maybe?
You know then, how this Horde of dwarfish, blue, warty, misformed
little horrors woke to the presence of the unknown enemy.
Already half alarmed by the warning given by the one, which, near the
crack in the wall, had sniffed the intruders and had howled, the pack
now broke into commotion. Stern and Beatrice saw a confused upheaving,
a shifting and a tumult. They heard a yapping outcry. The long, thin
spears began to bristle.
And all at once, as a dull, ugly hornet-hum rose through the wood,
they knew the moment for quick action was upon them.
"Here goes!" cried Stern, raging. "Let's see how _this_ will strike
the hell-hounds!"
His face white with passion and with loathing hate, he raised the
automatic. He aimed at none of the pack, for angry as he was he
realized that the time was not yet come for killing, if other means to
reach the spring could possibly avail.
Instead he pointed the ugly blue muzzle up toward the branches of a
maple, under which a dense swarm of the Horde had encamped and now was
staring, apelike, at him.
Then his finger sought the trigger. And five crackling spurts of
flame, five shots spat out into the calm and misty air of morning. A
few severed leaves swayed down, idly, with a swinging motion. A broken
twig fell, hung suspended a moment, then detached itself again and
crapped to earth.
"Good Lord! Look a' _that_, will you?" cried Stern.
A startled cry broke from the girl's lips.
Both of them had expected some effect from the sudden fusillade, but
nothing like that which actually resulted.
For, as the quick shots echoed to stillness again, and even before the
first of the falling leaves had spiraled to the ground, an absolute,
unbroken silence fell upon that vile rabble of beast-men--the silence
of a numbing, paralyzing, sheer brute terror.
Some stood motionless, crouching on their bandy legs, holding to
whatsoever tree or bush was nearest, staring with wild eyes.
Others dropped to their knees.
But by far the greater part, thousands on thousands of the little
monstrosities, fell prone and grovelling. Their hideous masklike faces
hidden, there they lay on the moss and all among the undergrowth, the
trampled, desecrated, befouled undergrowth of Madison Forest.
Then all at once, over and beyond them, Stern saw the blue-curling
smudge of the remains of the great fire by the spring.
He knew that, for a few brief, all-precious moments, the way might
possibly be clear to come and go--to get water--to save Beatrice and
himself from the thirst--tortures--to procure the one necessary thing
for the making of his Pulverite.
His heart gave a great, up-bounding leap.
"Look, Beatrice!" cried he, his voice ringing out over the
terror-stricken things. "Look--we're gods! While this lasts--_gods!_
Come, now's our only chance! _Come on!_--"
CHAPTER XXIII
THE OBEAH
Together, as in a dream--a nightmare, dazed, incredible,
grotesque--they advanced out into the dim-shaded forest aisles.
"Don't look!" Stern exclaimed, shuddering at sight of the unspeakable
hideousness of the Things, at glimpses of gnawed bones, grisly bits of
flesh, dried gouts of blood upon the woodland carpet. "Don't
think--just come along!
"Five minutes, and we're safe, there and back again. S-h-h-h! Don't
hurry! Count, now--count your steps--one, two, three--four, five,
six--steady, steady!--"
Now they were ten yards from the tower, now twenty. Bravely they
walked, now straight ahead among the trees, now circling some
individual, some horrid group. Stern held the water-pail firmly. He
gripped the revolver in a grasp of iron. The magazine-rifle lay in
both the girl's hands, ready for instant use.
Suddenly Stern fired again, three shots.
"Some of 'em are moving, over there!" he said in a crisp, ugly tone.
"I guess a little lead close to their ears will fix 'em for a while!"
His voice went to a hoarse whisper.
"Gods!" he repeated. "Don't forget it, for a moment; don't lose that
thought, for it may pull us through! These creatures here, _if_
they're descended from the blacks, must have some story, some
tradition of the white man. Of his mastery, his power! We'll use it
now, by Heaven, as it never yet was used!"
Then he began to count again; and so, tense, watching with
eager-burning eyes and taut muscles, the man and woman made their way
of frightful peril.
A snuffling howl rose.
"You will, will you?" Stern cried, adding another kick to the one he
had just dealt to one of the creatures, who had ventured to look up at
their approach. "Lie down, ape!" And with the clangorous metal pail he
smote the ugly, brutish skull.
Beatrice gasped with fear; but the bluff made good. The creature
grovelled, and again the pair strode forward, masterfully. Masterfully
they had to go, or not at all. Masterfully, or die. For now their
all-in-all lay just in that grim, steel-hard sense of mastery.
Before the girl's eyes a sort of haze seemed forming. Her heart beat
thick and heavy. Stern's counting sounded very far away and strange;
she hardly recognized his voice. To her came wild, disjointed,
confused impressions--now a bony and distorted back, now a simian
head; again a group that crouched and cowered in its filthy squalor,
hideously.
Then all at once, there right before her she saw the little woodland
path that, slightly descending, led past a big oak she well knew, down
to the margin of the pool.
"Steady, girl, steady!" came the engineer's warning, tense as
piano-wire. "Almost there, now. What's _that?_"
For a brief instant he hesitated. The girl felt his arm grow even more
taut, she heard his breath catch. Then she, too, looked--and saw.
It was enough, that sight, to have smitten with sick horror the
bravest man who ever lived. For there, beside the smouldering embers
of the great feast-fire, littered with bones and indescribable refuse,
a creature was squatting on its hams--one of the Horde, indeed, yet
vastly different, tremendously more venomous, more dangerous of
aspect.
Stern knew at once that here, not prostrate nor yet crouching, was the
chief of the blue Horde.
He knew it by the superior size and strength of the Thing, by the
almost manlike cunning of the low, gorilla face, the gleam of
intelligence in the reddened eye, the crude wreath of maple-leaves
upon the head, the necklace of finger-bones strung around the neck.
But most of all, he knew it by a thing that shocked him more than the
sight of stark, outright cannibalism would have done. A simple thing,
yet how ominous! A thing that argued reason in this reversion from the
human; a thing that sent the shuddering chills along the engineer's
spine.
For the chief, the obeah-man of this vile drove, rising now from
beside the fire with a gibbering chatter and a look of bestial malice,
held between his fangs a twisted brown leaf.
Stern knew at a glance the leaf was the rudely cured product of some
degenerated tobacco-plant. He saw a glow of red at the tip of the
close-rolled tobacco. Vapor issued from the chief's slit-mouth.
"Good Lord--he's--_smoking!_" stammered the engineer. "And _that_
means--means an almost human brain. And--quick, Beatrice, the water! I
didn't expect this! Thought they were all alike. Back to the tower,
quick! Here, fill the pail--I'll keep him covered!"
Up he brought the automatic, till the bead lay fair upon the naked,
muscular breast of the obeah.
Beatrice handed Stern the rifle, then snatching the pail, dipped it,
filled it to the brim. Stern heard the water lap and gurgle. He knew
it was but a few seconds, yet it seemed an hour to him, at the very
least.
Keener than ever before in his whole life, his mental pictures now
limned themselves with lightning rapidity upon his brain.
Stamped on his consciousness was this lithe, lean, formidable body,
showing beyond dispute its human ancestry; the right hand that held a
_steel-pointed_ spear; the horrible ornament (a withered little smoked
hand) that dangled from the left wrist by a cord of platted fiber.
Vividly Stern beheld a deep gash or scar that ran from the chief's
right eye--a dull, fishlike eye, evidently destroyed by that
wound--down across the leathery cheek, across the prognathous jaw; a
reddish-purple wale, which on that clay-blue skin produced an effect
indescribably repulsive.
Then the chief grunted, and moved forward, toward them. Stern saw that
the gait was almost human, not shuffling and uncertain like that of
the others, but firm and vigorous. He estimated the height at more
than five feet, eight inches; the weight at possibly one hundred and
forty pounds. Even at that juncture, his scientific mind, always
accustomed to judging, instinctively registered these data, with the
others.
"Here, you, get back there!" shouted Stern, as the girl rose again
from filling the pail.
The cry was instinctive, for even as he uttered it, he knew it could
not be understood. A thousand years of rapid degeneration had long
wiped all traces of English speech from the brute-men, who now, at
most, chattered some bestial gibberish. Yet the warning echoed loudly
through Madison Forest; and the obeah hesitated.
The tone, perhaps, conveyed some meaning to that brain behind the
sloping forehead. Perhaps some dim, racial memory of human speech
still lingered in that mind, in that strange organism which, by some
freak of atavism, had "thrown back" out of the mire of returning
animality almost to the human form and stature once again.
However that may have been, the creature-chief halted in his advance.
Undecided he stood a moment, leaning upon his spear, sucking at the
rude mockery of a cigar. Stern remembered having seen Consul, the
trained chimpanzee, smoke in precisely the same manner, and a nameless
loathing filled him at his mockery of the dead, buried past.
"Let me carry the pail!" said he. "We've got to hurry--hurry--or it
may be too late!"
"No, no--I'll keep the water!" she answered, panting. "You need both
hands clear! Come!"
Thus they turned, and, with a shuddering glance behind, started back
for the tower again.
But the obeah, with a whining plaint, spat away his tobacco-leaf. They
heard a shuffle of feet. And, looking round again, both saw that he
had crossed the little brook.
There he stood now, his right hand out, palm upward, his lips curled
in the ghastly imitation of a smile, blue gums and yellow lushes
showing, a sight to freeze the blood with horror. Yet through it all,
the meaning was most clearly evident.
Beatrice, laden as she was with the heavy water-bucket, more precious
now to them than all the wealth of the dead world, would still have
retreated, but with a word of stern command he bade her wait. He
stopped short in his tracks.
"Not a step!" commanded he. "Hold on! _If_ he makes friends with
us--with gods--that's a million times better every way! Hold on--wait,
no--this is _his_ move."
He faced the obeah. His left hand gripped the repeating rifle, his
right the automatic, held in readiness for instant action. The muzzle
sight never for a second left its aim at the chief's heart.
And for a second silence fell there in the forest. Save for the
rustling murmur of the Horde, and a faint, woodland trickle of the
stream, you might have thought the place untouched by life.
Yet death lurked there, and destiny--the destiny of the whole world,
the future, the human race, forever and ever without end; and the
cords of Fate were being loosed for a new knitting.
And Stern, with Beatrice there at his side, stood harsh and strong and
very grim; stood like an incarnation of man's life, waiting.
And slowly, step by step, over the yielding, noiseless moss, the
grinning, one-eyed, ghastly obeah-man came nearer, nearer still.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE FIGHT IN THE FOREST
Now the Thing was close, very close to them, while a hush lay
upon the watching Horde and on the forest. So close, that Stern could
hear the soughing breath between those hideous lips and see the
twitching of the wrinkled lid over the black, glittering eye that
blinked as you have often seen a chimpanzee's.
All at once the obeah stopped. Stopped and leered, his head craned
forward, that ghastly rictus on his mouth.
Stern's hot anger welled up again. Thus to be detained, inspected and
seemingly made mock of by a creature no more than three-quarters
human, stung the engineer to rage.
"What do _you_ want?" cried he, in a thick and unsteady voice.
"Anything I can do for you? If not, I'll be going."
The creature shook its head. Yet something of Stern's meaning may have
won to its smoldering intelligence. For now it raised a hand. It
pointed to the pail of water, then to its own mouth; again it
indicated the pail, then stretched a long, repulsive finger at the
mouth of Stern.
The meaning seemed clear. Stern, even as he stood there in anger--and
in wonder, too, at the fearlessness of this superthing--grasped the
significance of the action.
"Why, he must mean," said he, to Beatrice, "he must be trying to ask
whether we intend to drink any of the water, what? Maybe it's
poisoned, now, or something! Maybe he's trying to warn us!"
"Warn us? Why should he?"
"How can I tell? It isn't entirely impossible that he still retains
some knowledge of his human ancestors. Perhaps that tradition may have
been handed down, some way, and still exists in the form of a crude
beast-religion."
"Yes, but then--?"
"Perhaps he wants to get in touch with us, again; learn from us; try
to struggle up out of the mire of degeneration, who knows? If so--and
it's possible--of course he'd try to warn us of a poisoned spring!"
Acting on this hypothesis, of which he was now half-convinced, Stern
nodded. By gesture-play he answered: Yes. Yes, this woman and he
intended to drink of the water. The obeah-man, grinning, showed signs
of lively interest. His eyes brightened, and a look of craft, of
wizened cunning crept over his uncanny features.
Then he raised his head and gave a long, shrill, throaty call,
ululating and unspeakably weird.
Something stirred in the forest. Stern heard a rustle and a creeping
murmur; and quick fear chilled his heart.
To him it seemed as though a voice were calling, perhaps the inner,
secret voice of his own subjective self--a voice that cried:
"You, who must drink water--now _he_ knows you are not gods, but
mortal creatures. Tricked by his question and your answer, your peril
now is on you! _Flee!_"
The voice died. Stern found himself, with a strange, taut eagerness
tingling all through him, facing the obeah and--and _not daring to
turn his back_.
Retreat they must, he knew. Retreat, at once! Already in the forest he
understood that heads were being lifted, beastlike ears were
listening, brute eyes peering and ape-hands clutching the little,
flint-pointed spears. Already the girl and he should have been
half-way back to the tower; yet still, inhibited by that slow,
grinning, staring advance of the chief, there the engineer stood.
But all at once the spell was broken.
For with a cry, a hoarse and frightful yell of passion, the obeah
leaped--leaped like a huge and frightfully agile ape--leaped the whole
distance intervening.
Stern saw the Thing's red-gleaming eyes fixed on Beatrice. In those
eyes he clearly saw the hell-flame of lust. And as the woman screamed
in terror, Stern pulled trigger with a savage curse.
The shot went wild. For at the instant--though he felt no pain--his
arm dropped down and sideways.
Astounded, he looked. Something was wrong! What? His trigger-finger
refused to serve. It had lost all power, all control.
For God's sake, what could it be?
Then--all this taking but a second--Stern saw; he knew the truth.
Staring, pale and horrified, he understood.
There, through the fleshy part of his forearm, thrust clean from side
to side by a lightning-swift stroke, he saw the obeah's spear!
It dangled strangely in the firm muscles. The steel barb and full
eighteen inches of the shaft were red and dripping.
Yet still the engineer felt no slightest twinge of pain.
From his numbed, paralyzed hand the automatic dropped, fell
noiselessly into the moss.
And with a formless roar of killing-rage, Stern swung on the obeah,
with the rifle.
Stern felt his heart about to burst with hate. He did not even think
of the second revolver in the holster at his side. With only his left
hand now to use, the weapon could only have given clumsy service.
Instead, the man reverted instantly to the jungle stage, himself--to
the law of claw and fang, of clutching talon, of stone and club.
The beloved woman's cry, ringing in his ears, drove him mad. Up he
whirled the Krag again, up, up, by the muzzle; and down upon that
villainous skull he dashed it with a force that would have brained an
ox.
The obeah, screeching, reeled back. But he was not dead. Not dead,
only stunned a moment. And Stern, horrified, found himself holding
only a gun-barrel. The stock, shattered, had whirled away and vanished
among the tall and waving ferns.
Beatrice snatched up the fallen revolver. She stumbled; and the pail
was empty. Spurting, splashing away, the precious water flew. No time,
now, for any more.
For all about them, behind them and on every hand, the Things were
closing in.
They had seen blood--had heard the obeah's cry; they knew! Not gods,
now, but mortal creatures! _Not gods!_
"Run! _Run!_" gasped Beatrice.
The spear still hanging from his arm, Stern wheeled and followed. High
and hard he swung the rifle-barrel, like a war-club.
No counting of steps, now; no play at divinity. Panting,
horror-stricken, frenzied with rage, bleeding, they ran. It was a
hunt--the hunt of the last two humans by the nightmare Horde.
In front, a bluish and confused mass seemed to dance and quiver
through the forest; and a pattering rain of spears and little arrows
began to fall about the fugitives.
Then the girl's revolver sputtered in a quick volley; and again, for a
space, silence fell. The way again was clear. But in the path, silent
and still, or writhing horribly, lay a few of the Things. And the
pine-needles and soft moss were very red, in spots.
Stern had his pistol out too, by now. For behind and on his flanks,
like ferrets hanging to a hunted creature, the swarm was closing in.
The engineer, his face very white and drawn, veins standing out on his
sweat-beaded forehead, heard Beatrice cry out to him, but he could not
understand her words.
Yet as they ran, he saw her level the pistol and snap the hammer
twice, thrice, with no result. The little dead click sounded like a
death-warrant to him.
"Empty?" cried he. "Here, take this one! You can shoot better now than
I can!" And into her hand he thrust the second revolver.
Something stung him on the left shoulder. He glanced round. A dart was
hanging there.
With an oath, the engineer wheeled about. His eyes burned and his lips
drew back, taut, from his fine white teeth.
There, already recovered from the blow which would have killed a man
ten times over, he saw the obeah snarling after him. Right down along
the path the monster was howling, beating his breast with both huge
fists. And, now feeling fear no more than pain, Stern crouched to meet
his onslaught.
CHAPTER XXV
THE GOAL, AND THROUGH IT
It all happened in a moment of time, a moment, long--in
seeming--as an hour. The girl's revolver crackled, there behind him.
Stern saw a little round bluish hole take shape in the obeah's ear,
and red drops start.
Then with a ghastly screaming, the Thing was upon him.
Out struck the engineer, with the rifle-barrel. All the force of his
splendid muscles lay behind that blow. The Thing tried to dodge. But
Stern had been too quick.
Even as it sprang, with talons clutching for the man's throat, the
steel barrel drove home on the jaw.
An unearthly, piercing yell split the forest air. Then Stern saw the
obeah, his jaw hanging oddly awry, all loose and shattered, fall
headlong in the path.
But before he could strike again, could batter in the base of the
tough skull, a moan from Beatrice sent him to her aid.
"Oh, God!" he cried, and sank beside her on his knees.
On her forehead, as she lay gasping among the bushes, he saw an ugly
welt.
"A stone? They've hit her with a stone! Killed her, perhaps?"
Kneeling there, up he snatched the revolver, and in a deadly fire he
poured out the last spitting shots, pointblank in the faces of the
crowding rabble.
Up he leaped. The rifle barrel flashed and glittered as he whirled it.
Like a reaper, laying a clean swath behind him, the engineer mowed
down a dozen of the beast-men.
Shrieks, grunts, snarls, mingled with his execrations.
Then fair into a jabbering ape-face he flung the bloodstained barrel.
The face fell, faded, vanished, as hideous illusions fade in a dream.
And Stern, with a strength he never dreamed was his, caught up the
fainting girl in his left arm, as easily as though she had been a
child.
Still dragging the spear which pierced his right--his right that yet
protected her a little--he ran.
Stones, darts, spears, clattered in about him. He heard the swish and
tang of them; heard the leaves flutter as the missiles whirled
through.
Struck? Was he struck again?
He knew not, nor cared. Only he thought of shielding Beatrice. Nothing
but that, just that!
"The gate--oh, let me reach the gate! God! The gate--"
And all of a sudden, though how he could not tell, there he seemed to
see the gate before him. Could it be? Or was that, too, a dream? A
cruel, vicious mockery of his disordered mind?
Yes--the gate! It must be! He recognized the giant pine, in a moment
of lucidity. Then everything began to dance again, to quiver in the
mocking sunlight.
"The gate!" he gasped once more, and staggered on. Behind him, a
little trail of blood-drops from his wounded arm fell on the trampled
leaves.
Something struck his bent head. Through it a blinding pain darted.
Thousands of beautiful and tiny lights of every color began to quiver,
to leap and whirl.
"They've--set the building on fire!" thought he; yet all the while he
knew it was impossible, he understood it was only an illusion.
He heard the rustle of the wind through the forest. It blent and
mingled with a horrid tumult of grunts, of clicking cries, of gnashing
teeth and little bestial cries.
"The--gate!" sobbed Stern, between hard-set teeth, and stumbled
forward, ever forward, through the Horde.
To him, protectingly, he clasped the beautiful body in the tiger-skin.
Living? Was she living yet? A great, aching wonder filled him. Could
he reach the stair with her, and bear her up it? Hurl back these
devils? Save her, after all?
The pain had grown exquisite, in his head. Something seemed hammering
there, with regular strokes--a red-hot sledge upon an anvil of
white-hot steel.
To him it looked as though a hundred, a thousand of the little blue
fiends were leaping, shrieking, circling there in front of him. Ten
thousand! And he must break through.
Break through!
Where had he heard those words? Ah--Yes--
To him instantly recurred a distant echo of a song, a Harvard
football-song. He remembered. Now he was back again. Yale, 0; Harvard,
17--New Haven, 1898. And see the thousands of cheering spectators! The
hats flying through the air--flags waving--red, most of them!
Crimson--like blood!
Came the crash and boom of the old Harvard Band, with big Joe Foley
banging the drum till it was fit to burst, with Marsh blowing his
lungs out on the cornet, and all the other fellows raising Cain.
Uproar! Cheering! And again the music. Everybody was singing now,
everybody roaring out that brave old fighting chorus:
".....Now--all to-geth-er,
Smash them--_and_--break--_through!_"
And see! Look there! The goal!
The scene shifted, all at once, in a quite
unaccountable and puzzling manner.
Somehow, victory wasn't quite won, after all. Not quite yet. What was
the matter, then? What was wrong? Where _was_ he?
Ah, the Goal!
Yes, there through the rack and mass of the Blues, he saw it, again,
quite clearly. He was sure of _that_, anyhow.
The goal-posts seemed a trifle near together, and they were certainly
made of crumbling stone, instead of straight wooden beams. Odd, that!
He wondered, too, why the management allowed trees to grow on the
field, trees and bushes--why a huge pine should be standing right
there by the left-hand post. That was certainly a matter to be
investigated and complained of, later. But now was no time for kicks.
"Probably some Blue trick," thought Stern. "No matter, it won't do 'em
any good, this time!"
Ah! An opening! Stern's head went lower still.
He braced himself for a leap.
"Come on, come on!" he yelled defiance.
Again he heard the cheering, once wind like a chorus of mad devils.
An opening? No, he was mistaken. Instead, the Blues were massing there
by the Goal.
Bitterly he swore. Under his arm he tightened the ball. He ran!
What?
They were trying to tackle?
"Damn you!" he cried, in boiling anger. "I'll--I'll show you a trick
or two--yet!"
He stopped, circled, dodged the clutching hands, feinted with a tactic
long unthought of, and broke into a straight, resistless dash for the
posts.
As he ran, he yelled:
"_Smash_ them--and--break _through!_ . ....."
All his waning strength upgathered for that run. Yet how strangely
tired he felt--how heavy the ball was growing!
What was the matter with his head? With his right arm? They both ached
hideously. He must have got hurt, some way, in one of the "downs."
Some dirty work, somewhere. Rotten sport!
He ran. Never in all his many games had he seen such peculiar
gridiron, all tangled and overgrown. Never, such host of tackles.
Hundreds of them! Where were the Crimsons? What? No support, no
interference? Hell!
Yet the Goal was surely just there, now right ahead. He ran.
"Foul!" he shouted savagely, as a Blue struck at him, then another and
another, and many more. The taste of blood came to his tongue. He
spat. "Foul!"
Right and left he dashed them, with a giant's strength. They scattered
in panic, with strange and unintelligible cries.
"The goal!"
He reached it. And, as he crossed the line, he fell.
"_Down_, down!" sobbed he.
CHAPTER XXVI
BEATRICE DARES
An hour later, Stern and Beatrice sat weak and shaken in their
stronghold on the fifth floor, resting, trying to gather up some
strength again, to pull together for resistance to the siege that had
set in.
With the return of reason to the engineer--his free bleeding had
somewhat checked the onset of fever--and of consciousness to the girl,
they began to piece out, bit by bit, the stages of their retreat.
Now that Stern had barricaded the stairs, two stories below, and that
for a little while they felt reasonably safe, they were able to take
their bearings, to recall the flight, to plan a bit for the future, a
future dark with menace, seemingly hopeless in its outlook.
"If it--hadn't been for you," Beatrice was saying, "if you hadn't
picked me up and carried me, when that stone struck, I--I--"
"How's the ache now?" Stern hastily interrupted, in a rather weak yet
brisk voice, which he was trying hard to render matter-of-fact. "Of
course the lack of water, except that half-pint or so, to bathe your
bruise with, is a rank barbarity. But if we haven't got any, we
haven't--that's all. All--till we have another go at 'em!"
"Oh, Allan!" she exclaimed, tremulously. "Don't think of _me!_ Of me,
when your back's gashed with a spear-cut, your head's battered, arm
pierced, and we've neither water nor bandages--nothing of any kind to
treat your wounds with!"
"Come now, don't you bother about me!" he objected trying hard to
smile, though racked with pain. "I'll be O. K., fit as a fiddle, in no
time. Perfect health and all that sort of thing, you know. It'll heal
right away.
"Head's clear again already, in spite of that whack with the war-club,
or whatever it was they landed with. But for a while I certainly was
seeing things. I had 'em--had 'em bad! Thought--well, strange things.
"My back? Only a scratch, that's all. It's begun to coagulate already,
the blood has, hasn't it?" And he strove to peer over his own shoulder
at the slash. But the pain made him desist. He could hardly keep back
a groan. His face twitched involuntarily.
The girl sank on her knees beside him. Her arm encircled him; her hand
smoothed his forehead; and with a strange look she studied his
unnaturally pale face.
"It's your arm I'm thinking about, more than anything," said she.
"We've _got_ to have something to treat that with. Tell me, does it
hurt you very much, Allan?"
He tried to laugh, as he glanced down at the wounded arm, which,
ligatured about the spear-thrust with a thong, and supported by a
rawhide sling, looked strangely blue and swollen.
"Hurt me? Nonsense! I'll be fine and dandy in no time. The only
trouble is, I'm not much good as a fighter this way. Southpaw, you
see. Can't shoot worth a--a cent, you know, with my left. Otherwise, I
wouldn't mind."
"Shoot? Trust _me_ for that now!" she exclaimed. "We've still got two
revolvers and the shotgun left, and lots of ammunition. I'll do the
shooting--if there's got to be any done!"
"You're all right, Beatrice!" exclaimed the wounded man fervently.
"What would I do without you? And to think how near you came to--but
never mind. That's over now; forget it!"
"Yes, but what next?"
"Don't know. Get well, maybe. Things might be worse. I might have a
broken arm, or something; laid up for weeks--slow starvation and all
that. What's a mere puncture? Nothing! Now that the spear's out, it'll
begin healing right away.
"Bet a million, though, that What's-His-Name down there, Big Chief the
Monk, won't get out of _his_ scrape in a hurry. His face is certainly
scrambled, or I miss my guess. You got him through the ear with one
shot, by the way. Know that? Fact! Drilled it clean! Just a little to
the right and you'd have _had_ him for keeps. But never mind, we'll
save him for the encore--if there is any."
"You think they'll try again?"
"Can't say. They've lost a lot of fighters, killed and wounded,
already. And they've had a pretty liberal taste of our style. That
ought to hold them for a while! We'll see, at any rate. And if luck
stays good, we'll maybe have a thing or two to show them if they keep
on hanging round where they aren't wanted!"
Came now a little silence. Beside Stern the girl sat, half supporting
his wounded body with her firm, white arm. Thirst was beginning to
torment them both, particularly Stern, whose injuries had already
given him a marked temperature. But water there was absolutely none.
And so, still planless, glad only to recuperate a little, content that
for the present the Horde had been held back, they waited. Waiting,
they both thought. The girl's thoughts were all of him; but he,
man-fashion, was trying to piece out what had happened, to frame some
coherent idea of it all, to analyze the urgent necessities that lay
upon them both.
Here and there, a disjointed bit recurred to him, even from out of the
delirium that had followed the blow on the head. From the time he had
recovered his senses in the building, things were clearer.
He knew that the Horde, temporarily frightened by his mad rush, had
given him time to stumble up again and once more lift the girl, before
they had ventured to creep into the arcade in search of their prey.
He remembered that the spear had been gone then. Raving, he must have
broken and plucked it out. The blood, he recalled, was spurting freely
as he had carried Beatrice through the wreckage and up to the first
landing, where she had regained partial consciousness.
Then he shuddered at recollection of that stealthy, apelike creeping
of the Horde scouts in among the ruins, furtive and silent; their
sniffing after the blood-track; their frightful agility in clambering
with feet and hands alike, swinging themselves up like chimpanzees,
swarming aloft on the death-hunt.
He had evaded them, from story to story. Beatrice, able now to walk,
had helped him roll down balustrades and building-stones, fling rocks,
wrench stairs loose and block the way.
And so, wounding their pursuers, yet tracked always by more and ever
more, they had come to the landing, where by aid of the rifle barrel
as a lever they had been able to bring a whole wall crashing down, to
choke the passage. That had brought silence. For a time, at least,
pursuit had been abandoned. In the sliding, dusty avalanche of the
wall, hurled down the stairway, Stern knew by the grunts and shrieks
which had arisen that some of the Horde had surely perished--how many,
he could not tell. A score or two at the very least, he ardently
hoped.
Fear, at any rate, had been temporarily injected into the rest. For
the attack had not yet been renewed. Outside in the forest, no sign of
the Horde, no sound. A disconcerting, ominous calm had settled like a
pall. Even the birds, recovered from their terrors, had begun to hop
about and take up their twittering little household tasks.
As in a kind of clairvoyance, the engineer seemed to know there would
be respite until night. For a little while, at least, there could be
rest and peace. But when darkness should have settled down--
"If they'd only show themselves!" thought he, his leaden eyes closing
in an overmastering lassitude, a vast swooning weakness of blood-loss
and exhaustion. Not even his parched thirst, a veritable torture now,
could keep his thoughts from wandering. "If they'd tackle again, I
could score with--with lead--what's _that_ I'm thinking? I'm not
delirious, am I?"
For a moment he brought himself back with a start, back to a full
realization of the place. But again the drowsiness gained on him.
"We've got guns now; guns and ammunition," thought he. "We--could pick
them off--from the windows. Pick them--off--pick--them--off--"
He slept. Thus, often, wounded soldiers sleep, with troubled dreams,
on the verge of renewed battle which may mean their death, their long
and wakeless slumber.
He slept. And the girl, laying his gashed head gently back upon the
pile of furs, bent over him with infinite compassion. For a long
minute, hardly breathing, she watched him there. More quickly came her
breath. A strange new light shone in her eyes.
"Only for me, those wounds!" she whispered slowly. "Only for me!"
Taking his head in both her hands, she kissed him as he lay
unconscious. Kissed him twice, and then a third time.
Then she arose.
Quickly, as though with some definite plan, she chose from among their
store of utensils a large copper kettle, one which he had brought her
the week before from the little Broadway shop.
She took a long rawhide rope, braided by Stern during their long
evenings together. This she knotted firmly to the bale of the kettle.
The revolvers, fully reloaded, she examined with care. One of them she
laid beside the sleeper. The other she slid into her full, warm bosom,
where the clinging tiger-skin held it ready for her hand.
Then she walked noiselessly to the door leading into the hallway.
Here for a moment she stood, looking back at the wounded man. Tears
dimmed her eyes, yet they were very glad.
"For your sake, now, everything!" she said. "Everything--all! Oh,
Allan, if you only knew! And now--good-by!"
Then she was gone.
And in the silent room, their home, which out of wreck and chaos they
had made, the fevered man lay very still, his pulses throbbing in his
throat.
Outside, very far, very faint in the forests, a muffled drum began to
beat again.
And the slow shadows, lengthening across the floor, told that evening
was drawing nigh.
CHAPTER XXVII
TO WORK!
The engineer awoke with a start--awoke to find daylight gone,
to find that dusk had settled, had shrouded the whole place in gloom.
Confused, he started up. He was about to call out, when prudence muted
his voice. For the moment he could not recollect just what had
happened or where he was; but a vast impending consciousness of evil
and of danger weighed upon him. It warned him to keep still, to make
no outcry. A burning thirst quickened his memory.
Then his comprehension returned. Still weak and shaken, yet greatly
benefited by his sleep, he took a few steps toward the door. Where was
the girl? Was he alone? What could all this mean?
"Beatrice! Oh, Beatrice!" he called thickly, in guarded tones. "Where
are you? Answer me!"
"Here--coming!" he heard her voice. And then he saw her, dimly, in the
doorway.
"What is it? Where have you been? How long have I been asleep?"
She did not answer his questions, but came quickly to him, took his
hand, and with her own smoothed his brow.
"Better, now?" asked she.
"Lots! I'll be all right in a little while. It's nothing. But what
have _you_ been doing all this time?"
"Come, and I'll show you." She led him toward the other room.
He followed, in growing wonder.
"No attack, yet?"
"None. But the drums have been beating for a long time now. Hear
_that?_"
They listened. To them drifted a dull, monotonous sound, harbinger of
war.
Stern laughed bitterly, chokingly, by reason of his thirst.
"Much good their orchestra will do them," said he, "when it comes to
facing soft-nosed .38's! But tell me, what was it you were going to
show me?"
Quickly she went over to their crude table, took up a dish and came
back to him.
"Drink this!" bade she.
He took it, wondering.
"What? _Coffee?_ But--"
"Drink! I've had mine, already. Drink!"
Half-stupefied, he obeyed. He drained the whole dish at a draft, then
caught his breath in a long sigh.
"But this means water!" cried he, with renewed vigor. "And--?"
"Look here," she directed, pointing. There on the circular hearth
stood the copper kettle, three-quarters full.
"Water! You've got _water?_" He started forward in amazement. "While
I've been sleeping? Where--?"
She laughed with real enjoyment.
"It's nothing," she disclaimed. "After what you've done for me, this
is the merest trifle, Allan. You know that big cavity made by the
boiler-explosion? Yes? Well, when we looked down into it, before we
ventured out to the spring, I noticed a good deal of water at the
bottom, stagnant water, that had run out of the boiler and settled on
the hard clay floor and in among the cracked cement. I just merely
brought up some, and strained and boiled it, that's all. So you see--"
"But, my Lord!" burst out the man, "d'you mean to say you--you went
down _there--alone?_"
Once more the girl laughed.
"Not alone," she answered. "One of the automatics was kind enough to
bear me company. Of course the main stairway was impassable. But I
found another way, off through the east end of the building and down
some stairs we haven't used at all, yet. They may be useful, by the
way, in case of--well--a retreat. Once I'd reached the arcade, the
rest was easy. I had that leather rope tied to the kettle handle, you
see. So all I had to do was--"
"But the Horde! The Horde?"
"None of them down there, now--that is, alive. None when I was there.
All at the war-council, I imagine. I just happened to strike it right,
you see. It wasn't anything. We simply _had_ to have water, so I went
and got some, that's all."
"That's all?" echoed Stern, in a trembling voice. "That's--_all!_"
Then, lest she see his face even by the dim light through the window,
he turned aside a minute. For the tears in his eyes, he felt, were a
weakness which he would not care to reveal.
But presently he faced the girl again.
"Beatrice," said he, "words fall so flat, so hopelessly dead; they're
so inadequate, so anticlimactic at a time like this, that I'm just
going to skip them all. It's no use thanking you, or analyzing this
thing, or saying any of the commonplace, stupid things. Let it pass.
You've got water, that's enough. You've made good, where I failed.
Well--"
His voice broke again, and he grew silent. But she, peering at him
with wonder, laid a hand upon his shoulder.
"Come," said she, "you must eat something, too. I've got a little
supper ready. After that, the Pulverite?"
He started as though shot.
"That's so! I _can_ make it now!" cried he, new life and energy
suffusing him. "Even with my one hand, if you help me, I can make it!
Supper? No, no! To _work!_"
But she insisted, womanlike; and he at last consented to a bite. When
this was over, they began preparations for the manufacture of the
terrible explosive, Stern's own secret and invention, which, had not
the cataclysm intervened, would have made him ten times over a
millionaire. More precious now to him, that knowledge, than all the
golden treasures of the dead, forsaken world!
"We've got to risk a light," said he. "If it's turned low, and shaded,
maybe they won't learn our whereabouts. But however that may be, we
can't work in the dark. It would be too horribly perilous. One false
move, one wrong combination, even the addition of one ingredient at
the improper moment, and--well--you understand."
She nodded.
"Yes," said she. "And we don't want to quit--just _yet!_"
So they lighted the smaller of their copper lamps, and set to work in
earnest.
On the table, cleared of dishes and of food, Stern placed in order
eight glass bottles, containing the eight basic chemicals for his
reaction.
Beside him, at his left hand, he set a large metal dish with three
quarts of water, still warm. In front of him stood his copper
tea-kettle--the strangest retort, surely in which the terrific
compound ever had been distilled.
"Now our chairs, and the lamp," said he, "and we're ready to begin.
But first," and, looking earnestly at her, "first, tell me frankly,
wouldn't you just a little rather have me carry out this experiment
alone? You could wait elsewhere, you know. With these uncertain
materials and all the crude conditions we've got to work under,
there's no telling what--might happen.
"I've never yet found a man who would willingly stand by and see me
build Pulverite, much less a woman. It's frightful, this stuff is!
Don't be ashamed to tell me; are you afraid?"
For a long moment the girl looked at him.
"Afraid--with _you?_" said she.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE PULVERITE
An hour passed. And now, under the circle of light cast by the
hooded lamp upon the table, there in that bare, wrecked office-home of
theirs, the Pulverite was coming to its birth.
Already at the bottom of the metal dish lay a thin yellow cloud,
something that looked like London fog on a December morning. There,
covered with the water, it gently swirled and curdled, with strange
metallic glints and oily sheens, as Beatrice with a gold spoon stirred
it at the engineer's command.
From moment to moment he dropped in a minute quantity of glycerin, out
of a glass test-tube, graduated to the hundredth of an ounce. Keenly,
under the lamp-shine, he watched the final reaction; his face, very
pale and set, reflected a little of the mental stress that bound him.
Along the table-edge before him, limp in its sling, his wounded arm
lay useless. Yet with his left hand he controlled the sleeping giant
in the dish. And as he dropped the glycerin, he counted.
"Ten, eleven, twelve--fifteen, sixteen--twenty! Now! Now pour the
water off, quick! _Quick!_"
Splendidly the girl obeyed. The water ran, foaming strangely, out into
a glass jar set to receive it. Her hands trembled not, nor did she
hesitate. Only, a line formed between her brows; and her breath,
half-held, came quickly through her lips.
"_Stop!_"
His voice rang like a shot.
"Now, decant it through this funnel, into the vials!"
Again, using both hands for steadiness, she did his bidding.
And one by one as she filled the little flasks of chained death, the
engineer stoppered them with his left hand.
When the last was done, Stern drew a tremendous sigh, and dashed the
sweat from his forehead with a gesture of victory.
Into the residue in the dish he poured a little nitric acid.
"_That's_ got no kick left in it, now, anyhow," said he relieved. "The
HNO3 tames it, quick enough. But the bottles--take care--don't tip one
over, as you love your life!"
He stood up, slowly, and for a moment remained there, his face in the
shadow of the lamp-shade, holding to the table-edge for support, with
his left hand.
At him the girl looked.
"And now," she began, "now--?"
The question had no time for completion. For even as she spoke, a
swift little something flicked through the window, behind them.
It struck the opposite wall with a sharp _crack!_ then fell slithering
to the floor.
Outside, against the building, they heard another and another little
shock; and all at once a second missile darted through the air.
This hit the lamp. Stern grabbed the shade and steadied it. Beatrice
stooped and snatched up the thing from where it lay beside the table.
Only one glance Stern gave at it, as she held it up. A long reed stem
he saw wrapped at its base with cotton fibers--a fish-bone point,
firm-lashed--and on that point a dull red stain, a blotch of something
dry and shiny.
"Blow-gun darts!" cried he. "Poisoned! They've seen the light--got our
range! They're up there in the tree-tops--shooting at us!"
With one puff, the light was gone. By the wrist he seized Beatrice. He
dragged her toward the front wall, off to one side, out of range.
"The flasks of Pulverite! Suppose a dart should hit one?" exclaimed
the girl.
"That's so! Wait here--I'll get them!"
But she was there beside him as, in the thick dark, he cautiously felt
for the deadly things and found them with a hand that _dared not_
tremble. And though here, there, the little venom-stings whis-s-shed
over them and past them, to shatter on the rear wall, she helped him
bear the vials, all nine of them, to a place of safety in the
left-hand front corner where by no possibility could they be struck.
Together then, quietly as wraiths, they stole into the next room; and
there, from a window not as yet attacked, they spied out at the dark
tree-tops that lay in dense masses almost brushing the walls.
"See? See there?" whispered Stern in the girl's ear. He pointed where,
not ten yards away and below, a blacker shadow seemed to move along a
hemlock branch. Forgotten now, his wounds. Forgotten his loss of
blood, his fever and his weakness. The sight of that creeping stealthy
attack nerved him with new vigor. And, even as the girl looked, Stern
drew his revolver.
Speaking no further word, he laid the ugly barrel firm across the
sill.
Carefully he sighted, as best he could in that gloom lit only by the
stars. Coldly as though at a target-shot, he brought the muzzle-sight
to bear on that deep, crawling shadow.
Then suddenly a spurt of fire split the night. The crackling report
echoed away. And with a bubbling scream, the shadow loosened from the
limb, as a ripe fruit loosens.
Vaguely they saw it fall, whirl, strike a branch, slide off, and
disappear.
All at once a pattering rain of darts flickered around them. Stern
felt one strike his fur jacket and bounce off. Another grazed the
girl's head. But to their work they stood, and flinched not.
Now her revolver was speaking, in antiphony with his; and from the
branches, two, three, five, eight, ten of the ape-things fell.
"Give it to 'em!" shouted the engineer, as though he had a regiment
behind him. "_Give_ it to 'em!" And again he pulled the trigger.
The revolver was empty.
With a cry he threw it down, and, running to where the shotgun stood,
snatched it up. He scooped into his pocket a handful of shells from
the box where they were stored; and as he darted back to the window,
he cocked both hammers.
"Poom! _Poom!_"
The deep baying of the revolver roared out in twin jets of flame.
Stern broke the gun and jacked in two more shells.
Again he fired.
"Good Heaven! How many of 'em _are_ there in the trees?" shouted he.
"Try the Pulverite!" cried Beatrice. "Maybe you might hit a branch!"
Stern flung down the gun. To the corner where the vials were standing
he ran.
Up he caught one--he dared not take two lest they should by some
accident strike together.
"Here--here, now, take _this!_" he bellowed.
And from the window, aiming at a pine that stood seventy-five feet
away--a pine whose branches seemed to hang thick with the Horde's
blowgun-men--he slung it with all the strength of his uninjured arm.
Into the gloom it vanished, the little meteorite of latent death, of
potential horror and destruction.
"If it hits 'em, they'll think we _are_ gods, after all, what?" cried
the engineer, peering eagerly. But for a moment, nothing happened.
"Missed it!" he groaned. "If I only had my right arm to use now, I
might--"
Far below, down there a hundred feet beneath them and out a long way
from the tower base, night yawned wide in a burst of hellish glare.
A vast conical hole of flame was gouged in the dark. For a fraction of
a second every tree, limb, twig stood out in vivid detail, as that
blue-white glory shot aloft.
All up through the forest the girl and Stern got a momentary glimpse
of little, clinging Things, crouching misshapen, hideous.
Then, as a riven and distorted whirl burst upward in a huge geyser of
annihilation, came a detonation that ripped, stunned, shattered; that
sent both the defenders staggering backward from the window.
Darkness closed again, like a gaping mouth that shuts. And all about
the building, through the trees, and down again in a titanic, slashing
rain fell the wreckage of things that had been stone, and earth, and
root, and tree, and living creatures--that had been--that now were but
one indistinguishable mass of ruin and of death.
After that, here and there, small dark objects came dropping,
thudding, crashing down. You might have thought some cosmic gardener
had shaken his orchard, his orchard where the plums and pears were
rotten-ripe.
"_One!_" cried the engineer, in a strange, wild, exultant voice.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE BATTLE ON THE STAIRS
Almost like the echo of his shout, a faint snarling cry rose
from the corridor, outside. They heard a clicking, sliding, ominous
sound; and, with instant comprehension, knew the truth.
"They've got up, some of them--somehow!" Stern cried. "They'll be at
our throats, here, in a moment! Load! _Load!_ You shoot--_I'll_ give
'em Pulverite!"
No time, now, for caution. While the girl hastily threw in more
cartridges, Stern gathered up all the remaining vials of the
explosive.
These, garnered along his wounded arm which clasped them to his body,
made a little bristling row of death. His left hand remained free, to
fling the little glass bombs.
"Come! Come, meet 'em--they mustn't trap us, here!"
And together they crept noiselessly into the other room and thence to
the corridor-door.
Out they peered.
"Look! Torches!" whispered he.
There at the far end of the hallway, a red glare already flickered on
the wall around the turn by the elevator-shaft. Already the confused
sounds of the attackers were drawing near.
"They've managed to dig away the barricade, somehow," said Stern. "And
now they're out for business--clubs, poisoned darts and all--and
fangs, and claws! How many of 'em? God knows! A swarm, that's all!"
His mouth felt hot and dry, with fever, and the mad excitement of the
impending battle. His skin seemed tense and drawn, especially upon the
forehead. As he stood there, waiting, he heard the girl's quick
breathing. Though he could hardly see her in the gloom, he felt her
presence and he loved it.
"Beatrice," said he, and for a moment his hand sought hers, "Beatrice,
little girl o' mine, if this is the big finish, if we both go down
together and there's no to-morrow, I want to tell you now--"
A yapping outcry interrupted him. The girl seized his arm. Brighter
the torchlight grew.
"Allan!" she whispered. "Come back, back, away from here. We've got to
get up those stairs, there, at the other end of the hall. _This_ is no
kind of place to meet them--we're exposed, here. There's no
protection!"
"You're right." he answered. "Come!"
Like ghosts they slid away, noiselessly, through the enshrouding
gloom.
Even as they gained the shelter of the winding stairway, the scouts of
the Horde, flaring their torches into each room they passed, came into
view around the corner at the distant end.
Shuffling, hideous beyond all words by the fire-gleam, bent, wizened,
blue, the Things swarmed toward them in a vague and shifting mass, a
ruck of horror.
The defenders, peering from behind the broken balustrade, could hear
the guttural jabber of their beast-talk, the clicking play of their
fangs; could see the craning necks, the talons that held spears,
bludgeons, blow-guns, even jagged rocks.
Over all, the smoky gleams wavered in a ghastly interplay of light and
darkness. Uncanny shadows leaped along the walls. From every corner
and recess and black, empty door, ghoulish shapes seemed creeping.
Tense, now, the moment hung.
Suddenly the engineer bent forward, staring.
"The chief!" he whispered. And as he spoke, Beatrice aimed.
There, shambling among the drove of things, they saw him clearly for a
moment: Uglier, more incredibly brutal than ever he looked, now, by
that uncanny light.
Stern saw--and rejoiced in the sight--that the obeah's jaw hung surely
broken, all awry. The quick-blinking, narrow-ridded eyes shuttled
here, there, as the creature sought to spy out his enemies. The
nostrils dilated, to catch the spoor of man. Man, no longer god, but
mortal.
One hand held a crackling pine-knot. The other gripped the heft of a
stone ax, one blow of which would dash to pulp the stoutest skull.
This much Stern noted, as in a flash; when at his side the girl's
revolver spat.
The report roared heavily in that constricted space. For a moment the
obeah stopped short. A look of brute pain, of wonder, then of
quintupled rage passed over his face. A twitching grin of passion
distorted the huge, wounded gash of the mouth. He screamed. Up came
the stone ax.
"Again!" shouted Stern. "Give it to him again!"
She fired on the instant. But already, with a chattering howl, the
obeah was running forward. And after him, screaming, snarling, foaming
till their lips were all a slaver, the pack swept toward them.
Stern dragged the girl away, back to the landing.
"Up! _Up!_" he yelled.
Then, turning, he hurled the second bomb.
A blinding glare dazzled him. A shock, as of a suddenly unleashed
volcano, all but flung him headlong.
Dazed, choked by the gush of fumes that burst in a billowing cloud out
along the hall and up the stairs, he staggered forward. Tightly to his
body he clutched the remaining vials. Where was Beatrice? He knew not.
Everything boomed and echoed in his stunned ears. Below there, he
heard thunderous crashes as wrecked walls and floors went reeling
down. And ever, all about him, eddied the strangling smoke.
Then, how long after he knew not, he found himself gasping for air
beside a window.
"Beatrice!" he shouted with his first breath. Everything seemed
strangely still. No sound of pursuit, no howling now. Dead calm. Not
even the drum-beat in the forest, far below.
"_Beatrice!_ Where are you? _Beatrice!_"
His heart leaped gladly as he heard her answer.
"Oh! Are you safe? Thank God! I--I was afraid--I didn't know--"
To him she ran along the dark passageway.
"No more!" she panted. "No more Pulverite here in the building!"
pleaded she. "Or the whole tower will fall--and bury us! No more!"
Stern laughed. Beatrice was unharmed; he had found her.
"I'll sow it broadcast outside," he answered, in a kind of exaltation,
almost a madness from the strain and horror of that night, the
weakness of his fever and his loss of blood. "Maybe the others, down
there still, may need it. Here goes!"
And, one by one, all seven of the bombs he hurled far out and away, to
right, to left, straight ahead, slinging them in vast parabolas from
the height.
And as they struck one by one, night blazed like noonday; and even to
the Palisades the crashing echoes roared.
The forest, swept as by a giant broom, became a jackstraw tangle of
destruction.
Thus it perished.
When the last vial of wrath had been out-poured, when silence had once
more dropped its soothing mantle and the great brooding dark had come
again, "girdled with gracious watchings of the stars," Stern spoke.
"Gods!" he exclaimed exultantly. "Gods we are now to them--to such of
them as may still live. Gods we are--gods we shall be forever!
"Whatever happens now, _they_ know us. The Great White Gods of Terror!
They'll flee before our very look! Unarmed, if we meet a thousand,
we'll be safe. _Gods!_"
Another silence.
Then suddenly he knew that Beatrice was weeping.
And forgetful of all save that, forgetful of his weakness and his
wounds, he comforted her--as only a man can comfort the woman he
loves, the woman who, in turn, loves him.
CHAPTER XXX
CONSUMMATION
After a while, both calmer grown, they looked again from the
high window.
"See!" exclaimed the engineer, and pointed.
There, far away to westward, a few straggling lights--only a very
few--slowly and uncertainly were making their way across the broad
black breast of the river.
Even as the man and woman watched, one vanished. Then another winked
out, and did not reappear. No more than fifteen seemed to reach the
Jersey shore, there to creep vaguely, slowly away and vanish in the
dense primeval woods.
"Come," said Stern at last. "We must be going, too. The night's half
spent. By morning we must be very far away."
"What? We've got to leave the city?"
"Yes. There's no such thing as staying here now. The tower's quite
untenable. Racked and shaken as it is, it's liable to fall at any
time. But, even if it should stand, we can't live here any more."
"But--where now?"
"I don't just know. Somewhere else, that's certain. Everything in this
whole vicinity is ruined. The spring's gone. Nothing remains of the
forest, nothing but horror and death. Pestilence is bound to sweep
this place in the wake of such a--such an affair.
"The sights all about here aren't such as you should see. Neither
should I. We mustn't even think of them. Some way or other we can find
a path down out of here, away--away--"
"But," she cried anxiously, "but all our treasures? All the tools and
dishes, all the food and clothing, and everything? All our precious,
hard-won things?"
"Nothing left of them now. Down on the fifth floor, at that end of the
building, I'm positive there's nothing but a vast hole blown out of
the side of the tower. So there's nothing left to salvage. Nothing at
all."
"Can you replace the things?"
"Why not? Wherever we settle down we can get along for a few days on
what game I can snare or shoot with the few remaining cartridges. And
after that--"
"Yes?"
"After that, once we get established a little, I can come into the
city and go to raiding again. What we've lost is a mere trifle
compared to what's left in New York. Why, the latent resources of this
vast ruin haven't been even touched yet! We've got our lives. That's
the only vital factor. With those everything else is possible. It all
looks dark and hard to you now, Beatrice. But in a few days--wait and
see!"
"Allan!"
"What, Beatrice?"
"I trust you in everything. I'm in your hands. Lead me."
"Come, then, for the way is long before us. Come!"
Two hours later, undaunted by the far howling of a wolfpack, as the
wan crescent of the moon came up the untroubled sky, they reached the
brink of the river, almost due west of where the southern end of
Central Park hall been.
This course, they felt, would avoid any possible encounter with
stragglers of the Horde. Through Madison Forest--or what remained of
it--they had not gone; but had struck eastward from the building, then
northward, and so in a wide detour had avoided all the horrors that
they knew lay near the wreck of the tower.
The river, flowing onward to the sea as calmly as though pain and
death and ruin and all the dark tragedy of the past night, the past
centuries, had never been, filled their tired souls and bodies with a
grateful peace. Slowly, gently it lapped the wooded shore, where docks
and slips had all gone back to nature; the moonlit ripples spoke of
beauty, life, hope, love.
Though they could not drink the brackish waters, yet they laved their
faces, arms and hands, and felt refreshed. Then for some time in
silence they skirted the flood, ever northward, away from the dead
city's heart. And the moon rose even higher, higher still, and great
thoughts welled within their hearts. The cool night breeze, freshening
in from the vast salt wastes of the sea--unsailed forever now--cooled
their cheeks and soothed the fever of their thoughts.
Where the grim ruin of Grant's Tomb looked down upon the river, they
came at length upon a strange, rude boat, another, then a third--a
whole flotilla, moored with plaited ropes of grass to trees along the
shore.
"These must certainly be the canoes of the attacking force from
northward, the force that fought the Horde the night before _we_ took
a hand in the matter; fought, and were beaten, and--devoured," said
Stern.
And with a practical eye, wise and cool even despite the pain of his
wounded arm, he examined three or four of the boats as best he could
by moonlight.
The girl and he agreed on one to use.
"Yes, this looks like the most suitable," judged the engineer,
indicating a rough, banca-like craft nearly sixteen feet long, which
had been carved and scraped and burned out of a single log.
He helped Beatrice in, then cast off the rope. In the bottom lay six
paddles of the most degraded state of workmanship. They showed no
trace of decoration whatsoever, and the lowest savages of the
pre-cataclysmic era had invariably attempted some crude form of art on
nearly every implement.
The girl took up one of the paddles.
"Which way? Up-stream?" asked she. "No, no, you mustn't even try to
use that arm."
"Why paddle at all?" Stern answered. "See here."
He pointed where a short and crooked mast lay, unstopped, along the
side. Lashed to it was a sail of rawhides, clumsily caught together
with thongs, heavy and stiff, yet full of promise.
Stern laughed.
"Back to the coracle stage again," said he. "Back to Caesar's time,
and way beyond!" And he lifted one end of the mast. "Here we've got
the Seuvian pellis pro velis, the 'skins for sails' all over
again--only more so. Well, no matter. Up she goes!"
Together they stepped the mast and spread the sail. The engineer took
his place in the stern, a paddle in his left hand. He dipped it, and
the ripples glinted away.
"Now," said he, in a voice that left no room for argument, "now, _you_
curl up in the tiger-skin and go to sleep! This is my job."
The sail caught the breath of the breeze. The banca moved slowly
forward, trailing its wake like widening lines of silver in the
moonlight.
And Beatrice, strong in her trust of him, her confidence and love, lay
down to sleep while the wounded man steered on and on, and watched her
and protected her. And over all the stars, a glory in the summer sky,
kept silent vigil.
Dawn broke, all a flame of gold and crimson, as they landed in a
sheltered little bay on the west shore.
Here, though the forest stood unbroken in thick ranges all along the
background, it had not yet invaded the slope that led back from the
pebbly beach. And through the tangle of what once must have been a
splendid orchard, they caught a glimpse of white walls overgrown with
a mad profusion of wild roses, wisterias and columbines.
"This was once upon a time the summer-place, the big concrete bungalow
and all, of Harrison Van Amburg. You know the billionaire, the wheat
man? It used to be all his in the long ago. He built it for all time
of a material that time can never change. It was his. Well, it's ours
now. Our home!"
Together they stood upon the shelving beach, lapped by the river.
Somewhere in the woods behind them a robin was caroling with liquid
harmony.
Stern drew the rude boat up. Then, breathing deep, he faced the
morning.
"You and I, Beatrice," said he, and took her hand. "Just you--and I!"
"And love!" she whispered.
"And hope, and life! And the earth reborn. The arts and sciences,
language and letters, truth, 'all the glories of the world' handed
down through us!
"Listen! The race of men, our race, must live again--shall live! Again
the forests and the plains shall be the conquest of our blood. Once
more shall cities gleam and tower, ships sail the sea, and the world
go on to greater wisdom, better things!
"A kinder and a saner world this time. No misery, no war, no poverty,
woe, strife, creeds, oppression, tears--for we are wiser than those
other folk, and there shall be no error."
He paused, his face irradiate. To him recurred the prophecy of
Ingersoll, the greatest orator of that other time. And very slowly he
spoke again:
"Beatrice, it shall be a world where thrones have crumbled and where
kings are dust. The aristocracy of idleness shall reign no more! A
world without a slave. Man shall at last be free!
"'A world at peace, adorned by every form of art, with music's myriad
voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth. A
world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which
the gibbet's shadow shall not fall.
"'A race without disease of flesh or brain, shapely and fair, the
wedded harmony of form and function. And as I look, life lengthens,
joy deepens, and over all in the great dome shines the eternal star of
human hope!'"
"And love?" she smiled again, a deep and sacred meaning in her words.
Within her stirred the universal motherhood, the hope of everything,
the call of the unborn, the insistent voice of the race that was to
be.
"And love!" he answered, his voice now very tender, very grave.
Tired, yet strong, he looked upon her. And as he looked his eyes grew
deep and eager.
Sweet as the honey of Hymettus was the perfume of the orchard, all a
powder of white and rosy blooms, among which the bees, pollen-dusted,
labored, at their joyous, fructifying task. Fresh, the morning breeze.
Clear, warm, radiant, the sun of June; the summer sun uprising far
beyond the shining hills.
Life everywhere--and love!
Love, too, for them. For this man, this woman, love; the mystery, the
pleasure and the eternal pain.
With his unhurt arm he circled her. He bent, he drew her to him, as
she raised her face to his.
And for the first time his mouth sought hers.
Their lips, long hungry for this madness, met there and blended in a
kiss of passion and of joy.
BOOK II
BEYOND THE GREAT OBLIVION
CHAPTER I
BEGINNINGS
A thousand years of darkness and decay! A thousand years of
blight, brutality, and atavism; of Nature overwhelming all man's work,
of crumbling cities and of forgotten civilization, of stupefaction, of
death! A thousand years of night!
Two human beings, all alone in that vast wilderness--a woman and a
man.
The past, irrevocable; the present, fraught with problems, perils, and
alarms; the future--what?
A thousand years!
Yet, though this thousand years had seemingly smeared away all
semblance of the world of men from the cosmic canvas, Allan Stern and
Beatrice Kendrick thrilled with as vital a passion as though that
vast, oblivious age lay not between them and the time that was.
And their long kiss, there in sight of their new home-to-be--alone
there in that desolated world--was as natural as the summer breeze,
the liquid melody of the red-breast on the blossomy apple-bough above
their heads, the white and purple spikes of odorous lilacs along the
vine-grown stone wall, the gold and purple dawn now breaking over the
distant reaches of the river.
Thus were these two betrothed, this sole surviving pair of human
beings.
Thus, as the new day burned to living flame up the inverted bowl of
sky, this woman and this man pledged each other their love and loyalty
and trust.
Thus they stood together, his left arm about her warm, lithe body,
clad as she was only in her tiger-skin. Their eyes met and held true,
there in the golden glory of the dawn. Unafraid, she read the message
in the depths of his, the invitation, the command; and they both
foreknew the future.
Beatrice spoke first, flushing a little as she drew toward him.
"Allan," she said with infinite tenderness, even as a mother might
speak to a well-loved son, "Allan, come now and let me dress your
wound. That's the first thing to do. Come, let me see your arm."
He smiled a little, and with his broad, brown hand stroked back the
spun silk of her hair, its mass transfixed by the raw gold pins he had
found for her among the ruins of New York.
"No, no!" he objected. "It's nothing--it's not worth bothering about.
I'll be all right in a day or two. My flesh heals almost at once,
without any care. You don't realize how healthy I am."
"I know, dear, but it must hurt you terribly!"
"Hurt? How could I feel any pain with your kiss on my mouth?"
"Come!" she again repeated with insistence, and pointed toward the
beach where their banca lay on the sand.
"Come, I'll dress your wound first. And after I find out just how
badly you're injured--"
He tried to stop her mouth with kisses, but she evaded him.
"No, no!" she cried. "Not now--not now!"
Allan had to cede. And now presently there he knelt on the fine white
sand, his bearskin robe opened and flung back, his well-knit shoulder
and sinewed arm bare and brown.
"Well, is it fatal?" he jested. "How long do you give me to survive
it?" as with her hand and the cold limpid water of the Hudson she
started to lave the caked blood away from his gashed triceps.
At sight of the wound she looked grave, but made no comment. She had
no bandages; but with the woodland skill she had developed in the past
weeks of life in close touch with nature, she bound the cleansed wound
with cooling leaves and fastened them securely in place with lashings
of leather thongs from the banca.
Presently the task was done. Stern slipped his bearskin back in place.
Beatrice, still solicitous, tried to clasp the silver buckle that held
it; but he, unable to restrain himself, caught her hand in both of his
and crushed it to his lips.
Then he took her perfect face between his palms, and for a long moment
studied it. He looked at her waving hair, luxuriant and glinting rich
brown gleams in the sunlight; her thick, arched brows and hazel eyes,
liquid and full of mystery as woodland pools; her skin, sun-browned
and satiny, with abundant tides of life-blood coursing vigorously in
its warm flush; her ripe lips. He studied her, and loved and yearned
toward her; and in him the passion leaped up like living flames.
His mouth met hers again.
"My beloved!" breathed he.
Her rounded arm, bare to the shoulder, circled his neck; she hid her
face in his breast.
"Not yet--not yet!" she whispered.
On the white and pink flowered bough above, the robin, unafraid,
gushed into a very madness of golden song. And now the sun, higher
risen, had struck the river into a broad sheet of spun metal, over
which the swallows--even as in the olden days--darted and spiraled,
with now and then a flick and dash of spray.
Far off, wool-white winding-sheets of mist were lifting, lagging along
the purple hills, clothed with inviolate forest.
Again the man tried to raise her head, to burn his kisses on her
mouth. But she, instilled with the eternal spirit of woman, denied
him.
"No, not now--not yet!" she said; and in her eyes he read her meaning.
"You must let me go now, Allan. There's so much to do; we've got to be
practical, you know."
"Practical! When I--I love--"
"Yes, I know, dear. But there's so much to be done first." Her womanly
homemaking instinct would not be gainsaid. "There's so much work!
We've got the place to explore, and the house to put in order,
and--oh, thousands of things! And we must be very sensible and very
wise, you and I, boy. We're not children, you know. Now that we've
lost our home in the Metropolitan Tower, everything's got to be done
over again."
"Except to learn to love you!" answered Stern, letting her go with
reluctance.
She laughed back at him over her fur-clad shoulder as her sandaled
feet followed the dim remnants of what must once have been a broad
driveway from the river road along the beach, leading up to the
bungalow.
Through the encroaching forest and the tangle of the degenerate
apple-trees they could see the concrete walls, with here or there a
bit of white still gleaming through the enlacements of ancient vines
that had enveloped the whole structure--woodbine, ivy, wisterias, and
the maddest jungle of climbing roses, red and yellow, that ever made a
nest for love.
"Wait, I'll go first and clear the way for you," he said cheerily. His
big bulk crashed down the undergrowth. His hands held back the thorns
and briers and the whipping hardbacks. Together they slowly made way
toward the house.
The orchard had lost all semblance of regularity, for in the thousand
years since the hand of man had pruned or cared for it Mother Nature
had planted and replanted it times beyond counting. Small and gnarled
and crooked the trees were, as the spine-tree souls in Dante's
dolorosa selva.
Here or there a pine had rooted and grown tall, killing the lesser
tribe of green things underneath.
Warm lay the sun there. A pleasant carpet of last year's leaves and
pine-spills covered the earth.
"It's all ready and waiting for us, all embowered and carpeted for
love," said Allan musingly. "I wonder what old Van Amburg would think
of his estate if he could see it now? And what would he say to our
having it? You know, Van was pretty ugly to me at one time about my
political opinion--but that's all past and forgotten now. Only this is
certainly an odd turn of fate."
He helped the girl over a fallen log, rotted with moss and lichens.
"It's one awful mess, sure as you're born. But as quick as my arm gets
back into shape, we'll have order out of chaos before you know it.
Some fine day you and I will drive our sixty horse-power car up an
asphalt road here, and--"
"A car? Why, what do you mean? There's not such a thing left in the
whole world as a car!"
The engineer tapped his forehead with his finger.
"Oh, yes, there is. I've got several models right here. You just wait
till you see the workshop I'm going to install on the bank of the
river with current-power, and with an electric light plant for the
whole place, and with--"
Beatrice laughed.
"You dear, big, dreaming boy!" she interrupted. Then with a kiss she
took his hand.
"Come," said she. "We're home now. And there's work to do."
CHAPTER II
SETTLING DOWN
Together, in the comradeship of love and trust and mutual
understanding, they reached the somewhat open space before the
bungalow, where once the road had ended in a stone-paved drive.
Allan's wounded arm, had he but sensed it, was beginning to pain more
than a little. But he was oblivious. His love, the fire of spring that
burned in his blood, the lure of this great adventuring, banished all
consciousness of ill.
Parting a thicket, they reached the steps. And for a while they stood
there, hand in hand, silent and thrilled with vast, strange thoughts,
dreaming of what must be. In their eyes lay mirrored the future of the
human race. The light that glowed in them evoked the glories of the
dawn of life again, after ten centuries of black oblivion.
"Our home now!" he told her, very gently, and again he kissed her, but
this time on the forehead. "Ours when we shall have reclaimed it and
made it ours. See the yellow roses, dear? They symbolize our golden
future. The red, red roses? Our passion and our pain!"
The girl made no answer, but tears gathered in her eyes--tears from
the deepest wells of the soul. She brought his hand to her lips.
"Ours!" she whispered tremblingly.
They stood there together for a little space, silent and glad. From an
oak that shaded the porch a squirrel chippered at them. A
sparrow--larger now than the sparrows they remembered in the time that
was--peered out at them, wondering but unafraid, from its nest under
the eaves; at them, the first humans it had ever seen.
"We've got a tenant already, haven't we?" smiled Allan. "Well, I guess
we sha'n't have to disturb her, unless perhaps for a while, when I cut
away this poison ivy here." He pointed at the glossy triple leaf. "No
poisonous thing, whether plant, snake, spider, or insect, is going to
stay in this Eden!" he concluded, with a laugh.
Together, with a strange sense of violating the spirit of the past,
they went up the concrete steps, untrodden now by human feet for ten
centuries.
The massive blocks were still intact for the most part, for old Van
Amburg had builded with endless care and with no remotest regard for
cost. Here a vine, there a sapling had managed to insinuate a tap-root
in some crack made by the frost, but the damage was trifling. Except
for the falling of a part of a cornice, the building was complete. But
it was hidden in vines and mold. Moss, lichens and weeds grew on the
steps, flourishing in the detritus that had accumulated.
Allan dug the toe of his sandal into the loose drift of dead leaves
and pine-spills that littered the broad piazza.
"It'll need more than a vacuum cleaner to put this in shape!" said he.
"Well, the sooner we get at it, the better. We'd do well to take a
look at the inside."
The front door, one-time built of oaken planks studded with
hand-worked nails and banded with huge wrought-iron hinges, now hung
there a mere shell of itself, worm-eaten, crumbling, disintegrated.
With no tools but his naked hands Stern tore and battered it away. A
thick, pungent haze of dust arose, yellow in the morning sunlight that
presently, for the first time in a thousand years, fell warm and
bright across the cob-webbed front hallway, through the aperture.
Room by room Allan and Beatrice explored. The bungalow was practically
stripped bare by time.
"Only moth and rust," sighed the girl. "The same story everywhere we
go. But--well, never mind. We'll soon have it looking homelike. Make
me a broom, dear, and I'll sweep out the worst of it at once."
Talking now in terms of practical detail, with romance for the hour
displaced by harsh reality, they examined the entire house.
Of the once magnificent furnishings, only dust-piles, splinters and
punky rubbish remained. Through the rotted plank shutters, that hung
drunkenly awry from rust-eaten hinges, long spears of sunlight wanly
illuminated the wreck of all that had once been the lavish home of a
billionaire.
Rugs, paintings, furniture, _bibelots_, treasures of all kinds now lay
commingled in mournful decay. In what had evidently been the music
room, overlooking the grounds to southward, the grand piano now was
only a mass of rusted frame, twisted and broken fragments of wire and
a considerable heap of wood-detritus, with a couple of corroded pedals
buried in the pile.
"And _this_ was the famous hundred-thousand-dollar harp of Sara, his
daughter, that the papers used to talk so much about, you remember?"
asked the girl, stirring with her foot a few mournful bits of rubbish
that lay near the piano.
"Sic transit gloria mundi!" growled Stern, shaking his head. "You
and she were the same age, almost. And now--"
Silent and full of strange thoughts they went on into what had been
the kitchen. The stove, though heavily bedded in rust, retained its
form, for the solid steel had resisted even the fearful lapse of
vanished time.
"After I scour that with sand and water," said Stern, "and polish up
these aluminum utensils and reset that broken pane with a piece of
glass from up-stairs where it isn't needed, you won't know this place.
Yes, and I'll have running water in here, too--and electricity from
the power-plant, and--"
"Oh, Allan," interrupted the girl, delightedly, "this must have been
the dining room." She beckoned from a doorway. "No end of dishes left
for us! Isn't it jolly? This is luxury compared to the way we had to
start in the tower!"
In the dining-room a good number of the more solid cut-glass and china
pieces had resisted the shock of having fallen, centuries ago, to the
floor, when the shelves and cupboards of teak and mahogany had rotted
and gone to pieces. Corroded silverware lay scattered all about; and
there was gold plate, too, intact save for the patina of extreme
age--platters, dishes, beakers. But of the table and the chairs,
nothing remained save dust.
Like curious children they poked and pried.
"Dishes enough!" exclaimed she. "Gold, till you can't rest. But how
about something to put _on_ the dishes? We haven't had a bite since
yesterday noon, and I'm about starved. Now that the fighting's all
over, I begin to remember my healthy appetite!"
Stern smiled.
"You'll have some breakfast, girlie," promised he. "There'll be the
wherewithal to garnish our 18-k, never fear. Just let's have a look
up-stairs, and then I'll go after something for the larder."
They left the down-stairs rooms, silent save for a fly buzzing in a
spider's web, and together ascended the dusty stairs. The railing was
entirely gone; but the concrete steps remained.
Stern helped the girl, in spite of the twinge of pain it caused his
wounded arm. His heart beat faster--so, too, did hers--as they gained
the upper story. The touch of her was, to him, like a lighted match
flung into a powder magazine; but he bit his lip, and though his face
paled, then flushed, he held his voice steady as he said:
"So then, bats up here? Well, how the deuce do they get in and out?
Ah! That broken window, where the elm-branch has knocked out the
glass--I see! That's got to be fixed at once!"
He brushed webs and dust from the remaining panes, and together they
peered out over the orchard, out across the river, now a broad sheet
of molten gold. His arm went about her; he drew her head against his
heart, fast-beating; and silence fell.
"Come, Allan," said the girl at length, calmer than he. "Let's see
what we've got here to do with. Oh, I tell you to begin with," and she
smiled up frankly at him, "I'm a tremendously practical sort of woman.
You may be an engineer, and know how to build wireless telegraphs and
bridges and--and things; but when it comes to home--building--"
"I admit it. Well, lead on," he answered; and together they explored
the upper rooms. The sense of intimacy now lay strong upon them, of
unity and of indissoluble love and comradeship. This was quite another
venture than the exploration of the tower, for now they were choosing
a home, _their_ home, and in them the mating instinct had begun to
thrill, to burn.
Each room, despite its ruin and decay, took on a special charm, a
dignity, the foreshadowing of what must be. Yet intrinsically the
place was mournful, even after Stern had let the sunshine in.
For all was dark desolation. The rosewood and mahogany furniture,
pictures, rugs, brass beds, all alike lay reduced to dust and ashes. A
gold clock, the porcelain fittings of the bath-room, and some fine
clay and meerschaum pipes in what had evidently been Van Amburg's
den--these constituted all that had escaped the tooth of time.
In a front room that probably had been Sara's, a mud-swallow had built
its nest in the far corner. It flew out, frightened, when Stern thrust
his hand into the aperture to see if the nest were tenanted, fluttered
about with scared cries, then vanished up the broad fireplace.
"Eggs--warm!" announced Stern. "Well, this room will have to be shut
up and left. We've got more than enough, anyhow. Less work for you,
dear," he added, with a smile. "We might use only the lower floor, if
you like. I don't want you killing yourself with housework, you
understand."
She laughed cheerily.
"You make me a broom and get all the dishes and things together," she
answered, "and then leave the rest to me. In a week from now you won't
know this place. Once we clear out a little foothold here we can go
back to the tower and fetch up a few loads of tools and supplies--"
"Come on, come on!" he interrupted, taking her by the hand and leading
her away. "All such planning will do after breakfast, but I'm
starving! How about a five-pound bass on the coals, eh? Come on, let's
go fishing."
CHAPTER III
THE MASKALONGE
With characteristic resourcefulness Stein soon manufactured
adequate tackle with a well-trimmed alder pole, a line of leather
thongs and a hook of stout piano wire, properly bent to make a barb
and rubbed to a fine point on a stone. He caught a dozen young frogs
among the sedges in the marshy stretch at the north end of the
landing-beach, and confined them in the only available receptacle, the
holster of his automatic.
All this hurt his arm severely, but he paid no heed.
"Now," he announced, "we're quite ready for business. Come along!"
Together they pushed the boat off; it glided smoothly out onto the
breast of the great current.
"I'll paddle," she volunteered. "You mustn't, with your arm in the
condition it is. Which way?"
"Up--over there into that cove beyond the point," he answered, baiting
up his hook with a frog that kicked as naturally as though a full
thousand years hadn't passed since any of its progenitors had been
handled thus. "This certainly is far from being the kind of tackle
that Bob Davis or any of that gang used to swear by, but it's the best
we can do for now. When I get to making lines and hooks and things in
earnest, there'll be some sport in this vicinity. Imagine water
untouched by the angler for ten hundred years or more!"
He swung his clumsy line as he spoke, and cast. Far across the shining
water the circles spread, silver in the morning light; then the
trailing line cut a long series of V's as the girl paddled slowly
toward the cove. Behind the banca a rippling wake flashed metallic;
the cold, clear water caressed the primitive hull, murmuring with soft
cadences, in the old, familiar music of the time when there were men
on earth. The witchery of it stirred Beatrice; she smiled, looked up
with joy and wonder at the beauty of that perfect morning, and in her
clear voice began to sing, very low, very softly, to herself, a song
whereof--save in her brain--no memory now remained in the whole
world--
"Stark wie der Fels,
Tief wie das Meer,
Muss deine Liebe, muss deine Liebe sein--"
"_Ah!_" cried the man, interrupting her.
The alder pole was jerking, quivering in his hands; the leather line
was taut.
"A strike, so help me! A big one!"
He sprang to his feet, and, unmindful of the swaying of the banca,
began to play the fish.
Beatrice, her eyes a-sparkle, turned to watch; the paddle lay
forgotten in her hands.
"Here he comes! Oh, _damn!_" shouted Stern. "If I only had a reel
now--"
"Pull him right in, can't you?" the girl suggested.
He groaned, between clenched teeth--for the strain on his arm was
torture.
"Yes, and have him break the line!" he cried. "There he goes, under
the boat, now! Paddle! Go ahead--paddle!"
She seized the oar, and while Stern fought the monster she set the
banca in motion again. Now the fish was leaping wildly from side to
side, zig-zagging, shaking at the hook as a bull-dog shakes an old
boot. The leather cord hummed through the water, ripping and
vibrating, taut as a fiddle-string. A long, silvery line of bubbles
followed the vibrant cord.
_Flash!_
High in air, lithe and graceful and very swift, a spurt of green and
white--a long, slim curve of glistening power--a splash; and again the
cord drew hard.
"Maskalonge!" Stern cried. "Oh, we've got to land him--got to! Fifteen
pounds if he's an ounce!"
Beatrice, flushed and eager, watched the fight with fascination.
"If I can bring him close, you strike--hit hard!" the man directed.
"Give it to him! He's our breakfast!"
Even in the excitement of the battle Stern realized how very beautiful
this woman was. Her color was adorable--rose-leaves and cream. Her
eyes were shot full of light and life and the joy of living; her
loosened hair, wavy and rich and brown, half hid the graceful curve of
her neck as she leaned to watch, to help him.
And strong determination seized him to master this great fish, to land
it, to fling it at the woman's feet as his tribute and his trophy.
He had, in the days of long ago, fished in the Adirondack
wildernesses. He had fished for tarpon in the Gulf; he had cast the
fly along the brooks of Maine and lured the small-mouthed bass with
floating bait on many a lake and stream. He had even fished in a Rocky
Mountain torrent, and out on the far Columbia, when failure to succeed
meant hunger.
But this experience was unique. Never had he fished all alone in the
world with a loved woman who depended on his skill for her food, her
life, her everything.
Forgotten now the wounded arm, the crude and absurd implements;
forgotten everything but just that sole, indomitable thought: "I've
got to win!"
Came now a lull in the struggles of the monster. Stern hauled in.
Another rush, met by a paying-out, a gradual tautening of the line, a
strong and steady pull.
"He's tiring," exulted Stern. "Be ready when I bring him close!"
Again the fish broke cover; again it dived; but now its strength was
lessening fast.
Allan hauled in.
Now, far down in the clear depths, they could both see the darting,
flickering shaft of white and green.
"Up he comes now! Give it to him, hard!"
As Stern brought him to the surface, Beatrice struck with the
paddle--once, twice, with magnificent strength and judgment.
Over the gunwale of the banca, in a sparkle of flying spray, silvery
in the morning sun, the maskalonge gleamed.
Excited and happy as a child, Beatrice clapped her hands. Stern seized
the paddle as she let it fall. A moment later the huge fish, stunned
and dying, lay in the bottom of the boat, its gills rising, falling in
convulsive gasps, its body quivering, scales shining in the
sunlight--a thing of wondrous beauty, a promise of the feast for two
strong, healthy humans.
Stern dried his brow on the back of his hand and drew a deep breath,
for the morning was already warm and the labor had been hard.
"Now," said he, and smiled, "now a nice little pile of dead wood on
the beach, a curl of birch-bark and a handful of pine punk and
grass--a touch of the flint and steel! Then _this_," and he pointed at
the maskalonge, "broiled on a pointed stick, with a handful of
checkerberries for dessert, and I think you and I will be about ready
to begin work in earnest!"
He knelt and kissed her--a kiss that she returned--and then, slowly,
happily, and filled with the joy of comradeship, they drove their
banca once more to the white and gleaming beach.
CHAPTER IV
THE GOLDEN AGE
Stern's plans of hard work for the immediate present had to be
deferred a little, for in spite of his perfect health, the
spear-thrust in his arm--lacking the proper treatment, and irritated
by his labor in catching the big fish--developed swelling and
soreness. A little fever even set in the second day. And though he was
eager to go out fishing again, Beatrice appointed herself his nurse
and guardian, and withheld permission.
They lived for some days on the excellent flesh of the maskalonge, on
clams from the beach--enormous clams of delicious flavor--on a new
fruit with a pinkish meat, which grew abundantly in the thickets and
somewhat resembled breadfruit; on wild asparagus-sprouts, and on the
few squirrels that Stern was able to "pot" with his revolver from the
shelter of the leafy little camping-place they had arranged near the
river.
Though Beatrice worked many hours all alone in the bungalow, sweeping
it with a broom made of twigs lashed to a pole, and trying to bring
the place into order, it was still no fit habitation.
She would not even let the man try to help her, but insisted on his
keeping quiet in their camp. This lay under the shelter of a
thick-foliaged oak at the southern end of the beach. The perfect
weather and the presence of a three-quarters moon at night invited
them to sleep out under the sky.
"There'll be plenty of time for the bungalow," she said, "when it
rains. As long as we have fair June weather like this no roof shall
cover me!"
Singularly enough, there were no mosquitoes. In the thousand years
that had elapsed, they might either have shifted their habitat from
eastern America, or else some obscure evolutionary process might have
wiped them out entirely. At any rate, none existed, for which the two
adventurers gave thanks.
Wild beasts they feared not. Though now and then they heard the yell
of a wildcat far back in the woods, or the tramping of an occasional
bulk through the forest, and though once a cinnamon bear poked his
muzzle out into the clearing, sniffed and departed with a grunt of
disapproval, they could not bring themselves to any realization of
animals as a real peril. Their camp-fire burned high all night, heaped
with driftwood and windfalls; and beyond this protection, Stern had
his automatic and a belt nearly full of cartridges. They discussed the
question of a possible attack by some remnants of the Horde; but
common sense assured them that these creatures would--such as
survived--give them a wide berth.
"And in any event," Stern summed it up, "if anything happens, we have
the bungalow to retreat into. Though in its present state, without any
doors or shutters, I think we're safer out among the trees, where, on
a pinch, we could go aloft."
Thus his convalescence progressed in the open air, under the clouds
and sun and stars and lustrous moon of that deserted world.
Beatrice showed both skill and ingenuity in her treatment. With a
clam-shell she scraped and saved the rich fat from under the skins of
the squirrels, and this she "tried out" in a golden dish, over the
fire. The oil thus got she used to anoint his healing wound. She used
a dressing of clay and leaves; and when the fever flushed him she made
him comfortable on his bed of spruce-tips, bathed his forehead and
cheeks, and gave him cold water from a spring that trickled down over
the moss some fifty feet to westward of the camp.
Many a long talk they had, too--he prone on the spruce, she sitting
beside him, tending the fire, holding his hand or letting his head lie
in her lap, the while she stroked his hair. Ferns, flowers in
profusion--lilacs and clover and climbing roses and some new, strange
scarlet blossoms--bowered their nest. And through the pain and fever,
the delay and disappointment, they both were glad and cheerful. No
word of impatience or haste or repining escaped them. For they had
life; they had each other; they had love. And those days, as later
they looked back upon them, were among the happiest, the most purely
beautiful, the sweetest of their whole wondrous, strange experience.
He and she, perfect friends, comrades and lovers, were inseparable.
Each was always conscious of the other's presence. The continuity of
love, care and sympathy was never broken. Even when, at daybreak, she
went away around the wooded point for her bath in the river, he could
hear her splashing and singing and laughing happily in the cold water.
It was the Golden Age come back to earth again--the age of natural and
pure simplicity, truth, trust, honor, faith and joy, unspoiled by
malice or deceit, by lies, conventions, sordid ambitions, or the lust
of wealth or power. Arcady, at last--in truth!
Their conversation was of many things. They talked of their awakening
in the tower and their adventures there; of the possible cause of the
world-catastrophe that had wiped out the human race, save for their
own survival; the Horde and the great battle; their escape, their
present condition, and their probable future; the possibility of their
ever finding any other isolated human beings, and of reconstituting
the fragments of the world or of renewing the human race.
And as they spoke of this, sometimes the girl would grow strangely
silent, and a look almost of inspiration--the universal mother--look
of the race--would fill her wondrous eye's. Her hand would tremble in
his; but he would hold it tight, for he, too, understood.
"Afraid, little girl?" he asked her once.
"No, not afraid," she answered; and their eyes met. "Only--so much
depends on us--on you, on me! What strength we two must have, what
courage, what endurance! The future of the human race lies in our
hands!"
He made no answer; he, too, grew silent. And for a long while they sat
and watched the embers of the fire; and the day waned. Slowly the sun
set in its glory over the virgin hills; the far eastern spaces of the
sky grew bathed in tender lavenders and purples. Haze drew its veils
across the world, and the air grew brown with evenfall.
Presently the girl arose, to throw more wood on the fire. Clad only in
her loose tiger-skin, clasped with gold, she moved like a primeval
goddess. Stern marked the supple play of her muscles, the unspoiled
grace and strength of that young body, the swelling warmth of her
bosom. And as he looked he loved; he pressed a hand to his eyes; for a
while he thought--it was as though he prayed.
Evening came on--the warm, dark, mysterious night. Off there in the
shallows gradually arose the million-voiced chorus of frogs, shrill
and monotonous, plaintive, appealing--the cry of new life to the
overarching, implacable mystery of the universe. The first faint
silvery powder of the stars came spangling out along the horizon.
Unsteady bats began to reel across the sky. The solemn beauty of the
scene awed the woman and the man to silence. But Stern, leaning his
back against the bole of the great oak, encircled Beatrice with his
arm.
Her beautiful dear head rested in the hollow of his throat; her warm,
fragrant hair caressed his cheek; he felt the wholesome strength and
sweetness of this woman whom he loved; and in his eyes--unseen by
her--tears welled and gleamed in the firelight.
Beatrice watched, like a contented child, the dancing showers of
sparks that rose, wavering and whirling in complex sarabands--sparks
red as passion, golden as the unknown future of their dreams. From the
river they heard the gentle lap-lap-lapping of the waves along the
shore. All was rest and peace and beauty; this was Eden once
again--and there was no serpent to enter in.
Presently Stern spoke.
"Dear," said he, "do you know, I'm a bit puzzled in some ways,
about--well, about night and day, and temperature, and gravitation,
and a number of little things like that. Puzzled. We're facing
problems here that we don't realize fully as yet."
"Problems? What problems, except to make our home, and--and live?"
"No, there's more to be considered than just that. In the first place,
although I have no timepiece, I'm moderately certain the day and night
are shorter now than they used to be before the smash-up. There must
be a difference of at least half an hour. Just as soon as I can get
around to it, I'll build a clock, and see. Though if the force of
gravity has changed, too, that, of course, will change the time of
vibration of any pendulum, and so of course will invalidate my
results. It's a hard problem, right enough."
"You think gravitation has changed?"
"Don't you notice, yourself, that things seem a trifle lighter--things
that used to be heavy to lift are now comparatively easy?"
"M-m-m-m-m--I don't know. I thought maybe it was because I was
feeling so much stronger, with this new kind of outdoor life."
"Of course, that's worth considering," answered Stern, "but there's
more in it than that. The world is certainly smaller than it was,
though how, or why, I can't say. Things are lighter, and the time of
rotation is shorter. Another thing, the pole-star is certainly five
degrees out of place. The axis of the earth has been given an
astonishing twist, some way or other.
"And don't you notice a distinct change in the climate? In the old
days there were none of these huge, palm-like ferns growing in this
part of the world. We had no such gorgeous butterflies. And look at
the new varieties of flowers--and the breadfruit, or whatever it is,
growing on the banks of the Hudson in the early part of June!
"Something, I tell you, has happened to the earth, in all these
centuries; something big! Maybe the cause of it all was the original
catastrophe; who knows? It's up to us to find out. We've got more to
do than make our home, and live, and hunt for other people--if any are
still alive. We've got to solve these world--problems; we've got work
to do, little girl. Work--big work!"
"Well, you've got to rest _now_, anyhow," she dictated. "Now, stop
thinking and planning, and just rest! Till your wound is healed,
you're going to keep good and quiet."
Silence fell again between them. Then, as the east brightened with the
approach of the moon, she sang the song he loved best--"Ave Maria,
Gratia Plena"--in her soft, sweet voice, untrained, unspoiled by false
conventions. And Stern, listening, forgot his problems and his plans;
peace came to his soul, and rest and joy.
The song ended. And now the moon, with a silent majesty that shamed
human speech, slid her bright silver plate up behind the fret of trees
on the far hills. Across the river a shimmering path of light grew,
broadening; and the world beamed in holy beauty, as on the primal
night.
And their souls drank that beauty. They were glad, as never yet. At
last Stern spoke.
"It's more like a dream than a reality, isn't it?" said he. "Too
wonderful to be true. Makes me think of Alfred de Musset's 'Lucie.'
You remember the poem?
"'Un soir, nous etions seuls,
J'etais assis pres d'elle . ..'"
Beatrice nodded.
"Yes, I know!" she whispered. "How could I forget it? And to think
that for a thousand years the moon's been shining just the same, and
nobody--"
"Yes, but _is_ it the same?" interrupted Stern suddenly, his practical
turn of mind always reasserting itself. "Don't you see a difference?
You remember the old-time face in the moon, of course. Where is it
now? The moon always presented only one side, the same side, to us in
the old days. How about it now? If I'm not mistaken, things have
shifted up there. We're looking now at some other face of it. And if
that's so it means a far bigger disarrangement of the solar system and
the earth's orbit and lots of things than you or I suspect!
"Wait till we get back to New York for half a day, and visit the tower
and gather up our things. Wait till I get hold of my binoculars again!
Perhaps some of these questions may be resolved. We can't go on this
way, surrounded by perpetual puzzles, problems, mysteries! We must--"
"Do nothing but rest now!" she dictated with mock severity.
Stern laughed.
"Well, you're the boss," he answered, and leaned back against the oak.
"Only, may I propound one more question?"
"Well, what is it?"
"Do you see that dark patch in the sky? Sort of a roughly circular
hole in the blue, as it were--right there?" He pointed. "Where there
aren't any stars?"
"Why--yes. What about it?"
"It's moving, that's all. Every night that black patch moves among the
stars, and cuts their light off; and one night it grazed the
moon--passed before the eastern limb of it, you understand. Made a
partial eclipse. You were asleep; I didn't bother you about it. But if
there's a new body in the sky, it's up to us to know why, and what
about it, and all. So the quicker--"
"The quicker you get well, the better all around!"
She drew his head down and kissed him tenderly on the forehead with
that strange, innate maternal instinct which makes women love to
"mother" men even ten years older than themselves.
"Don't you worry your brains about all these problems and vexations
to-night, Allan. Your getting well is the main thing. The whole
world's future hangs on just that! Do you realize what it means? Do
you?"
"Yes, as far as the human brain _can_ realize so big a concept.
Languages, arts, science, all must be handed down to the race by us.
The world can't begin again on any higher plane than just the level of
our collective intelligence. All that the world knows to-day is stored
in your brain-cells and mine! And our speech, our methods, our ideals,
will shape the whole destiny of the earth. Our ideals! We must keep
them very pure!"
"Pure and unspotted," she answered simply. Then with an adorable and
feminine anticlimax:
"Dear, does your shoulder pain you now? I'm awfully heavy to be
leaning on you like this!"
"You're not hurting me a bit. On the contrary, your touch, your
presence, are life to me!"
"Quite sure you're comfy, boy?"
"Positive."
"And happy?"
"To the limit."
"I'm so glad. Because I am, too. I'm awfully sleepy, Allan. Do you
mind if I take just a little, tiny nap?"
For all answer he patted her, and smoothed her hair, her cheek, her
full, warm throat.
Presently by her slow, gentle breathing he knew she was asleep.
For a long time he half-lay there against the oak, softly swathed in
his bear-skin, on the odorous bed of fir, holding her in his arms,
looking into the dancing firelight.
And night wore on, calm, perfumed, gentle; and the thoughts of the man
were long, long thoughts--thoughts "that do often lie too deep for
tears."
CHAPTER V
DEADLY PERIL
Pages on pages would not tell the full details of the following
week--the talks they had, the snaring and shooting of small game, the
fishing, the cleaning out of the bungalow, and the beginnings of some
order in the estate, the rapid healing of Stern's arm, and all the
multifarious little events of their new beginnings of life there by
the river-bank.
But there are other matters of more import than such homely things; so
now we come to the time when Stern felt the pressing imperative of a
return to the tower. For he lacked tools in every way; he needed them
to build furniture, doors, shutters; to clear away the brush and make
the place orderly, rational and beautiful; to start work on his
projected laboratory and power-plant; for a thousand purposes.
He wanted his binoculars, his shotgun and rifles, and much ammunition,
as well as a boat-load of canned supplies and other goods.
Instruments, above all, he had to have.
So, though Beatrice still, with womanly conservatism, preferred to let
well enough alone for the present, and stay away from the scene of
such ghastly deeds as had taken place on the last day of the invasion
by the Horde, Stern eventually convinced and overargued her; and on
what he calculated to be the 16th day of June, 2912--the tenth day
since the fight--they set sail for Manhattan. A favoring northerly
breeze, joined with a clear sky and sunshine of unusual brilliancy,
made the excursion a gala time for both. As they put their supplies of
fish, squirrel-meat and breadfruit aboard the banca and shoved the
rude craft off the sand, both she and he felt like children on an
outing.
Allan's arm was now so well that he permitted himself the luxury of a
morning plunge. The invigoration of this was still upon him as, with a
song, he raised the clumsy skin sail upon the rough-hewn mast.
Beatrice curled down in her tiger-skin at the stern, took one of the
paddles, and made ready to steer. He settled himself beside her, the
thongs of his sail in his hand. Thus happy in comradeship, they sailed
away to southward, down the blue wonder of the river, flanked by
headlands, wooded heights, crags, cliffs and Palisades, now all alike
deserted.
Noon found them opposite the fluted columns of gray granite that once
had borne aloft the suburbs of Englewood. Stern recognized the
conformation of the place; but though he looked hard, could find no
trace of the Interstate Park road that once had led from top to bottom
of the Palisades, nor any remnant of the millionaires' palaces along
the heights there.
"Stone and brick have long since vanished as structures," he
commented. "Only steel and concrete have stood the gaff of uncounted
years! Where all that fashion, wealth and beauty once would have
scorned to notice us, girl, now what's left? Hear the cry of that
gull? The barking of that fox? See that green flicker over the
pinnacle? Some new, bright bird, never dreamed of in this country! And
even with the naked eye I can make out the palms and the lianas
tangled over the verge of what must once have been magnificent
gardens!"
He pointed at the heights.
"Once," said he, "I was consulted by a sausage-king named Breitkopf,
who wanted to sink an elevator-shaft from the top to the bottom of
this very cliff, so he could reach his hundred-thousand-dollar launch
in ease. Breitkopf didn't like my price; he insulted me in several
rather unpleasant ways. The cliff is still here, I see. So am I. But
Breitkopf is--elsewhere."
He laughed, and swept the river with a glance.
"Steer over to the eastward, will you?" he asked. "We'll go in through
Spuyten Duyvil and the Harlem. That'll bring us much nearer the tower
than by landing on the west shore of Manhattan."
Two hours later they had run past the broken arches of Fordham,
Washington, and High Bridges, and following the river--on both banks
of which a few scattered ruins showed through the massed foliage--were
drawing toward Randall's and Ward's islands and Hell Gate.
Wind and tide still favored them. In safety they passed the ugly
shoals and ledges. Here Stern took the paddle, while Beatrice went to
the bow and left all to his directing hand.
By three o'clock in the afternoon they were drawing past Blackwell's
Island. The Queensboro Bridge still stood, as did the railway bridges
behind them; but much wreckage had fallen into the river, and in one
place formed an ugly whirlpool, which Stern had to avoid by some hard
work with the paddle.
The whole structure was sagging badly to southward, as though the
foundations had given way. Long, rusted masses of steel hung from the
spans, which drooped as though to break at any moment. Though all the
flooring had vanished centuries before, Stern judged an active man
could still make his way across the bridge.
"That's their engineering," gibed he, as the little boat sailed under
and they looked up like dwarfs at the legs of a Colossus. "The old
Roman bridges are good for practically eternity, but these jerry steel
things, run up for profits, go to pieces in a mere thousand years!
Well, the steel magnates are gone now, and their profits with them.
But this junk remains as a lesson and a warning, Beta; the race to
come must build better than this, and sounder, every way!"
On, on they sailed, marveling at the terrific destruction on either
hand--the dense forests now grown over Brooklyn and New York alike.
"We'll be there before long now," said Allan. "And if we have any luck
at all, and nothing happens, we ought to be started for home by
nightfall. You don't mind a moonlight sail up the Hudson, do you?"
It was past four by the time the banca nosed her way slowly in among
the rotten docks and ruined hulks of steamships, and with a gentle
rustling came to rest among the reeds and rushes now growing rank at
the foot of what had once been Twenty-Third Street.
A huge sea-tortoise, disturbed, slid off the sand-bank where he had
been sunning himself and paddled sulkily away. A blue heron flapped up
from the thicket, and with a frog in its bill awkwardly took flight,
its long neck crooked, legs dangling absurdly.
"Some mighty big changes, all right," commented Stern. "Yes, there's
got to be a deal of work done here before things are right again. But
there's time enough, time enough--there's all the time we need, we and
the people who shall come after us!"
They made the banca fast, noting that the tide was high and that the
leather cord was securely tied to a gnarled willow that grew at the
water's edge. Half an hour later they had made their way across town
to Madison Avenue.
It was with strange feelings they once more approached the scene of
their battle against such frightful odds with the Horde. Stern was
especially curious to note the effect of his Pulverite, not only on
the building itself but on the square.
This effect exceeded his expectations. Less than two hundred feet of
the tower now stood and the whole western facade was but a mass of
cracked and gaping ruin.
Out on the Square the huge elms and pines had been uprooted and flung
in titanic confusion, like a game of giants' jack-straws. And vast
conical excavations showed, here and there, where vials of the
explosive had struck the earth. Gravel and rocks had even been thrown
over the Metropolitan Building itself into the woodland glades of
Madison Avenue. And, worse, bits of bone--a leg-bone, a
shoulder-blade, a broken skull with flesh still adhering--here or
there met the eye.
"Mighty good thing the vultures have been busy here," commented Stern.
"If they hadn't, the place wouldn't be even approachable. Gad! I thank
my stars what we've got to do won't take more than an hour. If we had
to stay here after dark I'd surely have the creeps, in spite of all my
scientific materialism! Well, no use being retrospective. We're living
in the present and future now; not the past. Got the plaited cords
Beatrice? We'll need them before long to make up our bundle with."
Thus talking, Stern kept the girl from seeing too much or brooding
over what she saw. He engaged her actively on the work in hand. Until
he had assured himself there was no danger from falling fragments in
the shattered halls and stairways that led up to the gaping ruin at
the truncated top of the tower he would not let her enter the
building, but set her to fashioning a kind of puckered bag with a huge
skin taken from the furrier's shop in the Arcade, while he explored.
He returned after a while, and together they climbed over the debris
and ruins to the upper rooms which had been their home during the
first few days after the awakening.
The silence of death that lay over the place was appalling--that and
the relics of the frightful battle. But they had their work to do;
they had to face the facts.
"We're not children, Beta," said the man. "Here we are for a purpose.
The quicker we get our work done the better. Come on, let's get busy!"
Stifling the homesick feeling that tried to win upon them they set to
work. All the valuables they could recover they collected--canned
supplies, tools, instruments, weapons, ammunition and a hundred and
one miscellaneous articles they had formerly used.
This flotsam of a former civilization they carried down and piled in
the skin bag at the broken doorway. And darkness began to fall ere the
task was done.
Still trickled the waters of the fountain in Madison Forest through
the dim evening aisles of the shattered forest. A solemn hush fell
over the dead world; night was at hand.
"Come, let's be going," spoke the man, his voice lowered in spite of
himself, the awe of the Infinite Unknown upon him. "We can eat in the
banca on the way. With the tide behind us, as it will be, we ought to
get home by morning. And I'll be mighty glad never to see this place
again!"
He slung a sack of cartridges over his shoulder and picked up one of
the cord loops of the bag wherein lay their treasure-trove. Beatrice
took the other.
"I'm ready," said she. Thus they started.
All at once she stopped short.
"Hark! What's that?" she exclaimed under her breath.
Far off to northward, plaintive, long-drawn and inexpressibly
mournful, a wailing cry reechoed in the wilderness--fell, rose, died
away, and left the stillness even more ghastly than before.
Stern stood rooted. In spite of all his aplomb and matter-of-fact
practicality, he felt a strange thrill curdle through his blood, while
on the back of his neck the hair drew taut and stiff.
"What is it?" asked Beatrice again.
"That? Oh, some bird or other, I guess. It's nothing. Come on!"
Again he started forward, trying to make light of the cry; but in his
heart he knew it well.
A thousand years before, far in the wilds near Ungava Bay, in
Labrador, he had heard the same plaintive, starving call--and he
remembered still the deadly peril, the long fight, the horror that had
followed.
He knew the cry; and his soul quivered with the fear of it; fear not
for himself, but for the life of this girl whose keeping lay within
the hollow of his hand.
For the long wail that had trembled across the vague spaces of the
forest, affronting the majesty and dignity of night and the coming
stars with its blood-lusting plaint of famine, had been none other
than the summons to the hunt, the news of quarry, the signal of a
gathering wolf-pack on their trail.
CHAPTER VI
TRAPPED!
"That's not the truth you're telling me, Allan," said Beatrice very
gravely. "And if we don't tell each other the whole truth always, how
can we love each other perfectly and do the work we have to do? I
don't want you to spare me anything, even the most terrible things.
That's not the cry of a bird--it's wolves!"
"Yes, that's what it is," the man admitted. "I was in the wrong. But,
you see--it startled me at first. Don't be alarmed, little girl! We're
well armed you see, and--"
"Are we going to stay here in the tower if they attack?"
"No. They might hold us prisoners for a week. There's no telling how
many there may be. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Once they get the
scent of game, they'll gather for miles and miles around; from all
over the island. So you see--"
"Our best plan, then, will be to make for the banca?"
"Assuredly! It's only a matter of comparatively few minutes to reach
it, and once we're aboard, we're safe. We can laugh at them and be on
our homeward way at the same time. The quicker we start the better.
Come on!"
"Come!" she repeated. And they made their second start after Stern had
assured himself his automatic hung easily in reach and that the guns
were loaded.
Together they took their way along the shadowy depths of the forest
where once Twenty-Third Street had lain. Bravely and strongly the girl
bore her half of the load as they broke through the undergrowth,
clambered over fallen and rotten logs, or sank ankle-deep in mossy
swales.
Even though they felt the danger, perhaps at that very moment
slinking, sneaking, crawling nearer off there in the vague, darkling
depths of the forest, they still sensed the splendid comradeship of
the adventure. No longer as a toy, a chattel, an instrument of
pleasure or amusement did the idea of woman now exist in the world. It
had altered, grown higher, nobler, purer--it had become that of mate
and equal, comrade, friend, the indissoluble other half of man.
Beatrice spoke.
"You mustn't take more of the weight than I do, Allan," she insisted,
as they struggled onward with their burden. "Your wounded arm isn't
strong enough yet to--"
"S-h-h-h!" he cautioned. "We've got to keep as quiet as possible. Come
on--the quicker we get these things aboard and push off the better!
Everything depends on speed!"
But speed was hard to make. The way seemed terribly long, now that
evening had closed in and they could no longer be exactly sure of
their path. The cumbersome burden impeded them at every step. In the
gloom they stumbled, tripped over vines and creepers, and became
involved among the close-crowding boles.
Suddenly, once again the wolf-cry burst out, this time reechoed from
another and another savage throat, wailing and plaintive and full of
frightful portent.
So much nearer now it seemed that Beatrice and Allan both stopped
short. Panting with their labors, they stood still, fear-smitten.
"They can't be much farther off now than Thirty-Fifth Street," the man
exclaimed under his breath. "And we're hardly past Second Avenue
yet--and look at the infernal thickets and brush we've got to beat
through to reach the river! Here, I'd better get my revolver ready and
hold it in my free hand. Will you change over? I can take the bag in
my left. I've got to have the right to shoot with!"
"Why not drop everything and run for the banca?"
"And desert the job? Leave all we came for? And maybe not be able to
get any of the things for Heaven knows how long? I guess not!"
"But, Allan--"
"No, no! What? Abandon all our plans because of a few wolves? Let 'em
come! We'll show 'em a thing or two!"
"Give me the revolver, then--you can have the rifle!"
"That's right--here!"
Each now with a firearm in the free hand, they started forward again.
On and on they lunged, they wallowed through the forest, half
carrying, half dragging the sack which now seemed to have grown ten
times heavier and which at every moment caught on bushes, on limbs and
among the dense undergrowth.
"Oh, look--look there!" cried Beatrice. She stopped short again,
pointing the revolver, her finger on the trigger.
Allan saw a lean, gray form, furtive and sneaking, slide across a dim
open space off toward the left, a space where once First Avenue had
cut through the city from south to north.
"There's another!" he whispered, a strange, choked feeling all around
his heart. "And look--three more! They're working in ahead of us.
Here, I'll have a shot at 'em, for luck!"
A howl followed the second spurt of flame in the dusk. One of the
gray, gaunt portents of death licked, yapping, at his flank.
"Got you, all right!" gibed Stern. "The kind o' game you're after
isn't as easy as you think, you devils!"
But now from the other side, and from behind them, the slinking
creatures gathered. Their eyes glowed, gleamed, burned softly yellow
through the dusk of the great wilderness that once had been the city's
heart. The two last humans in the world could even catch the flick of
ivory fangs, the lolling wet redness of tongues--could hear the
soughing breath through those infernal jaws.
Stern raised the rifle again, then lowered it.
"No use," said he quite calmly. "God knows how many there are. I might
use up all our ammunition and still leave enough of 'em to pick our
bones. They'll be all around us in a minute; they'll be worrying at
us, dragging us down! Come on--come on, the boat!"
"Light a torch, Allan. They're afraid of fire."
"Grand idea, little girl!"
Even as he answered he was scrabbling up dry-kye. Came the rasp of his
flint.
"Give 'em a few with the automatic, while I get this going!" he
commanded.
The gun spat twice, thrice. Then rose a snapping, snarling wrangle.
Off there in the gloom a hideous turmoil grew.
It ended in screams of pain and rage, suddenly throttled, choked, and
torn to nothing. A worrying, rending, gnashing told the story of the
wounded wolf's last moment.
Stern sprang up, a dry flaming branch of resinous fir in his hand. The
rifle he thrust back into the bag.
"Ate him, still warm, eh?" he cried. "Fine! And five shots left in the
gun. You won't miss, Beta! You can't!"
Forward they struggled once more.
"Gad, we'll hang to this bag _now_, whatever happens!" panted Stern,
jerking it savagely off a jagged stub. "Five minutes more and
we'll--arrh! _would_ you?"
The flaring torch he dashed full at a grisly muzzle that snapped and
slavered at his legs. To their nostrils the singe of burned hair
wafted. Yelping, the beast swerved back.
But others ran in and in at them; and now the torch was failing. Both
of them shouted and struck; and the revolver stabbed the night with
fire.
Pandemonium rose in the forest. Cries, howls, long wails and snuffing
barks blent with the clicking of ivories, the pad-pad-pad of feet, the
crackling of the underbrush.
All around, wolves. On either side, behind, in front, the sliding,
bristling, sneaking, suddenly bold horrors of the wild.
And the ring was tightening; the attack was coming, now, more and more
concertedly. The swinging torch could not now drive them back so fast,
so far.
Strange gleams shot against the tree-trunks, wavered through the dusk,
lighted the harsh, rage-contracted face of the man, fell on the
laboring, skin-clad figure of the woman as they still fought on and on
with their precious burden, hoping for a glimpse of water, for the
river, and salvation.
"Take--a tree?" gasped Beatrice.
"And maybe stay there a week? And use up--all our ammunition? Not
yet--no--no! The boat!"
On, ever on, they struggled.
A strange, unnatural exhilaration filled the girl, banishing thoughts
of peril, sending the blood aglow through every vein and fiber of her
wonderful young body.
Stern realized the peril more keenly. At any moment now he understood
that one of the devils in gray might hurl itself at the full throat of
Beatrice or at his own.
And once the taste of blood lay on those crimson tongues--good-by!
"The boat--the boat!" he shouted, striking right and left like mad
with the smoky, half-extinguished flare.
"There--the river!" suddenly cried Beatrice.
Through the columns of the forest she had seen at last the welcome
gleam of water, starlit, beautiful and calm. Stern saw it, too. A
demon now, he charged the snarling ring. Back he drove them; he
turned, seized the bag, and again plunged desperately ahead.
Together he and Beatrice crashed out among the willows and the alders
on the sedgy shore, with the vague, shifting, bristling horror of the
wolf-pack at their heels.
"Here, beat 'em off while I cut the cord--while I get the bag in--and
shove off!" panted Stern.
She seized the torch from his hand. Up he snatched the rifle again,
and with a pointblank volley flung three of the grays writhing and
yelling all in the mud and weeds and trampled cattails on the river
verge.
Down he threw the gun. He turned and swept the dark shore, there
between the ruins of the wharves, with a keen reconnoitering glance.
What? What was this?
There stood the aged willow to which the banca had been tied. But the
boat--where was it?
With a cry Stern leaped to the tree. His clutching hands fumbled at
the trunk.
"My God! Here's--here's the cord!" he stammered. "But it's--been cut!
The boat--_the boat's gone!_"
CHAPTER VII
A NIGHT OF TOIL
An hour later, from the gnarled branches of the willow--up into
which Stern had fairly flung her, and where he had himself clambered
with the beasts ravening at his legs--the two sole survivors of the
human race watched the glowering eyes that dotted the velvet gloom.
"I estimate a couple of hundred, all told," judged Allan. "Odd we
never ran across any of them before to-night. Must be some kind of a
migration under way--maybe some big shift of game, of deer, or
buffalo, or what-not. But then, in that case, they wouldn't be so
starved, so dead-set on white meat as they seem to be."
Beta shifted her place on a horizontal limb.
"It's awfully hard for a _soft_ wood," she remarked. "Do you think
we'll have to stay here long, dear?"
"That depends. I don't see that the fifteen we've killed since
roosting here have served as any terrible examples to the others. And
we're about twenty cartridges to the bad. They're not worth it, these
devils. We've got to save our ammunition for something edible till I
can get my shop to running and begin making my own powder. No; must be
there's some other and better way."
"But what?" asked the girl. "We're safe enough here, but we're not
getting any nearer home--and I'm _so_ hungry!"
"Same here," Stern coincided. "And the lunch was all in the boat;
worse luck! Who the deuce could have cut her loose? I thought we'd
pretty effectually cleared out those Hinkmatinks, or whatever the
Horde consisted of. But evidently something, or somebody, is still
left alive with a terrific grudge against us, or an awful longing for
navigation."
"Was the cord broken or cut?"
"I'll see."
Stern clambered to a lower branch. With the trigger-guard of his rifle
he was able to catch the cord. All about the trunk, meanwhile, the
wolves leaped snarling. The fetid animal smell of them was strong upon
the air--that, and the scent of blood and raw meat, where they had
feasted on the slain.
With the severed cord, Allan climbed back to where Beatrice sat.
"Hold the rifle, will you?" asked he. A moment, and by the quick
showers of sparks that issued from his flint and steel, he was
examining the leather thong.
"_Cut!_"
"Cut? But then, then--"
"No tide or wind to blame. Some intelligence, even though rudimentary,
has been at work here--is at work--opposed to us."
"But what?"
"No telling. There may be more things in this world yet than either of
us dream. Perhaps we committed a very grave error to leave the
apparently peaceful little nook we've got, up there on the Hudson, and
tackle this place again. But who could ever have thought of anything
like this after that terrible slaughter?"
They kept silence a few minutes. The wolves now had sunk to a plane of
comparative insignificance. At the very worst Stern could annihilate
them, one by one, with a lavish expenditure of his ammunition.
Unnoticed now, they yelped, and scratched and howled about the tree,
sat on their haunches, waiting in the gloom, or sneaked--vague
shadows--among the deeper dusks of the forest.
And once again the east began to glow, even as when he and she had
watched the moon rise over the hills beyond the Hudson; and their
hearts beat with joy for even that relief from the dark mystery of
solitude and night.
After a while the man spoke.
"It's this way," said he. "Whoever cut that cord and either let the
banca float away or else stole it, evidently doesn't want to come to
close quarters for the present, so long as these wolves are making
themselves friendly.
"Perhaps, in a way, the wolves are a factor in our favor; perhaps,
without them, we might have had a poisoned arrow sticking into us, or
a spear or two, before now. My guess is that we'll get a wide berth so
long as the wolves stay in the neighborhood. I think the anthropoids,
or whoever they were, must have been calculating on ambushing us as we
came back, and expected to 'get' us while we were hunting for the
boat.
"They didn't reckon on this little diversion. When they heard it they
probably departed for other regions. They won't be coming around just
yet, that's a safe wager. Mighty lucky, eh? Think what Ar targets we'd
make, up here in this willow, by moonlight!"
"You're right, Allan. But when it comes daylight we'll make better
ones. And I don't know that I enjoy sitting up here and starving to
death, with a body-guard of wolves to keep away the Horde, very much
more than I would taking a chance with the arrows. It's two sixes,
either way, and not a bit nice, is it?"
"Hang the whole business! There must be some other way--some way out
of this infernal pickle! Hold on--wait--I--I almost see it now!"
"What's your plan, dear?"
"Wait! Let me think, a minute!"
She kept silence. Together they sat among the spreading branches in
the growing moonlight. A bat reeled overhead, chippering weakly. Far
away a whippoorwill began its fluty, insistent strain. A distant cry
of some hunting beast echoed, unspeakably weird, among the dead,
deserted streets buried in oblivion. The brush crackled and snapped
with the movements of the wolf-pack; the continued snarling, whining,
yapping, stilled the chorus of the frogs along the sedgy banks.
"If I could only snare a good, lively one!" suddenly broke out Stern.
"What for?"
"Why, don't you see?" And with sudden inspiration he expounded.
Together, eager as children, they planned. Beatrice clapped her hands
with sheer delight.
"But," she added pensively, "it'll be a little hard on the wolf, won't
it?"
Stern had to laugh.
"Yes," he assented; "but think how much he'll learn about the new kind
of game he tried to hunt!"
Half an hour later a grim old warrior of the pack, deftly and securely
caught by one hind leg with the slip-noosed leather cord, dangled
inverted from a limb, high out of reach of the others.
Slowly he swung, jerking, writhing, frothing as he fought in vain to
snap his jaws upon the cord he could not touch. And night grew
horrible with the stridor of his yells.
"Now then," remarked Stern calmly, "to work. The moonlight's good
enough to shoot by. No reason I should miss a single target."
Followed a time of frightful tumult as the living ate the dying and
the dead, worrying the flesh from bones that had as yet scarcely
ceased to move. Beatrice, pale and silent, yet very calm, watched the
slaughter. Stern, as quietly methodical as though working out a
reaction, sighted, fired, sighted, fired. And the work went on apace.
The bag of cartridges grew steadily lighter. The work was done long
before all the wolves had died. For the survivors, gorged to
repletion, some wounded, others whole, slunk gradually away and
disappeared in the dim glades, there to sleep off their cannibal
debauch.
At last Stern judged the time was come to descend.
"Bark away, old boy!" he exclaimed. "The louder the better. You're our
danger-signal now. As long as those poor, dull anthropoid brains keep
sensing you I guess we're safe!"
To Beatrice he added:
"Come now, dear. I'll help you down. The quicker we tackle that raft
and away, the sooner we'll be home!"
"Home!" she repeated. "Oh, how glad I'll be to see our bungalow again!
How I hate the ruins of the city now! Look out, Allan--you'll have to
let me take a minute or two to straighten out in. You don't know how
awfully cramped I am!"
"Just slide into my arms--there, that's right!" he answered, and swung
her down as easily as though she had been a child. Her arms went round
his neck; their lips met and thrilled in a long kiss.
But not even the night-breeze and the moon could now beguile them to
another. For there was hard, desperate work to do, and time was short.
A moment they stood there together, under the old tree wherein the
wolf was dangling in loud-mouthed rage.
"Well, here's where I go at it!" exclaimed the man.
He opened the big sack. Fumbling among the tools, he quickly found the
ax.
"You, Beta," he directed, "get together all the plaited rope you can
take off the bag, and cut me some strips of hide. Cut a lot of them.
I'll need all you can make. We've got to work fast--got to clear out
of here before sunrise or there may be the devil to pay!"
It was a labor of extraordinary difficulty, there in those dense and
dim-lit thickets, felling a tall spruce, limbing it out and cutting it
into three sections. But Stern attacked it like a demon. Now and again
he stopped to listen or to jab tile suspended wolf with the ax-handle.
"Go on there, you alarm-signal!" he commanded. "Let's have plenty of
music, good and loud, too. Maybe if you deliver the goods and hold
out--well, you'll get away with your life. Otherwise, not!"
Robinson Crusoe's raft had been a mere nothing to build compared with
this one that the engineer had to construct there at the water's edge,
among the sedges and the reeds For Crusoe had planks and beams and
nails to help him; while Stern had naught but his ax, the forest, and
some rough cordage.
He had to labor in the gloom, as well, listening betimes for sounds of
peril or stopping to stimulate the wolf. The dull and rusty ax
retarded him; blisters rose upon his palms, and broke, and formed
again. But still he toiled.
The three longitudinal spruce timbers he lashed together with poles
and with the cords that Beatrice prepared for him. On these, again, he
laid and lashed still other poles, rough-hewn.
In half an hour's hard work, while the moon began to sink to the
westward, he had stepped a crude mast and hewed a couple of
punt-poles.
"No use our trying to row this monstrosity," he said to Beatrice,
stopping a moment to dash the sweat off his forehead with a shaking
hand. "We either rig the skin sack in some way as a sail, or we drift
up with the tide, tie at the ebb, and so on--and if we make the
bungalow in three days we're lucky!
"Come on now, Beatrice. Lend a hand here and we'll launch her! Good
thing the tide's coming up--she almost floats already. Now, one, two,
three!"
The absurd raft yielded, moved, slid out upon the marshy water and was
afloat!
"Get aboard!" commanded Allan. "Go forward to the _salon de luxe_.
I'll stow the bag aft, so."
He lifted her in his arms and set her on the raft. The bag he
carefully deposited at what passed for the stern. The raft sank a bit
and wallowed, but bore up.
"Now then, all aboard!" cried Stern.
"The wolf, Allan, the wolf! How about _him?_"
"That's right, I almost plumb forgot! I guess he's earned his life,
all right enough."
Quickly he slashed the cord. The wolf dropped limp, tried to crawl,
but could not, and lay panting on its side, tongue lolling, eyes
glazed and dim.
"He'll be a horrible example all his life of what it means to monkey
with the new kind of meat," remarked Allan, clambering aboard. "If
wolves or anthropoids can learn, they ought to learn from him!"
Strongly, steadily, they poled the raft out through the marshy slip,
on, on, past the crumbling wreckage of the pier-head.
"Now the tide's got us," exclaimed Allan with satisfaction, as the
moonlit current, all silver and rippling with calm beauty, swung them
up-stream.
Beatrice, still strong, and full of vigorous, pulsing life, in spite
of the long vigil in the tree and the hard night of work, curled up at
the foot of the rough mast, on the mass of fir-tips Stern had piled
there.
"You steer, boy," said she, "and I'll go to work on making some kind
of sail out of the big skin. By morning we ought to have our little
craft under full control."
"It's one beautiful boat, isn't it?" mocked Stern, poling off from a
gaunt hulk that barred the way.
"It mayn't be very beautiful," she answered softly, "but it carries
the greatest, purest, noblest love that ever was since the world
began--it carries the hope of the whole world, of all the ages--and
it's taking us home!"
CHAPTER VIII
THE REBIRTH OF CIVILIZATION
A month had hardly gone, before order and peace and the promise
of bountiful harvests dwelt in and all about Hope Lodge, as they had
named the bungalow.
From the kitchen, where the stove and the aluminum utensils now shone
bright and free from rust, to the bedrooms where fir-tips and soft
skin rugs made wondrous sleeping places, the house was clean and sweet
and beautiful again. Rough-hewn chairs and tables, strong, serviceable
and eloquent of nature--through which this rebirth of the race all had
to come--adorned the rooms. Fur rugs covered the floors.
In lieu of pictures, masses of flowers and great sprays of foliage
stood in clay pots of Stern's own manufacture and firing. And on a
rustic book-case in their living room, where the big fireplace was,
and where the southern sun beat warmest in, stood their chief
treasure--a set of encyclopedias.
Stern had made leather bindings for these, with the deft help of
Beatrice. The original bindings had vanished before the attacks of
time and insects centuries before. But the leaves were still intact.
For these were thin sheets of nickel, printed by the electrolysis
process.
"Just a sheer streak of luck," Stern remarked, as he stood looking at
this huge piece of fortune with the girl. "Just a kindly freak of
fate, that Van Amburg should have bought one of Edison's first sets of
nickel-sheet books.
"Except for the few sets of these in existence, here and there, not a
book remains on the surface of this entire earth. The finest hand-made
linen paper has disintegrated ages ago. And parchment has probably
crinkled and molded past all recognition. Besides, up-to-date
scientific books, such as we need, weren't done on parchment. We're
playing into gorgeous luck with these cyclopedias, for everything I
need and can't remember is in them. But it certainly was one job to
sort those scattered sheets out of the rubbish-pile in the library and
rearrange them."
"Yes, that _was_ hard work, but it's done now. Come on out into the
garden, Allan, and see if our crops have grown any during the night!"
The grounds about the bungalow were a delight to them. Like two
children they worked, day by day, to enlarge and beautify their
holdings, their lands won back from nature's greed.
Though wild fruits--some new, others familiar--and fish and the
plentiful game all about them offered abundant food, to be had for the
mere seeking, they both agreed on the necessity of reestablishing
agriculture. For they disliked the thought of being driven southward,
with the return of each successive winter. They wanted, if advisable,
to be able to winter in the bungalow. And this meant some provision
for the unproductive season.
"It won't always be summer here, you know," Stern told her. "This Eden
will sometime lie wet and dreary under the winter rains that I expect
now take the place of snow. And the eternal curse of Adam--toil--is
not yet lifted even from us two survivors of the fifteen hundred
million that once ruled the earth. We, and those who shall come after,
must have the old-time foods again. And that means work!"
They had cleared a patch of black, virgin soil, in a sunny hollow.
Here Stern had transplanted all the wild descendants of the vegetables
and grains of other time which in his still limited explorations he
had come across.
The work of clearing away the thorns and bushes, the tangled lianas
and tall trees, was severe; but it strengthened him and hardened his
whip-cord muscles till they ridged his skin like iron. He burned and
pulled the stumps, spaded and harrowed and hoed all by hand, and made
ready the earth for the reception of its first crop in a thousand
years.
He recalled enough of his anthropology and botany from university days
to recognize the reverted, twisted and stringy little degenerate
wild-potato root which had once served the Aztecs and Pueblo Indians
for food, and could again, with proper cultivation, be brought back to
full perfection. Likewise with the maize, the squash, the wild turnip,
and many other vegetable forms.
"Three years of cultivation," he declared, "and I can win them back to
edibility. Five, and they'll be almost where they were before the
great catastrophe. As for the fruits, the apple, cherry, and pear, all
they need is care and scientific grafting.
"I predict that ten years from to-day, orchards and cornfields and
gardens shall surround this bungalow, and the heritage of man shall be
brought back to this old world!"
"Always giving due credit to the encyclopedia," added Beatrice.
"And to _you!_" he laughed happily. "This is all on your account,
anyhow. If I were alone in the world, you bet there'd be no gardens
made!"
"No, I don't believe there would," she agreed, a serious look on her
face. "But, then," she concluded, smiling again, "you aren't alone,
Allan. You've got _me!_"
He tried to catch her in his arms, but she evaded him and ran back
toward the bungalow.
"No, no, you've got to work," she called to him from the porch. "And
so have I. Good-by!" And with a wave of the hand, a strong, brown hand
now, slim and very beautiful, she vanished.
Stern stood in thought a moment, then shook his head, and, with a
singular expression, picked up his hoe, and once more fell to
cultivating his precious little garden-patch, on which so infinitely
much depended. But something lay upon his mind; he paused, reflecting;
then picked up a stone and weighed it in his hand, tried another, and
a third.
"I'm damned," he remarked, "if these feel right to met I've been
wondering about it for a week now--there's got to be some answer to
it. A stone of this size in the old days would certainly have weighed
more. And that big boulder I rooted out from the middle of the
field--in the other days I couldn't have more than stirred it.
"Am I so very much stronger? So much as all that? Or have things grown
lighter? Is that why I can leap farther, walk better, run faster?
What's it all about, anyhow?"
He could not work, but sat down on a rock to ponder. Numerous
phenomena occurred to him, as they had while he had lain wounded under
the tree by the river during their first few days at the bungalow.
"My observations certainly show a day only twenty-two hours and
fifty-seven minutes long; that's certain," he mused. "So the earth is
undoubtedly smaller. But what's that got to do with the mass of the
earth? With weight? Hanged if I can make it out at all!
"Even though the earth has shrunk, it ought to have the same power of
gravitation. If all the molecules and atoms really were pressed
together, with no space between, probably the earth wouldn't be much
bigger than a football, but it would weigh just that much, and a body
would fall toward it from space just as fast as now. Quite a hefty
football, eh? For the life of me I can't see why the earth's having
shrunk has affected the weight of everything!"
Perplexed, he went back to his work again. And though he tried to
banish the puzzle from his mind it still continued to haunt and to
annoy him.
Each day brought new and interesting activities. Now they made an
expedition to gather a certain kind of reeds which Beatrice could plat
into cordage and basketry; now they peeled quantities of birch-bark,
which on rainy days they occupied themselves in splitting into thin
sheets for paper. Stern manufactured a very excellent ink in his
improvised laboratory on the second floor, and the split and pointed
quills of a wild goose served them for pens in taking notes and
recording their experiences.
"Paper will come later, when we've got things a little more settled,"
he told her. "But for now this will have to do."
"I guess if you can get along with skin clothing for a while, I can do
with birch-bark for my correspondence," she replied laughing. "Why not
catch some of those wild sheep that seem so plentiful on the hills to
westward? If we could domesticate them, that would mean wool and yarn
and cloth--and milk, too, wouldn't it? And if milk, why not butter?"
"Not so fast!" he interposed. "Just wait a while--we'll have cattle,
goats, and sheep, and the whole business in due time; but how much can
one pair of human beings undertake? For the present we'll have to be
content with what mutton-chops and steaks and hams I can get with a
gun--and we're mighty lucky to have those!"
Singularly enough, and contrary to all beliefs, they felt no need of
salt. Evidently the natural salts in their meat and in the fruits they
ate supplied their wants. And this was fortunate, because the quest of
salt might have been difficult; they might even had had to boil
sea-water to obtain it.
They felt no craving for sweets, either; but when one day they came
upon a bee-tree about three-quarters of a mile back in the woods to
westward of the river, and when Stern smoked out the bees and gathered
five pounds of honey in the closely platted rush basket lined with
leaves, which they always carried for miscellaneous treasure-trove,
they found the flavor delicious. They decided to add honey to their
menu, and thereafter always kept it in a big pottery jar in their
kitchen.
Stern's hunting, fishing and gardening did not occupy his whole time.
Every day he made it a rule to work at least an hour, two if possible,
on the thirty-foot yawl that had already begun to take satisfactory
shape on the timber ways which now stood on the river bank.
All through July and part of August he labored on this boat, building
it stanch and true, calking it thoroughly, fitting a cabin, stepping a
fir mast, and making all ready for the great migration which he felt
must inevitably be forced upon them by the arrival of cool weather.
He doubted very much, in view of the semitropic character of some of
the foliage, whether even in January the temperature would now go
below freezing; but in any event he foresaw that there would be no
fruits available, and he objected to a winter on flesh foods. In
preparation for the trip he had built a little "smoke-house" near the
beach, and here he smoked considerable quantities of meat--deer-meat,
beef from a wild steer which he was so fortunate as to shoot during
the third week of their stay at the bungalow, and a good score of hams
from the wild pigs which rooted now and then among the beech growth
half a mile downstream.
Often the girl and he discussed this coming trip, of an evening,
sitting together by the river to watch the stars and moon and that
strange black wandering blotch that now and then obscured a portion of
the night sky--or perchance leaning back in their huge, rustic easy
chairs lined with furs on the broad piazza; or again, if the night
were cool or rainy, in front of their blazing fire of pine knots and
driftwood, which burned with gorgeous blues and greens and crimsons in
the vast throat of Hope Lodge fireplace.
Other matters, too, they talked of--strange speculations, impossible
to solve, yet filling them with vague uneasiness, with wonder and a
kind of mighty awe in face of the vast, unknowable mysteries
surrounding them; the forces and phenomena which might, though
friendly in their outward aspect, at any time precipitate catastrophe,
ruin and death upon them and extinguish in their persons all hopes of
a world reborn.
The haunting thought was never very far away: "Should either one of us
be killed--what then?"
One day Stern voiced his fear.
"Beatrice," he said, "if anything should ever happen to me, and you be
left alone in a world which, without me, would become instantly
hostile and impossible, remember that the most scientific way out is a
bullet. That's _my_ way if anything happens to _you!_ Understand?"
She nodded, and for a long time that day the silence of a great pact
weighed upon their souls.
CHAPTER IX
PLANNING THE GREAT MIGRATION
Stern rigged a tripod for the powerful field-glasses he had
rescued from the Metropolitan Building, and by an ingenious addition
of a wooden tube and another lens carefully ground out of rock
crystal, succeeded in producing (on the right-hand barrel of the
binoculars) a telescope of reasonably high power. With this, of an
evening, he often made long observations, after which he would spend
hours figuring all over many sheets of the birch bark, which he then
carefully saved and bound up with leather strings for future
reference.
In Van's set of encyclopedias he found a fairly large celestial map
and thorough astronomic data. The results of his computations were of
vital interest to him.
He said to Beatrice one evening:
"Do you know, that wandering black patch in the sky moves in a regular
orbit of its own? It's a solid body, dark, irregular in outline, and
certainly not over five hundred miles above the surface of the earth."
"What can it be, dear?"
"I don't know yet. It puzzles me tremendously. Now, if it would only
appear in the daytime once in a while, we might be able to get some
information or knowledge about it; but, coming only at night, all it
records itself as is just a black, moving thing. I'm working on the
size of it now, making some careful studies. In a while I shall
probably know its area and mass and density. But what it is I cannot
say--not yet."
They both pondered a while, absorbed in wonder. At last the engineer
spoke again.
"Beta," said he, "there's another curious fact to note. The axis of
the earth itself has shifted more than six degrees, thirty minutes!"
"It has? Well--what about it?" And she went on with her platting of
reed cordage.
"You don't seem much concerned about it!"
"I'm not. Not in the least. It can shift all it wants to, for all of
me. What hurt does it do? Doesn't it run just as well that way?"
Stern looked at her a moment, then laughed.
"Oh, yes; it runs all right," he answered. "Only I thought the
announcement that the pole-star had thrown up its job might startle
you a bit. But I see it doesn't. So far as practical results go, it
accounts for the warmer climate and the decreased inclination to the
plane of the ecliptic; or, rather, the decreased--"
"Please, please, don't!" she begged. "There's nothing really wrong, is
there?"
"Well, that depends on how you define it. Probably an astronomer might
think there was something very much wrong. I make it that the orbit of
the earth has altered its relative length and width by--"
"No figures, Allan, there's a dear. You know I'm awfully bad at
arithmetic. Tell me what it means, won't you?"
"Well, it means, for one thing, that we've maybe spent a far longer
time on this earth since the cataclysm than we even dare suspect. It
may be that what we've been calculating as about a thousand years, is
twice that, or even five times that--no telling. For another thing,
I'm convinced by all these changes, and by the diminution of gravity
and by the accelerated rate of revolution of the earth--"
"Allan dear, please hand me those scissors, won't you?"
Stern laughed again.
"Here!" said he. "I guess I'm not much good as a lecturer. But I tell
you one thing I'm going to do, and that's a one best bet. I'm going to
have a try at some really big telescope before a year's out, and know
the truth of this thing!"
"A big telescope! Build one, you mean?"
"Not necessarily. All I need is a chance to make some accurate
observations, and I can find out all I need to know. Even though I
have been out of college for--let's see--"
"Fifteen hundred years, at a guess," she suggested.
"Yes, all of that. Even so, I remember a good bit of astronomy. And
I've got my mind set on peeking through a first-class tube. If the
earth has broken in two, or anything like that, and our part is
skyhooting away toward the unknown regions of outer space beyond the
great ring of the Milky Way and is getting into an unchartered place
in the universe--as it seems to be--why, we ought to have a good look
at things. We ought to know what's what, eh?
"Then there's the moon I want to investigate, too. No living man
except myself has even seen the side that's now turned toward the
earth. No telling what a good glass mightn't show."
"That's so, dear," she answered. "But where can you find the sort of
telescope you need?"
"In Boston--in Cambridge, rather. The Harvard observatory has the
biggest one within striking distance. What do you say to our making
our trial trip in the boat, up the Sound and around Cape Cod, to
Boston? We can spend a week there, then slant away for wherever we may
decide to pass the winter. How does that suit you, Beta?"
She put away her work, and for a moment sat looking in at the flames
that went leaping up the huge boulder chimney. The room glowed with
warmth and light that drove away the cheerlessness of a foggy, late
August drizzle.
"Do you really think we're wise to--to leave our home, with winter
coming on?" she asked at length, pensively, the firelight casting its
glow across her cheek and glinting in her eyes.
"Wise? Yes. We can't stay here, that's certain. And what is there to
fear out in the world? With our firearms and our knowledge of fire
itself, our science and our human intelligence, we're far more than a
match for all enemies, whether of the beast-world or of that race of
the Horde. I hate, in a way, to revisit the ruins of New York, for
more ammunition and canned stuffs. The place is to o ghastly, too
hideous, now, after the big fight.
"Boston will be a clean ground for us, with infinite resources. And as
I said before, there's the Cambridge observatory. It's only two or
three miles back in the forest, from the coast; maybe not more than
half a mile from some part of the Charles River. We can sail up, camp
on Soldiers' Field, and visit it easily. Why not?"
He sat down on the tiger-rug before the fire, near the girl. She drew
his head down into her lap; then, when he was lying comfortably, began
playing with his thick hair, as he loved so well to have her do.
"If you think it's all right, Allan," said she, "we'll go. I want what
you want."
"That's my good girl!" exclaimed the engineer. "We'll be ready to
start in a few days now. The boat's next thing to finished. What with
the breadfruit, smoked steer and buffalo meat, hams and canned goods
now on our shelves, we've certainly got enough supplies to stock her a
two months' trip.
"Even with less, we'd be safe in starting. You see, the world's lain
untouched by mankind for so many centuries that all the blighting
effect of man's folly and greed and general piracy has vanished.
"The soil's got back to its natural state, animal life abounds, and so
long as I still have a good supply of cartridges, we can live almost
anywhere. Anthropoids? I don't think there's much danger. Oh, yes, I
remember the line of blue smoke we saw yesterday over the hills to
westward; but what does that prove? Lightning may have started a
fire--there's no telling. And we can't always stay here, Beta, just
because there may be dangers out yonder!"
He flung one arm toward the vast night, beyond the panes where the
mist and storm were beating cheerlessly.
"No, we can't camp down here indefinitely. Now's the time to start. As
I say, we've got all of sixty days' of downright civilized food on
hand, for a good cruise in the Adventure. The chance of finding other
people somewhere is too precious not to make any risk worth while."
Silence fell between them for a few minutes. Each saw visions in the
flames. The man's thoughts dwelt, in particular, on this main factor
of a possible rediscovery of other human beings somewhere.
More than the girl, he realized the prime importance of this
possibility. Though he and she loved each other very dearly, though
they were all in all each to the other, yet he comprehended the
loneliness she felt rather than analyzed--the infinite need of man for
man, of woman for woman--the old social, group-instinct of the race
beginning to reassert itself even in their Eden.
Each of them longed, with a longing they hardly realized as yet, to
hear some other human voice, to see another face, clasp another hand
and again feel the comradeship of man.
During the past week or so, Stern had more than once caught himself
listening for some other sound of human life and activity. Once he had
found the girl standing on a wooded point among the pines, shading her
eyes with her hand and watching down-stream with an attitude of hope
which spoke more fluently than words. He had stolen quietly away,
saying nothing, careful not to break her mood. For he had understood
it; it had been his very own.
The mood expressed itself, at times, in long talks together of the
seeming dream-age when there had been so many millions of men and
women in the world. Beatrice and Stern found themselves dwelling with
a peculiar pleasure on memories and descriptions of throngs.
They would read the population statistics in Van's encyclopedia, and
wonder greatly at them, for now these figures seemed the unreal
chimeras of wild imaginings.
They would talk of the crowded streets, the "L" crushes and the jams
at the Bridge entrance; of packed cars and trains and overflowing
theaters; of great concourses they had seen; of every kind and
condition of affairs where thousands of their kind had once rubbed
elbows, all strangers to each other, yet all one vast kin and family
ready in case of need to succor one another, to use the collective
intelligence for the benefit of each.
Sometimes they indulged in fanciful comparisons, trying to make their
present state seem wholly blest.
"This is a pretty fine way to live, after all," Stern said one day,
"even if it is a bit lonesome at times. There's no getting up in the
morning and rushing to an office. It's a perpetual vacation! There are
no appointments to keeps no angry clients kicking because I can't make
water run up-hill or make cast-iron do the work of tool-steel. No
saloons or free-lunches, no subways to stifle the breath out of us, no
bills to pay and no bill collectors to dodge; no laws except the laws
of nature, and such as we make ourselves; no bores and no bad shows;
no politics, no yellow journals, no styles--"
"Oh, dear, how I'd like to see a milliner's window again!" cried
Beatrice, rudely shattering his thin-spun tissue of optimism. "These
skin-clothes, all the time, and no hats, and no chiffons and no--no
nothing, at all--! Oh, I never half appreciated things till they were
all taken away!"
Stern, feeling that he had tapped the wrong vein, discreetly withdrew;
and the sound of his calking-hammer from the beach, told that he was
expending a certain irritation on the hull of the Adventure.
One day he found a relic that seemed to stab him to the heart with a
sudden realization of the tremendous gap between his own life and that
which he had left.
Hunting in the forest, to westward of the bungalow, he came upon what
at first glance seemed a very long, straight, level Indian mound or
earthwork; but in a moment his trained eye told him it was a railway
embankment.
With an almost childish eagerness he hunted for some trace of the
track; and when, buried under earth-mold and rubbish, he found some
rotten splinters of metal, they filled him with mingled pleasure and
depression.
"My God!" he exclaimed, "is it possible that here, right where I
stand, countless thousands of human beings once passed at tremendous
velocity, bent on business and on pleasure, now ages long vanished and
meaningless and void? That mighty engines whirled along this bank,
where now the forest has been crowding for centuries? That all, all
has perished--forever?
"It shall not be!" he cried hotly, and flung his hands out in
passionate denial. "All shall be thus again! All shall return--only
far better! The world's death shall not, cannot be!"
Experiences such as these, leaving both of them increasingly irritated
and depressed as time went on, convinced Stern of the imperative
necessity for exploration. If human beings still existed anywhere in
the world, he and she must find them, even at the risk of losing life
itself. Years of migration, he felt, would not be too high a price to
pay for the reward of coming once again in contact with his own
species. The innate gregariousness of man was torturing them both.
Now that the hour of departure was drawing nigh, a strange exultation
filled them both--the spirit of conquest and of victory.
Together they planned the last details of the trip.
"Is the sail coming along all right, Beta?" asked Stern, the night
when they decided to visit Cambridge. "You expect to have it done in a
day or two?"
"I can finish it to-morrow. It's all woven now. Just as soon as I
finish binding one edge with leather strips, it'll be ready for you."
"All right; then we can get a good, early start, on Monday morning.
Now for the details of the freight."
They worked out everything to its last minutiae. Nothing was
forgotten, from ammunition to the soap which Stern had made out of
moose-fat and wood-ashes and had pressed into cakes; from
fishing-tackle and canned goods to toothbrushes made of stiff
vegetable fibers set in bone; from provisions even to a plentiful
supply of birch-bark leaves for taking notes.
"Monday morning we're off," Stern concluded, "and it will be the
grandest lark two people ever had since time began! Built and stocked
as the Adventure is, she's safe enough for anything from here to
Europe.
"Name the place you want to see, and it's yours. Florida? Bermuda?
Mediterranean? With the compass I've made and adjusted to the new
magnetic variations, and with the maps out of Van's set of books, I
reckon we're good for anything, including a trip around the world.
"The survivors will be surprised to see a fully stocked yawl putting
in to rescue them from savagery, eh? Imagine doing the Captain Cook
stunt, with white people for subjects!"
"Yes, but I'm not counting on their treating us the way Captain Cook
was; are you? And what if we shouldn't find anybody, dear? What then?"
"How can we help finding people? Could a billion and a half human
beings die, all at once, without leaving a single isolated group
somewhere or other?"
"But you never succeeded in reaching them with the wireless from the
Metropolitan, Allan."
"Never mind--they weren't in a condition to pick up my messages;
that's all. We surely must find somebody in all the big cities we can
reach by water, either along He coast or by running up the Mississippi
or along the St. Lawrence and through the lakes. There's Boston, of
course, and Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, St. Louis,
Chicago--dozens of others--no end of places!"
"Oh, if they're only not all like New York!"
"That remains to be seen. There's all of Europe, too, and Africa and
Asia--why, the whole wide world is ours! We're so rich, girl, that it
staggers the imagination--we're the richest people that have ever
lived, you and I. The 'pluses' in the old days owned their millions;
but we own--we own the whole earth!"
"Not if there's anybody else alive, dear."
"That's so. Well, I'll be glad to share it with 'em, for the sake of a
handshake and a 'howdy,' and a chance to start things going again. Do
you know, I rather count on finding a few scattered remnants of folk
in London, or Paris, or Berlin?
"Just the same as in our day, a handful of ragged shepherds descended
from the Mesopotamian peoples extinct save for them--were tending
their sheep at Kunyunjik, on those Babylonian ruins where once a
mighty metropolis stood, and where five million people lived and
moved, trafficked, loved, hated, fought, conquered, died--so now
to-day, perhaps, we may run across a handful of white savages
crouching in caves or rude huts among the debris of the Place de
l'Opera, or Unter den Linden, or--"
"And civilize them, Allan? And bring them back and start a colony and
make the world again? Oh, Allan, do you think we could?" she
exclaimed, her eyes sparkling with excitement.
"My plans include nothing less," he answered. "It's mighty well worth
trying for, at any rate. Monday morning we start, then, little girl."
"Sunday, if you say so."
"Impatient, now?" he laughed. "No, Monday will be time enough. Lots of
things yet to put in shape before we leave. And we'll have to trust
our precious crops to luck, at that. Here's hoping the winter will
bring nothing worse than rain. There's no help for it, whatever
happens. The larger venture calls us."
They sat there discussing many many other factors of the case, for a
long time. The fire burned low, fell together and dwindled to glowing
embers on the hearth.
In the red gloom Allan felt her vague, warm, beautiful presence.
Strong was she; vigorous, rosy as an Amazon, with the spirit and the
beauty of the great outdoors; the life lived as a part of nature's own
self. He realized that never had a woman lived like her.
Dimly he saw her face, so sweet, so gentle in its wistful strength,
shadowed with the hope and dreams of a whole race--the type, the
symbol, of the eternal motherhood.
And from his hair he drew her hand down to his mouth and kissed it;
and with a thrill of sudden tenderness blent with passion he knew all
that she meant to him--this perfect woman, his love, who sometime soon
was now to be his bride.
CHAPTER X
TOWARD THE GREAT CATARACT
Pleasant and warm shone the sun that Monday morning, the 2d of
September, warm through the greenery of oak and pine and fern-tree.
Golden it lay upon the brakes and mosses by the river-bank; silver
upon the sands.
Save for the chippering of the busy squirrels, a hush brooded over
nature. The birds were silent. A far blue haze veiled the distant
reaches of the stream. Over the world a vague, premonitory something
had fallen; it was summer still, but the first touch of dissolution,
of decay, had laid the shadow of a pall upon it.
And the two lovers felt their hearts gladden at thought of the long
migration out into the unknown, the migration that might lead them to
southern shores and to perpetual plenty, perhaps to the great boon of
contact once again with humankind.
From room to room they went, making all tight and fast for the long
absence, taking farewell of all the treasures that during their long
weeks of occupancy had accumulated there about them.
Though Stern was no sentimentalist, yet he, too, felt the tears well
in his eyes, even as Beta did, when they locked the door and slowly
went down the broad steps to the walk he had cleared to the river.
"Good-by," said the girl simply, and kissed her hand to the bungalow.
Then he drew his arm about her and together they went on down the
path. Very sweet the thickets of bright blossoms were; very warm and
safe the little garden looked, cut out there from the forest that
stood guard about it on all sides.
They lingered one last moment by the sun-dial he had carved on a flat
boulder, set in a little grassy lawn. The shadow of the gnomon fell
athwart the IX and touched the inscription he had graved about the
edge:
I MARK NO HOURS BUT BRIGHT ONES.
Beatrice pondered.
"We've never had any other kind, together--not one," said she, looking
up quickly at the man as though with a new sort of self-realization.
"Do you know that, dear? In all this time, never one hour, never one
single moment of unhappiness or disagreement. Never a harsh word, an
unkind look or thought. 'No hours but bright ones!' Why, Allan, that's
the motto of our lives!"
"Yes, of our lives," he repeated gravely. "Our lives, forever, as long
as we live. But come, come--time's slipping on. See, the shadow's
moving ahead already. Come, say good-by to everything, dear, until
next spring. Now let's be off and away!"
They went aboard the yawl, which, fully laden, now lay at a little
stone wharf by the edge of the sweet wild wood, its mast overhung by
arching branches of a Gothic elm.
Allan cast off the painter of braided leather, and with his boat-hook
pushed away. He poled out into the current, then raised the sail of
woven rushes like that of a Chinese junk.
The brisk north wind caught it, the sail crackled, filled and bellied
hugely. He hauled it tight. A pleasant ripple began to murmur at the
stern as the yawl gathered speed.
"Boston and way-stations!" cried he. But through his jest a certain
sadness seemed to vibrate. As the wooded point swallowed up their
bungalow and blotted out all sight of their garden in the wilderness,
then as the little wharf vanished, and nothing now remained but
memories, he, too, felt the solemnity of a leave-taking which might
well be eternal.
Beatrice pressed a spray of golden-rod to her lips.
"From our garden," said she. "I'm going to keep it, wherever we go."
"I understand," he answered. "But this is no time, now, for
retrospection. Everything's sunshine, life, hope--we've got a world to
win!"
Then as the yawl heeled to the breeze and foamed away down stream with
a speed and ease that bore witness to the correctness of her lines, he
struck up a song, and Beatrice joined in, and so their sadness
vanished and a great, strong, confident joy thrilled both of them at
prospect of what was yet to be.
By mid-afternoon they had safely navigated
Harlem River and the upper reaches of East River, and were well up
toward Willett's Point, with Long Island Sound opening out before them
broadly.
Of the towns and villages, the estates and magnificent palaces that
once had adorned the shores of the Sound, no trace remained. Nothing
was visible but unbroken lines of tall, blue forest in the distance;
the Sound appeared to have grown far wider, and what seemed like a
strong current set eastward in a manner certainly not produced by the
tide, all of which puzzled Stern as he held the little yawl to her
course, sole alone in that vast blue where once uncounted thousands of
keels had vexed the brine.
Nightfall found them abreast the ruins of Stamford, still holding a
fair course about five or six miles off shore.
Save for the gulls and one or two quick-scurrying flights of Mother
Carey's chickens (now larger and swifter than in the old days), and a
single "V" of noisy geese, no life had appeared all that afternoon.
Stern wondered at this. A kind of desolation seemed to lie over the
region.
"Ten times more living things in our vicinity back home on the
Hudson," he remarked to Beatrice, who now lay 'midships, under the
shelter of the cabin, warmly wrapped in furs against the keen cutting
of the night wind. "It seems as though something had happened around
here, doesn't it? I should have thought the Sound would be alive with
birds and fish. What can the matter be?"
She had no hypothesis, and though they talked it over, they reached no
conclusion. By eight o'clock she fell asleep in her warm nest, and
Stern steered on alone, by the stars, under promise to put into harbor
where New Haven once had stood, and there himself get some much-needed
sleep.
Swiftly the yawl split the waters of the Sound, for though her sail
was crude, her body was as fine and speedy as his long experience with
boats could make it. Something of the vast mystery of night and sea
penetrated his soul as he held the boat on her way.
The night was moonless; only the great untroubled stars wondered down
at this daring venture into the unknown.
Stern hummed a tune to keep his spirits up. Running easily over the
monotonous dark swells with a fair following breeze, he passed an hour
or two. He sat down, braced the tiller, and resigned himself to
contemplation of the mysteries that had been and that still must be.
And very sweet to him was the sense of protection, of guardianship,
wherein he held the sleeping girl, in the shelter of the little cabin.
He must have dozed, sitting there inactive and alone. How long? He
could not tell. All that he knew was, suddenly, that he had wakened to
full consciousness, and that a sense of uneasiness, of fear, of peril,
hung about him.
Up he started, with an exclamation which he suppressed just in time to
avoid waking Beatrice. Through all, over all, a vast, dull roar was
making itself heard--a sound as though of mighty waters rushing,
leaping, echoing to the sky that droned the echo back again.
Whence came it? Stern could not tell. From nowhere, from everywhere;
the hum and vibrant blur of that tremendous sound seemed universal.
"My God, what's that?" Allan exclaimed, peering ahead with eyes
widened by a sudden stabbing fear. "I've got Beatrice aboard, here; I
can't let anything happen to her!"
The gibbous moon, red and sullen, was just beginning to thrust its
strangely mottled face above the uneasy moving plain of waters. Far
off to southward a dim headland showed; even as Stern looked it
drifted backward and away.
Suddenly he got a terrifying sense of speed. The headland must have
lain five miles to south of him; yet in a few moments, even as he
watched, it had gone into the vague obliteration of a vastly greater
distance.
"What's happening?" thought Stern. The wind had died; it seemed as
though the waters were moving with the wind, as fast as the wind; the
yawl was keeping pace with it, even as a floating balloon drifts in a
storm, unfeeling it.
Deep, dull, booming, ominous, the roar continued. The sail flapped
idle on the mast. Stern could distinguish a long line of foam that
slid away, past the boat, as only foam slides on a swift current.
He peered, in the gloom, to port; and all at once, far on the horizon,
saw a thing that stopped his heart a moment, then thrashed it into
furious activity.
Off there in a direction he judged as almost due northeast, a tenuous,
rising veil of vapor blotted out the lesser stars and dimmed the
brighter ones.
Even in that imperfect light he could see something of the sinuous
drift of that strange cloud.
Quickly he lashed the tiller, crept forward and climbed the mast, his
night-glasses slung over his shoulder.
Holding by one hand, he tried to concentrate his vision through the
glasses, but they failed to show him even as much as the naked eye
could discern.
The sight was paralyzing in its omen of destruction. Only too well
Stern realized the meaning of the swift, strong current, the roar--now
ever increasing, ever deepening in volume--the high and shifting vapor
veil that climbed toward the dim zenith.
"Merciful Heaven!" gulped he. "There's a cataract over there--a
terrible chasm--a plunge--to what? And we're drifting toward it at
express-train speed!"
CHAPTER XI
THE PLUNGE!
Dazed though Stern was at his first realization of the
impending horror, yet through his fear for Beatrice, still asleep
among her furs, struggled a vast wonder at the meaning, the
possibility of such a phenomenon.
How could a current like that rush up along the Sound? How could there
be a cataract, sucking down the waters of the sea itself--whither
could it fall? Even at that crisis the man's scientific curiosity was
aroused; he felt, subconsciously, the interest of the trained observer
there in the midst of deadly peril.
But the moment demanded action.
Quickly Stern dropped to the deck, and, noiseless as a cat in his
doe-skin sandals, ran aft.
But even before he had executed the instinctive tactic of shifting the
helm, paying off, and trying to beat up into the faint breeze that now
drifted over the swirling current, he realized its futility and
abandoned it.
"No use," thought he. "About as effective as trying to dip up the
ocean with a spoon. Any use to try the sweeps? Maybe she and I
together could swing away out of the current--make the shore--nothing
else to do--I'll try it, anyhow."
Beside the girl he knelt.
"Beta! Beta!" he whispered in her ear. He shook her gently by the arm.
"Come, wake up, girlie--there's work to do here!"
She, submerged in healthy sleep, sighed deeply and murmured some
unintelligible thing; but Stern persisted. And in a minute or so there
she was, sitting up in the bottom of the yawl among the furs.
In the dim moonlight her face seemed a vague sweet flower shadowed by
the dark, wind-blown masses of her hair. Stern felt the warmth,
scented the perfume of her firm, full-blooded flesh. She put a hand to
her hair; her tiger-skin robe, falling back to the shoulder, revealed
her white and beautiful arm.
All at once she drew that arm about the man and brought him close to
her breast.
"Oh, Allan!" she breathed. "My boy! Where are we? What is it? Oh, I
was sleeping so soundly! Have we reached harbor yet? What's that
noise--that roaring sound? Surf?"
For a moment he could not answer. She, sensing some trouble, peered
closely at him.
"What is it, Allan?" cried she, her woman's intuition telling her of
trouble. "Tell me--is anything wrong?"
"Listen, dearest!"
"Yes, what?"
"We're in some kind of--of--"
"What? Danger?"
"Well, it may be. I don't know yet. But there's something wrong. You
see--"
"Oh, Allan!" she exclaimed, and started up. "Why didn't you waken me
before? What is it? What can I do to help?"
"I think there's rough water ahead, dear," the engineer answered,
trying to steady his voice, which shook a trifle in spite of him. "At
any rate, it sounds like a waterfall of some kind or other; and see,
there's a line, a drift of vapor rising over there. We're being
carried toward it on a strong current."
Anxiously she peered, now full awake. Then she turned to Allan.
"Can't we sail away?"
"Not enough wind. We might possibly row out of the current, and--and
perhaps--"
"Give me one of the sweeps quick, quick!"
He put the sweeps out. No sooner had he braced himself against a rib
of the yawl and thrown his muscles against the heavy bar than she,
too, was pulling hard.
"Not too strong at first, dear," he cautioned. "Don't use up all your
strength in the first few minutes. We may have a long fight for it!"
"I'm in it with you--till the end--whichever way it ends," she
answered; and in the moonlight he saw the untrammeled swing and play
of her magnificent body.
The yawl came round slowly till it was crosswise to the current,
headed toward the mainland shore. Now it began to make a little
headway. But the breeze slightly impeded it.
Stern whipped out his knife and slashed the sheets of platted rush.
The sail crumpled, crackled and slid down; and now under a bare pole
the boat cradled slowly ahead transversely across the foam-streaked
current that ran swiftly soughing toward the dim vapor-swirls away to
the northeast.
No word was spoken now. Both Beatrice and Stern lay to the sweeps;
both braced themselves and put the full force of back and arms into
each long, powerful stroke. Yet Stern could see that, at the rate of
progress they were making over that black and oily swirl, they could
not gain ten feet while the current was carrying them a thousand.
In his heart he knew the futility of the fight, yet still he fought.
Still Beatrice fought for life, too, there by his side. Human
instinct, the will to live, drove them on, on, where both understood
there was no hope.
For now already the current had quickened still more. The breeze had
sprung up from the opposite direction; Stern knew the boiling rush of
waters had already reached a speed greater than that of the wind
itself. No longer the stars trembled, reflected, in the waters. All
ugly, frothing, broken, the swift current foamed and leaped, in long,
horrible gulfs and crests of sickening velocity.
And whirlpools now began to form. The yawl was twisted like a straw,
wrenched, hurled, flung about with sickening violence.
"Row! _Row!_" Stern cried none the less. And his muscles bunched and
hardened with the labor; his veins stood out, and sweat dropped from
his brow, ran into his eyes, and all but blinded him.
The girl, too, was laboring with all her might. Stern heard her
breath, gasping and quick, above the roar and swash of the mad waters.
And all at once revulsion seized him--rage, and a kind of mad
exultation, a defiance of it all.
He dropped the sweep and sprang to her.
"Beta!" he shouted, louder than the droning tumult. "No use! No use at
all! Here--come to me!"
He drew the sweep inboard and flung it in the bottom of the yawl.
Already the vapors of the cataract ahead were drifting over them and
driving in their faces. A vibrant booming shuddered through the dark
air, where now even the moon's faint light was all extinguished by the
whirling mists.
Heaven and sea shook with the terrible concussion of falling waters.
Though Stern had shouted, yet the girl could not have heard him now.
In the gloom he peered at her; he took her in his arms. Her face was
pale, but very calm. She showed no more fear than the man; each seemed
inspired with some strange exultant thought of death, there with the
other.
He drew her to his breast and covered her face; he knelt with her
among the heaped-up furs, and then, as the yawl plunged more violently
still, they sank down in the poor shelter of the cabin and waited.
His arms were about her; her face was buried on his breast. He
smoothed her hair; his lips pressed her forehead.
"Good-by!" he whispered, though she could not hear.
They seemed now to hover on the very brink.
A long, racing sluicelike incline of black waters, streaked with
swirls of white, appeared before them. The boat plunged and whirled,
dipped, righted, and sped on.
Behind, a huge, rushing, wall-like mass of lathering, leaping surges.
In front, a vast nothingness, a black, unfathomable void, up through
which gushed in clouds the mighty jets of vapor.
Came a lurch, a swift plunge.
The boat hung suspended a moment.
Stern saw what seemed a long, clear, greenish slant of water. Deafened
and dazed by the infernal pandemonium of noise, he bowed his head on
hers, and his arms tightened.
Suddenly everything dropped away. The universe crashed and bellowed.
Stern felt a heavy dash of brine--cold, strangling, irresistible.
All grew black.
"_Death!_" thought he, and knew no more.
CHAPTER XII
TRAPPED ON THE LEDGE
Consciousness won back to Allan Stern--how long afterward he
could not tell--under the guise of a vast roaring tumult, a deafening
thunder that rose, fell, leaped aloft again in huge, titanic cadences
of sound.
And coupled with this glimmering sense-impression, he felt the drive
of water over him; he saw, vaguely as in the memory of a dream, a dim
gray light that weakly filtered through the gloom.
Weak, sick, dazed, the man realized that he still lived; and to his
mind the thought "Beatrice!" flashed back again.
With a tremendous effort, gasping and shaken, weak, unnerved and
wounded, he managed to raise himself upon one elbow and to peer about
him with wild eyes.
A strange scene that. Even in the half light, with all his senses
distorted by confusion and by pain, he made shift to comprehend a
little of what he saw.
He understood that, by some fluke of fate, life still remained in him;
that, in some way he never could discover, he had been cast upon a
ledge of rock there in the cataract--a ledge over which spray and foam
hurled, seething, yet a ledge which, parting the gigantic flood,
offered a chance of temporary safety.
Above him, sweeping in a vast smooth torrent of clear green, he saw
the steady downpour of the falls. Out at either side, as he lay there
still unable to rise, he caught glimpses through the spume-drive,
glimpses of swift white water, that broke and creamed as it whirled
past; that jetted high; that, hissing, swept away, away, to unknown
depths below that narrow, slippery ledge.
Realization of all this had hardly forced itself upon his dazed
perceptions when a stronger recrudescence of his thought about the
girl surged back upon him.
"Beatrice! Beatrice!" he gasped, and struggled up.
On hands and knees, groping, half-blinded, deafened, he began to
crawl; and as he crawled, he shouted the girl's name, but the
thundering of the vast tourbillions and eddies that swirled about the
rock, white and ravening, drowned his voice. Vague yet terrible, in
the light of the dim moon that filtered through the mists, the racing
flood howled past. And in Stern's heart, as he now came to more and
better understanding, a vast despair took shape, a sickening fear
surged up.
Again he shouted, chokingly, creeping along the slippery ledge.
Through the driving mists he peered with agonized eyes. Where was the
yawl now? Where the girl? Down there in that insane welter of the mad
torrent--swept away long since to annihilation? The thought maddened
him.
Clutching a projection of the rock, he hauled himself up to his feet,
and for a moment stood there, swaying, a strange, tattered, dripping
figure in the dim moonlight, wounded, breathless and disheveled, with
bloodshot eyes that sought to pierce the hissing spray.
All at once he gulped some unintelligible thing and staggered forward.
There, wedged in a crevice, he had caught sight of something--what it
was he could not tell, but toward it now he stumbled.
He reached the thing. Sobbing with realization of his incalculable
loss and of the wreckage of all their hopes and plans and all that
life had meant, he fell upon his knees beside the object.
He groped about it as though blind; he felt that formless mass of
debris, a few shattered planks and part of the woven sail, now jammed
into the fissure in the ledge. And at touch of all that remained to
him, he crouched there, ghastly pale and racked with unspeakable
anguish.
But hope and the indomitable spirit of the human heart still urged him
on. The further end of the ledge, overdashed with wild jets of spray
and stinging drives of brine, still remained unexplored. And toward
this now he crept, bit by bit, fighting his way along, now clinging as
some more savage surge leaped over, now battling forward on hands and
knees along the perilous strip of stone.
One false move, he knew, one slip and all was over. He, too, like the
yawl itself, and perhaps like Beatrice, would whirl and fling away
down, down, into the nameless nothingness of that abyss.
Better thus, he dimly realized, better, after all, than to cling to
the ledge in case he could not find her. For it must be only a matter
of time, and no very long time at that, when exhaustion and starvation
would weaken him and when he must inevitably be swept away.
And in his mind he knew the future, which voiced itself in a
half-spoken groan:
"If she's not there, or if she's there, but dead--good-by!"
Even as he sensed the truth he found her. Sheltered behind a jutting
spur of granite, Beatrice was lying, where the shock of the impact had
thrown her when the yawl had struck the ledge.
Drenched and draggled in her water-soaked tiger-skin, her long hair
tangled and disheveled over the rock, she lay as though asleep.
"_Dead!_" gasped Allan, and caught her in his arms, all limp and cold.
Back from her brow he flung the brine-soaked hair; he kissed her
forehead and her lips, and with trembling hands began to chafe her
face, her throat, her arms.
To her breast he laid his ear, listening for some flicker of life,
some promise of vitality again.
And as he sensed a slight yet rhythmic pulsing there--as he detected a
faint breath, so vast a gratitude and love engulfed him that for a
moment all grew dazed and shaken and unreal.
He had to brace himself, to struggle for self-mastery.
"Beta! Beta!" he cried. "Oh, my God! You live--you live!"
Dripping water, unconscious, lithe, she lay within his clasp, now
strong again. Forgotten his weakness and his pain, his bruises, his
wounds, his fears All had vanished from his consciousness with the one
supreme realization--"_She lives!_"
Back along the ledge he bore her, not slipping now, not crouching, but
erect and bold and powerful, nerved to that effort and that daring by
the urge of the great love that flamed through all his veins.
Back he bore her to the comparative safety of the other end, where
only an occasional breaker creamed across the rock and where, behind a
narrow shelf that projected diagonally upward and outward, he laid his
precious burden down.
And now again he called her name; he rubbed and chafed her.
Only joy filled his soul. Nothing else mattered now. The total loss of
their yawl and all its precious contents, the wreck of their
expedition almost at its very start, the fact that Beatrice and he
were now alone upon a narrow ledge of granite in the midst of a
stupendous cataract that drained the ocean down to unknown,
unthinkable depths, the knowledge that she and he now were without
arms, ammunition, food, shelter, fire, anything at all, defenseless in
a wilderness such as no humans ever yet had faced--all this meant
nothing to Allan Stern.
For he had _her_; and as at last her lids twitched, then opened, and
her dazed eyes looked at him; as she tried to struggle up while he
restrained her; as she chokingly called his name and stretched a
tremulous hand to him, there in the thunderous half light of the
falls, he knew he could not ask for greater joy, though all of
civilization and of power might be his, without her.
In his own soul he knew he would choose this abandonment and all this
desperate peril with Beatrice, rather than safety, comfort, luxury,
and the whole world as it once had been apart from her.
Yet, as sometimes happens in the supreme crises of life, his first
spoken word was commonplace enough.
"There, there, lie still!" he commanded, drawing her close to his
breast. "You're all right, now--just keep quiet, Beatrice!"
"What--what's happened--" she gasped. "_Where_--"
"Just a little accident, that's all," he soothed the frightened girl.
Dazed by the roaring cadence of the torrent, she shuddered and hid her
face against him; and his arms protected her as he crouched there
beside her in the scant shelter of the rocky shelf.
"We got carried over a waterfall, or something of that sort," he
added. "We're on a ledge in the river, or whatever it is, and--"
"You're hurt, Allan?"
"No, no--are _you?_"
"It's nothing, boy!" She looked up again, and even in the dim light he
saw her try to smile. "Nothing matters so long as we have each other!"
Silence between them for a moment, while he drew her close and kissed
her. He questioned her again, but found that save for bruises and a
cruel blow on the temple, she had taken no hurt in the plunge that had
stunned her. Both, they must have been flung from the yawl when it had
gone to pieces. How long they had lain upon the rock they knew not.
All they could know was that the light woodwork of the boat had been
dashed away with their supplies and that now they again faced the
world empty-handed--provided even that escape were possible from the
midst of that mad torrent.
An hour or so they huddled in the shelter of the rocky shelf till
strength and some degree of calm returned and till the growing light
far off to eastward through the haze and mist told them that day was
dawning again.
Then Allan set to work exploring once more carefully their little
islet in the swirling flood.
"You stay here, Beta," said he. "So long as you keep back of this
projection you're safe. I'm going to see just what the prospect is."
"Oh, be careful, Allan!" she entreated. "Be so very, very careful,
won't you?"
He promised and left her. Then, cautiously, step by step, he made his
way along the ledge in the other direction from that where he had
found the senseless girl.
To the very end of the ledge he penetrated, but found no hope. Nothing
was to be seen through the mists save the mad foam-rush of the waters
that leaped and bounded like white-maned horses in a race of death.
Bold as the man was, he dared not look for long. Dizziness threatened
to overwhelm him with sickening lure, its invitation to the plunge.
So, realizing that nothing was to be gained by staying there, he drew
back and once more sought Beatrice.
"Any way out?" she asked him, anxiously, her voice sounding clear and
pure through the tumult of the rushing waters.
He shook his head, despairingly. And silence fell again, and each sat
thinking long, long thoughts, and dawn came creeping grayly through
the spume-drive of the giant falls.
More than an hour must have passed before Stern noted a strange
phenomenon--an hour in which they had said few words--an hour in which
both had abandoned hopes of life--and in which, she in her own way, he
in his, they had reconciled themselves to the inevitable.
But at last, "What's that?" exclaimed the man; for now a different
tone resounded in the cataract, a louder, angrier note, as though the
plunge of waters at the bottom had in some strange, mysterious way
drawn nearer. "What's that?" he asked again.
Below there somewhere by the tenebrous light of morning he could
see--or thought that he could see--a green, dim, vaguely tossing drive
of waters that now vanished in the whirling mists, now showed again
and now again grew hidden.
Out to the edge of the rocky shelf he crept once more. Yes, for a
certainty, now he could make out the seething plunge of the waters as
they roared into the foam-lashed flood below.
But how could this be? Stern's wonder sought to grasp analysis of the
strange phenomenon.
"If it's true that the water at the bottom's rising," thought he,
"then there must either be some kind of tide in that body of water or
else the cavity itself must be filling up. In either case, what if the
process continues?"
And instantly a new fear smote him--a fear wherein lay buried like a
fly in amber a hope for life, the only hope that had yet come to him
since his awakening there in that trap sealed round by sluicing
maelstroms.
He watched a few moments longer, then with a fresh resolve, desperate
yet joyful in its strength, once more sought the girl.
"Beta," said he, "how brave are you?"
"How brave? Why, dear?"
He paused a moment, then replied: "Because, if what I believe is true,
in a few minutes you and I have got to make a fight for life--a harder
fight than any we've made yet--a fight that may last for hours and
may, after all, end only in death. A battle royal! Are you strong for
it? Are you brave?"
"Try me!" she answered, and their eyes met, and he knew the truth,
that come what might of life or death, of loss or gain, defeat or
victory, this woman was to be his mate and equal to the end.
"Listen, then!" he commanded. "This is our last, our only chance. And
if it fails--"
CHAPTER XIII
ON THE CREST OF THE MAELSTROM
Stern's observation of the rising flood proved correct. By
whatever theory it might or might not be explained, the fact was
positive that now the water there below them was rising fast, and that
inside of half an hour at the outside the torrent would engulf their
ledge.
It seemed as though there must be some vast, rhythmic ebb and flux in
the unsounded abysses that yawned beneath them, some incalculable
regurgitation of the sea, which periodically spewed forth a part, at
least, of the enormous torrent that for hours poured into that titanic
gulf.
And it was upon this flux, stormy and wild and full of seething
whirlpools, that Allan Stern and the girl now built their only
possible hope of salvation and of life.
"Come, we must be at work!" he told her, as together they peered over
the edge and now beheld the weltering flood creeping up, up along the
thunderous plunge of the waterfall till it was within no more than a
hundred feet of their shelter.
As the depth of the fall decreased the spray-drive lessened, and now,
with the full coming of day, some reflection of the golden morning sky
crept through the spray. Yet neither to right nor left could they see
shore or anything save that long, swift, sliding wall of brine,
foam-tossed and terrible.
"To work!" said he again. "If we're going to save ourselves out of
this inferno we've got to make some kind of preparation. We can't just
swim and trust to luck. We shall have to malice float of some sort or
other, I think."
"Yes, but what with?" asked she.
"With what remains of the yawl!"
And even as he spoke he led the way to the crevice where the
splintered boards and the torn sail had been wedged fast.
"A slim hope, I know," he admitted, "but it's all we've got now."
Driven home as the wreckage was by the terrific impact of the blow,
Stern had a man's work cut out for him to get it clear; but his was as
the strength of ten, and before half an hour had passed he had, with
the girl's help, freed all the planks and laid them out along the
rock-shelf, the most sheltered spot of the ledge.
Another hour later the planks had been lashed into a rough sort of
float with what cordage remained and with platted strips of the mat
sail.
"It's not half big enough to hold us up altogether," judged the man,
"but if we merely use it to keep our heads out of water it will serve,
and it's got the merit of being unsinkable, anyhow. God knows how long
we may have to be in the water, little girl. But whatever comes we've
got to face it. There's no other chance at all!"
They waited now calmly, with the resignation of those who have no
alternative to hardship. And steadily the flood mounted up, up, toward
the ledge, and now the seethe was very near. Now already the leaping
froth of the plunge was dashing up against their rock. In a few
moments the shelter would be submerged.
He put his lips close to her ear, for now his voice could not carry.
"Let's jump for it!" he cried. "If we wait till the flood reaches us
here we'll be crushed against the rock. Come on, Beatrice, we've got
to plunge!"
She answered with her eyes; he knew the girl was ready. To him he drew
her and their kiss was one that spoke eternal farewell. But of this
thought no word passed their lips.
"_Come!_" bade the man once more.
How they leaped into that vortex of mad waters, how they vanished in
that thunderous welter, rose, sank, fought, strangled, rose again and
caught the air, and once more were whirled down and buried in that
crushing avalanche; how they clung to the lashed planks and with these
spiraled in mad sarabands among the whirlpools and green eddies; how
they were flung out into smoother water, blinded and deafened, yet
with still the spark of life and consciousness within them, and how
they let the frail raft bear them, fainting and dazed, all their
senses concentrated just on gripping this support--all this they never
could have told.
Stern knew at last, with something of clarity, that he was floating
easily along an oily current which ran, undulating, beneath a
slate-gray mist; he realized that with one hand he was grasping the
planks, with the other arm upbearing the girl.
Pale and with closed eyes, she lay there in the hollow of his arm, her
face free from water, her long hair floating out upon the tide.
He saw her lids twitch and knew she lived. Yet even as he thanked God
and took a firmer hold on her, consciousness lapsed again, and with it
all realization of time or of events.
Yet though the moments--or were they hours?--which followed left no
impress on his brain, some intelligence must have directed Stern. For
when once more he knew, he found the mist and fog all gone; he saw a
golden sun that weltered all across the heaving flood in a brave
splendor; and, off to northward, a wooded line of hills, blue in the
distance, yet beautiful with their promise of salvation.
Stern understood, then, what must have happened. He saw that the
upfilling of the abyss, whatever might have caused it, had flung them
forth; he perceived that the temporary flood which had taken place
before once more another terrific down-draft should pour into the
gaping chasm, had cast them out, floated by their raft of planks, even
as match-straws might be flung and floated on the outburst of a
geyser.
He understood; he knew that, fortune favoring, life still beckoned
there ahead.
And in his heart resolve leaped up.
"Life! Life!" he cried. "Oh, Beatrice, look! See! There's land ahead,
there--_land!_"
But the girl, still circled by his arm, lay senseless. Allan knew he
could make no progress in that manner. So by dint of great labor, he
managed to draw her somewhat onto the float and there to lash her with
a loose end of cordage in such wise that she could breathe with no
danger of drowning.
Himself he summoned all his forces, and now began to swim through the
smooth tides, which, warm with some grateful heat, vastly unlike the
usual ocean chill, stretched lazily rolling away and away to that far
off shore.
That day was long and bitter, an agony of toil, hope, despair, labor
and struggle, and the girl, reviving, shared it toward the end. Only
their frail raft fenced death away, but so long as the buoyant planks
held together they could not drown.
Thirst and exhaustion tortured them, but there was no hope of appeal
to any help. In this manless world there could be no rescue. Here,
there, a few gulls wheeled and screamed above the flood; and once a
school of porpoises, glistening as they curved their shining backs in
long leaps through the brine, played past. Allan and the girl envied
the creatures, and renewed their fight for life.
The south wind favored, and what seemed a landward current drew them
on. Their own strength, too, in spite of the long fast and the
incredible hardships, held out well. For now that civilization was a
thing of the oblivious past, they shared the vital forces and the very
powers of Mother Nature herself. And, like two favored children of
that all-mother, they slowly made their way to land.
Night found them utterly exhausted and soaked to the marrow, yet
alive, stretched out at full length, inert, upon the warm sands of a
virgin beach. There they lay, supine, above high tide, whither they
had dragged themselves with terrible exertion. And the stars wheeled
overhead; and down upon them the strange-featured moon wondered with
her pallid gleam.
Fireless, foodless and without shelter, unprotected in every way,
possessing nothing now save just their own bodies and the draggled
garments that they wore, they lay and slept. In their supreme
exhaustion they risked attack from wild beasts and from anthropoids.
Sleep to them was now the one vital, inevitable necessity.
Thus the long night hours passed and strength revived in them,
up-welling like fresh tides of life; and once more a new day grayed
the east, then transmuted to bright gold and blazoned its insignia all
up the eastern sky.
Stern woke first, dazed with the long sleep, toward mid-morning. A
little while he lay as though adream, trying to realize what had
happened; but soon remembrance knitted up the fabric of the peril and
the close escape. And, arising stiffly from the sand, he stretched his
splendid muscles, rubbed his eyes, and stared about him.
A burning thirst was tormenting him. His tongue clave to the roof of
his mouth; he found, by trial, that he could scarcely swallow.
"Water!" gasped he, and peered at the deep green woods, which promised
abundant brooks and streams.
But before he started on that quest he looked to see that Beatrice was
safe and sound. The girl still slept. Bending above her he made sure
that she was resting easily and that she had taken no harm. But the
sun, he saw, was shining in her face.
"That won't do at all!" he thought; and now with a double motive he
strode off up the beach, toward the dense forest that grew down to the
line of shifting sands.
Ten minutes and he had discovered a spring that bubbled out beneath a
moss-hung rock, a spring whereof he drank till renewed life ran
through his vigorous body. And after that he sought and found with no
great labor a tree of the same species of breadfruit that grew all
about their bungalow on the Hudson.
Then, bearing branches of fruit, and a huge, fronded tuft of the giant
fern-trees that abounded there, he came back down the beach to the
sleeping girl, who still lay unconscious in her tiger-skin, her heavy
hair spread drying on the sands, her face buried in the warm, soft
hollow of her arm.
He thrust the stalk of the fern-tree branch far down into the sand,
bending it so that the thick leaves shaded her. He ate plentifully of
the fruit and left much for her. Then he knelt and kissed her forehead
lightly, and with a smile upon his lips set off along the beach.
A rocky point that rose boldly against the morning, a quarter-mile to
southward, was his objective.
"Whatever's to be seen round here can be seen from there," said he.
"I've got _my_ job cut out for me, all right--here we are, stranded,
without a thing to serve us, no tools, weapons or implements or
supplies of any kind--nothing but our bare hands to work with, and
hundreds of miles between us and the place we call home. No boat, no
conveyance at all. Unknown country, full of God knows what perils!"
Thinking, he strode along the fine, smooth, even sands, where never
yet a human foot had trodden. For the first time he seemed to realize
just what this world now meant--a world devoid of others of his kind.
While the girl and he had been among the ruins of Manhattan, or even
on the Hudson, they had felt some contact with the past; but here,
Stern's eye looked out over a world as virgin as on the primal morn.
And a vast loneliness assailed him, a yearning almost insupportable.
that made him clench his fists and raise them to the impassive, empty
sky that mocked him with its deep and azure calm.
But from the rocky point, when he had scaled its height, he saw far
off to westward a rising column of vapor which for a while diverted
his thoughts. He recognized the column, even though he could not hear
the distant roaring of the cataract he knew lay under it. And,
standing erect and tall on the topmost pinnacle, eyes shaded under his
level hand, he studied the strange sight.
"Yes, the flood's rushing in again, down that vast chasm," he
exclaimed. "The chasm that nearly proved a grave to us! And every day
the same thing happens--but how and why? By Jove, here's a problem
worthy a bigger brain than mine!
"Well, I can't solve it now. And there's enough to do, without
bothering about the maelstrom--except to avoid it!"
He swept the sea with his gaze. Far off to southward lay a dim, dark
line, which at one time must have been Long Island; but it was
irregular now and faint, and showed that the island had been
practically submerged or swept away by the vast geodetic changes of
the age since the catastrophe.
A broken shore-line, heavily wooded, stretched to east and west. Stern
sought in vain for any landmark which might give him position on a
shore once so familiar to him. Whether he now stood near the former
site of New Haven, whether he was in the vicinity of the one-time
mouth of the Connecticut River, or whether the shore where he now
stood had once been Rhode Island, there was no means of telling. Even
the far line of land on the horizon could not guide him.
"If that _is_ some remnant of Long Island," he mused, "it would
indicate that we're no further east than the Connecticut; but there's
no way to be sure. Other islands may have been heaved up from the
ocean floor. There's nothing definite or certain about anything now,
except that we're both alive, without a thing to help us but our wits
and that I'm starving for something more substantial than that
breadfruit!"
Wherewith he went back to Beatrice.
He found her, awake at last, sitting on the beach under the shadow of
the fern-tree branch, shaking out her hair and braiding it in two
thick plaits. He brought her water in a cup deftly fashioned from a
huge leaf; and when she had drunk and eaten some of the fruit they sat
and talked a while in the grateful warmth of the sun.
She seemed depressed and disheartened, at last, as they discussed what
had happened and spoke of the future.
"This last misfortune, Allan," said she, "is too much. There's nothing
now except life--"
"Which is everything!" he interrupted, laughing. "If we can weather a
time like that, nothing in store for us can have any terrors!" His own
spirits rose fast while he cheered the girl.
He drew his arm about her as they sat together on the beach.
"Just be patient, that's all," bade he. "Just give me a day or so to
find out our location, and I'll get things going again, never fear. A
week from now we may be sailing into Boston Harbor--who knows?"
And, shipwrecked and destitute though they were, alone in the vast
emptiness of that deserted world, yet with his optimism and his faith
he coaxed her back to cheerfulness and smiles again.
"The whole earth is ours, and the fulness thereof!" he cried, and
flung his arms defiantly outward. "This is no time for hesitance or
fear. Victory lies all before us yet. To work! To work!"
CHAPTER XIV
A FRESH START
Indomitably the human spirit, temporarily beaten down and
crushed by misfortunes beyond all calculation, once more rose in
renewed strength to the tremendous task ahead. And, first of all,
Stern and the girl made a camping place in the edge of the forest,
close by the spring under the big rock.
"We've got to have a base of supplies, or something of that sort," the
man declared. "We can't start trekking away into the wilderness at
once, without consideration and at least some definite place where we
can store a few necessaries and to which we can retreat, in case of
need. A camp, and--if possible--a fire, these are our first
requisites."
Their camp they built (regardless of the protests of birds and
squirrels and many little woodland folk) roughly, yet strongly enough
to offer protection from the rain, under a thick-leaved oak, which in
itself gave shelter. This oak, through whose branches darted many a
gay-plumaged bird of species unknown to Stern, grew up along the
overhanging face of Spring Rock, as they christened it.
By filling in the space between the rock and the bole of the oak with
moss and stones, and then by building a heavy lean-to roof of leafy
branches, thatched with lashed bundles of marsh-grass, they
constructed in two days a fairly comfortable shack, hard by an
abundant, never-failing supply of the finest water ever a human set
lip to.
Here Stern piled fragrant grasses in great quantity for the girl's
bed. He himself volunteered to sleep at the doorway, on guard with his
only weapon--a jagged boulder lashed with leather thongs to a
four-foot heft, even in the; very fashion of the neolithic ancestors
of man.
Their food supply reverted to such berries and fruits as they could
gather in the fringes of the forest, for as yet they dared not
penetrate far from the shore. To these they added a plentiful supply
of clams, which they dug with sharp sticks, at low tide, far out
across the sand-flats--toiling for all the world like two of the
identical savages who in the long ago, a thousand or five thousand
years before the white man came to America, had left shell-heap
middens along the north Atlantic coast.
This shell-fish gathering brought the action of the tides to their
careful attention. The tide, they found, behaved ire an erratic
manner. Instead of two regular flows a day there was but one. And at
the ebb more than two miles of beach and sea-bottom lay exposed below
the spot where they had landed at the flood. Stern analyzed the
probable cause of this phenomenon.
"There must be two regular tides," he said, "only they're lost in the
far larger flux and reflux caused by the vortex we escaped from. Any
marine geyser like that, able to, suck down water enough from the sea
to lay bare two miles of beach every day and capable of throwing a
column of mist and spray like that across the sky, is worth investing
gating. Some day you and I are going to know more about it--a lot
more!"
And that was truth; but little the engineer suspected how soon, or
under what surpassingly strange circus stances, the girl and he were
destined to behold once more the workings of that terrible and mighty
force.
On the third day Stern set himself to work on the problem of making
fire. He had not even flint-and-steel now; nor any firearm. Had he
possessed a pistol he could have collected a little birch-bark, sought
out a rotten pine-stump, and discharged his weapon into the "punk,"
then blown the glow to a flame, and almost certainly have got a blaze.
But he lacked everything, and so was forced back to primitive man's
one simplest resource--friction.
As an assistant instructor in anthropology at Harvard University, he
had now and then produced fire for his class of expectant students by
using the Peruvian fire-drill; but even this simple expedient required
a head-strap and a jade bearing, a well-formed spindle and a bow.
Stern had none of these things, neither could he fashion them without
tools. He had, therefore, to resort to the still more primitive method
of "fire-sawing," such as long, long ago the Australian bushmen had
been wont to practice.
He was a strong man, determined and persistent; but two days more had
passed, and many blisters covered his palms ere--after innumerable
experiments with different kinds of woods and varying strokes--the
first tiny glow fell into the carefully scraped sawdust. And it was
with a fast-beating heart and tremulous breath that he blew his spark
to a larger one, then laid on his shredded strips of bark and blew
again, and so at last, with a great up-welling triumph in his soul,
beheld the flicker of a flame once more.
Exhausted, he carefully fed that precious fire, while the girl clapped
her hands with joy. In a few moments more the evening air in the dim
forest aisles was gladdened by the ruddy blaze of a camp-fire at the
door of the lean-to, and for the first time smoke went wafting up
among the branches of that primeval wood.
"Now for some real meat!" cried Stern with exultation. "To-morrow I go
hunting!"
That evening they sat for hours feeding their fire with deadfalls,
listening to the trickle of the little spring and to the night sounds
of the forest, watching the bats flicker among the dusky spaces, and
gazing at the slow and solemn march of the stars beyond the leafy
fretwork overhead. Stern slept but little that night, in his anxiety
to keep the fire fed; and morning found him eager to be at his work
with throwing-sticks among the vistas of the wilderness.
Together they hunted that day. She carried what his skilful aim
brought down from the tangled greenery above. Birds, squirrels,
chipmunks, all were welcome. Noon found them in possession of more
than thirty pieces of small game, including two hedgehogs. And for the
first time in almost a week they tasted flesh again, roasted on a
sharp stick over the glowing coals.
Stern hunted all that day and the next. He dressed the game with an
extraordinarily large and sharp clamshell, which he whetted from time
to time on a rock beside the spring. And soon the fire was overhung
with much meat, being smoked with a pine-cone smudge in preparation
for the journey into the unknown.
"Inside of a week, at this rate," he judged, "we'll be able to start
again. You must set to work platting a couple of sacks. The grass
along the brook is tough and long. We can carry fifty or seventy-five
pounds of meat, for emergencies. Fruits we can gather on the way."
"And fire? Can we carry that?"
"We can take a supply of properly dried-out woods with punk. I've
already had practice enough, so I ought to be able to get fire at any
time inside of half an hour."
"Weapons?"
"I'll make you a battle-ax like my own, only lighter. That's the best
we can do for the present, till we strike some ruin or other where a
city used to be."
"And you're still bent on reaching Boston?"
"Yes. I reckon we're more than half-way there by now. It's the nearest
big ruin, the nearest place where we can refit and recoup the damage
done, get supplies and arms and tools, build another boat, and in
general take a fresh start. If we can make ten miles a day, we can
reach it in; ten days or less. I think, all things considered, the
Boston plan's the wisest possible one."
She gazed into the fire a moment before replying. Then, stirring the
coals with a stick, said she:
"All right, boy; but I've got a suggestion to make."
"What is it?"
"We'll do better to follow the shore all the way round."
"And double the distance?"
"Yes, even so. You know, this shore is--or used to be--flat and sandy
most of the way. We can make better progress along beaches and levels
than we can through the forest. And there's the matter of shell-fish
to consider; and most important of all--"
"Well, what?"
"The sea will guide us. We can't get lost, you understand. With the
exception of cutting across the shank of Cape Cod, if the cape still
exists, we needn't ever get out of sight of salt water. And it will
bring us surely to the Hub."
"By Jove, you're right!" he cried enthusiastically. "The shore-line
has it! And to-morrow morning at sunup we begin preparations in
earnest. You'll weave the knapsacks while I go after still more meat.
Gad! Now that everything's decided, the quicker we're on our way the
better. I'm keen to see old Tremont Hill again, and get my hands on a
good stock of arms and ammunition once more!"
That night, long after Beatrice was sleeping soundly on her bed of
odorous grasses, Allan lay musing by the lean-to door, in the red glow
of the fire. He was thinking of the long and painful history of man,
of the great catastrophe and of the terrible responsibility that now
lay on his own shoulders.
As in a panorama, he saw the emergence of humanity from the animal
stage, the primitive savagery of his kind; then the beginnings of the
family, the nomadic epoch, the stone age, and the bronze age, and the
age of iron; the struggle up to agriculturalism, and communism, and
the beginnings of the village groups, with all their petty tribal
wars.
He saw the slow formation of small states, the era of slavery, then
feudalism and serfdom, and at last the birth of modern nations, the
development of machinery, and the vast nexus of exploitation known as
capitalism--the stage which at one blow had been utterly destroyed
just as it had been transmuting into collectivism.
And at thought of this Stern felt a pang of infinite regret.
"The whole evolutionary process wiped out," mused he, "just as it was
about to pass into its perfect form, toward which the history of all
the ages had conspired, for which oceans of blood had been spilled and
millions of men and women--billions!--lived and toiled and died!
"All gone, all vanished--it's all been in vain, the woe and travail of
the world since time began, unless she and I, just we two, preserve
the memory and the knowledge of the world's long, bitter fight, and
hand them down to strong descendants.
"Our problem is to bridge this gap, to keep the fires of science and
of truth alive, and, if that be possible, to start the world again on
a higher plane, where all the harsh and terrible phases will no longer
have to be lived through again. Our problem and our task! Were ever
two beings weighed by such a one?"
And as he pondered, in the firelight, his thoughts and dreams and
hopes all centered in the sleeping girl, there in the lean-to
sheltered by his watchful care. But what those dreams were, what his
visions of the future--who shall set forth or fully understand?
CHAPTER XV
LABOR AND COMRADESHIP
Four days later, having hastened all their preparations and
worked with untiring energy, they broke camp for the long, perilous
trek in quest of the ruins of a dead and buried city.
It was at daylight that they started from the little shack in the edge
of the forest. Both were refreshed by a long sleep and by a plunge in
the curling breakers that now, at high tide, were driven up the beach
by a stiff sea-breeze.
The morning, which must have been toward the end of September--Stern
had lost accurate count but reckoned the day at about the
twenty-fifth--dawned clear and bracing, with just a tang of winelike
exhilaration in the air. Before them the beach spread away and away to
eastward, beyond the line of vision, a broad and yellow road to bid
them travel on.
"Come, girl, _en marche!_" cried the man cheerily, as he adjusted
Beta's knapsack so that the platted cord should not chafe her
shoulders, then swung his own across his back. And with a buoyant
sense of conquest, yet a regret at leaving the little camp which,
though crude and rough, had yet been a home to them for a week, they
turned their faces to the rising sun and set out on the journey into
the unexplored.
Much altered were they now from those days at Hope Villa, when they
had been able to restore most of the necessities and even some of the
refinements of civilization. Now the girl's hair hung in two thick
braids down over her worn tiger-skin, each braid as big as a strong
man's wrist, for she lacked any means to do it up; she had not so much
as a comb, nor could Stern, without a knife, fashion one for her.
Their sandals hung in tatters. Stern had tried to repair them with
strips of squirrel-skin clumsily hacked out with the sharp clam-shell,
but the result was crude.
Long were his hair and beard, untrimmed now, unkempt and red. Clad in
his ragged fur garment, bare legged and bare armed, with the
grass-cloth sack slung over his sinewy shoulder and the heavy stone-ax
in his hand, he looked the very image of prehistoric man--as she, too,
seemed the woman of that distant age.
But though their outward guise was that of savages far cruder than the
North American Indian was when Columbus first beheld him, yet in their
brains lay all the splendid inheritance of a world-civilization. And
as the fire-materials in Stern's sack contained, in germ, all the
mechanic arts, so their joint intelligence presaged everything that
yet might be.
They traveled at an easy pace, like voyagers who foresee many hard
days of journeying and who are cautious not at first to drain their
strength. Five hours they walked, with now and then a pause. Stern
calculated they had made twelve miles or more before they camped
beside a stream that flowing thinly from the wood, sank into the sand
and was lost before it reached the sea.
Here they ate and rested till the sun began to pass its meridian, when
once more they started on their pilgrimage. That night, after a day
wherein they had met no other sign of life than gulls and crows
ravaging the mussel-beds, they slept on piles of sun-dried kelp which
they heaped into some crevices under an overhanging brow of low cliffs
on a rocky point. And dawn found them again, traveling steadily
eastward, battle-axes swinging, hopes high, in perfect comradeship and
faith.
Toward what must have been about ten o'clock of that morning they
reached the mouth of a river, something like half a mile wide where it
joined the sea. By following this up a mile or so they reached a
narrow point; but even here, burdened as they were, swimming was out
of the question.
"The only thing to do," said Stern, "will be to wait till the tide
backs up and gives us quiet water, then make our way across on a log
or two"--a plan they put into effect with good success. Mid-afternoon,
and they were on their way again, east-bound.
"Was that the Connecticut?" asked Beatrice. "Car do you think we've
passed that already?"
"More likely to be the Thames," he answered. "I figure that what used
be New London is less than five miles from here."
"Why not visit the ruins? There might be something there."
"Not enough to bother with. We mustn't be diverted from the main
issue, Boston! Forward, march!"
Next day Stern descried a point jutting far out to sea, which he
declared was none other than Watch Hill Point, on the Rhode Island
boundary. And on the afternoon of the following day they reached what
was indisputably Point Judith and Narragansett Bay.
Here they were forced to turn northward; and when camping time came,
after they had dug their due allowance of clams and gathered their
breadfruit and made their fire in the edge of the woods, they held
conclave about their future course.
The bay was, indeed, a factor neither Stern nor she had reckoned on.
To follow its detours all the way around would add seventy to a
hundred miles to their journey, according as they hugged the shore or
made straight cuts across some of the wooded promontories.
"And from Providence, at the head of the bay, to Boston, is only forty
miles in a direct line northwest-by-north," said he, poking the fire
contemplatively.
"But if we miss our way?"
"How can we, if we follow the remains of the railroad? The cuts and
embankments will guide us all the way."
"I know; but the forest is so thick!"
"Not so thick but we can make at least five miles a day. That is,
inside of eight days we can reach the Hub. And we shall have the help
of tools and guns, remember. In a place the size of Providence there
must be a few ruins still containing something of value. Yes, by all
means the overland route is best, from now on. It means forty miles
instead of probably two hundred."
Thus they agreed upon it; and, having settled matters, gave them no
more thought, but prepared for rest. And sunset came down once more;
it faded, smoldering along the forest-line to westward; it burned to
dull timbers and vague purples, then went out. And "the wind that runs
after the sun awoke and sang softly among the tree-tops, a while, like
the intoning of a choir invisible, and was silent again."
There by the firelight he half saw, half sensed her presence, vague
and beautiful despite the travel-worn, tattered skin that clothed her.
He felt her warm, vital nearness; his hand sought hers and pressed it,
and the pressure was returned. And with a thrill of overwhelming
tenderness he realized what this girl was to him and what his love
meant and what it all portended.
Until long after dark they sat and talked of the future, and of life
and death, and of the soul and of the great mystery that had swept the
earth clean of all of their kind and had left them, alone, of all
those fifteen hundred million human creatures.
And overhead, blotting out a patch of sky and stars, moved slowly the
dark object which had so puzzled Stern since the first time he had
observed it--the thing he meant to know about and solve, once he could
reach the Cambridge Observatory. And of this, too, they talked; but
neither he nor she could solve the riddle of its nature.
Their talk together, that night, was typical of the relationship that
had grown up between them in the long weeks since their awakening in
the Tower. Almost all, if not quite all, the old-time idea of sex had
faded--the old, false assumption on the part of the man that he was by
his very nature the superior of woman.
Stern and Beatrice now stood on a different footing; their friendship,
comradeship and love were based on the tacit recognition of absolute
equality, save for Stern's accidental physical superiority. It was as
though they had been two men, one a little stronger and larger than
the other, so far as the notion of equality went; though this by no
means destroyed that magnetic sex-emotion which, in other aspects,
thrilled and attracted and infused them both.
Their love never for a moment obscured Stern's recognition of the girl
as primarily a human being, his associate on even terms in this great
game that they were playing together, this tremendous problem they
were laboring to solve--the vastest and most vital problem that ever
yet had confronted the human race, now represented in its totality by
these two living creatures.
And as Beatrice recalled the world of other times, with all its false
conventions, limitations and pettily stupid gallantries, she shuddered
with repulsion. In her heart she knew that, had the choice been hers,
she would not have gone back to that former state of half-chattel
patronage, half-hypocritical homage and total misconception.
Contrasting her present state with her past one, and comparing this
man--all ragged, unshaven and long-haired as he was, yet a true man in
every inch of his lithe, virile body--with others she remembered, she
found up-welling in her a love so deep and powerful, grounded on such
broad bases of respect and gratitude, mutual interest and latent
passion, that she herself could not yet understand it in all its
phases and its moods.
The relation which had grown up between them, comrades and partners in
all things, partook of a fine tolerance, an exquisite and
never-failing tenderness, a wealth of all intimate, yet respectful
adoration. It held elements of brotherhood and parenthood; it was the
love of coworkers striving toward a common goal, of companions in life
and in learning, in striving, doing, accomplishing, even failing.
Failure mattered nothing; for still the comradeship was there.
And on this soil was growing daily and hourly a love such as never
since the world began had been equaled in purity and power, faith,
hope, integrity. It purified all things, made easy all things, braved
all things, pardoned all things; it was long-suffering and very kind.
They had no need to speak of it; it showed in every word and look and
act, even in the humblest and most commonplace of services each for
each. Their love was lived, not talked about.
All their trials and tremendous hardships, their narrow passes with
death, and their hard-won escapes, the vicissitudes of a savage life
in the open, with every imaginable difficulty and hard expedient,
could not destroy their illusions or do aught than bind them in closer
bonds of unity.
And each realized when the time should ripen for another and a more
vital love, that, too, would circle them with deeper tenderness,
binding them in still more intense and poignant bonds of joy.
CHAPTER XVI
FINDING THE BIPLANE
The way up the shores of Narragansett Bay was full of
experiences for them both. Animal life revealed itself far more
abundantly here than along the open sea.
"Some strange blight or other must lie in the proximity of that
terrific maelstrom," judged Stern, "something that repels all the
larger animals. But skirting this bay, there's life and to spare. How
many deer have we seen to-day? Three? And one bull-buffalo! With any
kind of a gun, or even a revolver, I could have had them all. And that
big-muzzled, shaggy old moose we saw drinking at the pool, back there,
would have been meat for us if we had had a rifle. No danger of
starving here, Beatrice, once we get our hands on something that'll
shoot again!"
The night they camped on the way, Stern kept constant guard by the
fire, in case of possible attack by wolves or other beasts. He slept
only an hour, when the girl insisted on taking his place; but when the
sun arose, red and huge through the mists upon the bay, he started out
again on the difficult trail as strong and confident as though he had
not kept nine hours of vigil.
Everywhere was change and desolation. As the travelers came into a
region which had at one time been more densely populated, they began
to find here and there mournful relics of the life that once had
been--traces of man, dim and all but obliterated, but now and then
puissant in their revocation of the distant past.
Twice they found the ruins of villages--a few vague hollows in the
earth, where cellars had been, hollows in which huge trees were
rooted, and where, perhaps, a grass-grown crumble of disintegrated
brick indicated the one-time presence of a chimney. They discovered
several farms, with a few stunted apple-trees, the distant descendants
of orchard growths, struggling against the larger forest strength, and
with perhaps a dismantled well-curb, a moss-covered fireplace or a few
bits of iron that had possibly been a stove, for all relics of the
other age. Mournful were the long stone walls, crumbling down yet
still discernible in places--walls that had cost the labor of
generations of farmers and yet now lay useless and forgotten in the
universal ruin of the world.
On the afternoon of the fifth day since having left their lean-to by
the shore of Long Island Sound, they came upon a canyon which split
the hills north of the site of Greenwich, a gigantic "fault" in the
rocks, richly striated and stratified with rose and red and umber, a
great cleft on the other side of which the forest lay somber and
repellent in the slanting rays of the September sun.
"By Jove, whatever it was that struck the earth," said Stern, "must
have been good and plenty. The whole planet seems to be ripped up and
broken and shattered. No wonder it knocked down New York and killed
everybody and put an end to civilization. Why, there's ten cubic miles
of material gouged out right here in sight; here's a regular Panama
Canal, or bigger, all scooped out in one piece! What the devil could
have happened?"
There was no answer to the question. After an hour spent in studying
the formations along the lip of the cleft they made a detour eastward
to the shore, crossed the fjord that ran into the canyon, and again
kept to the north. Soon after this they struck a railroad embankment,
and this they followed now, both because it afforded easier travel
than the shore, which now had grown rocky and broken, and also because
it promised to guide them surely to the place they sought.
It was on the sixth day of their exploration that they at last
penetrated the ruins of Providence. Here, as in New York, pavements
and streets and squares were all grassed over and covered with pines
and elms and oaks, rooting among the stones and shattered brickwork
that lay prone upon the earth. Only here or there a steel or concrete
building still defied the ravages of time.
"The wreckage is even more complete here than on Manhattan Island,"
Stern judged as he and the girl stood in front of the ruins of the
post-office surveying the debris. "The smaller area, of course, would
naturally be covered sooner with the inroads of the forest. I doubt
whether there's enough left in the whole place to be of any real
service to us."
"To-morrow will be time enough to see," answered the girl. "It's too
late now for any more work to-day."
They camped that night in an upper story of the Pequot National Bank
Building on Hampstead Street. Here, having cleared out the bats and
spiders, they made themselves an eerie secure from attack, and slept
long and soundly. Dawn found them at work among the overgrown ruins,
much as--three months before--they had labored in the Metropolitan
Tower and about it. Less, however, remained to salvage here. For the
smaller and lighter types of buildings had preserved far less of the
relics of civilization than had been left in the vast and solid
structures of New York.
In a few places, none the less, they still came upon the little piles
of the gray ash that marked where men and women had fallen and died;
but these occurred only in the most sheltered spots. Stern paid no
attention to them. His energies and his attention were now fixed on
the one task of getting skins, arms, ammunition and supplies. And
before nightfall, by a systematic looting of such shops as
remained--perhaps not above a score in all could even be entered--the
girl and he had gathered more than enough to last them on their way to
Boston. One find which pleased him immensely was a dozen sealed glass
jars of tobacco.
"As for a pipe," said he, "I can make that easily enough. What's more
I will!" More still, he did, that very evening, and the gloom was
redolent again of good smoke. Thereafter he slept as not for a long,
long time.
They spent the next day in fashioning new garments and sandals; in
putting to rights the two rifles Stern had chosen from the basement of
the State armory, and in making bandoliers to carry their supply of
cartridges. The possession of a knife once more, and of steel
wherewith readily to strike fire, delighted the man enormously. The
scissors they found in a hardware-shop, though rusty, enabled him to
trim his beard and hair. Beatrice hailed a warped hard-rubber comb
with joy.
But the great discovery still awaited them, the one supreme find which
in a moment changed every plan of travel, opened the world to them,
and at a single stroke increased their hopes ten thousandfold--the
discovery of the old Pauillac monoplane!
They came upon this machine, pregnant with such vast possibilities, in
a concrete hangar back of the Federal courthouse on Anderson Street.
The building attracted Stern's attention by its unusual state of
preservation. He burst in one of the rusted iron shutters and climbed
through the window to see what might be inside.
A moment later Beatrice heard a cry of astonishment and joy.
"Great Heavens!" the man exclaimed, appearing at the window. "Come in!
Come in--see what I've found!"
And he stretched out his hands to help her up and through the
aperture.
"What is it, boy? More arms? More--"
"An aeroplane! Good God, think o' that, will you?"
"An aeroplane? But it's all to pieces, of course, and--"
"Come on in and look at it, I say!" Excitedly he lifted her through
the window. "See there, will you? Isn't that the eternal limit? And to
think I never even thought of trying to find one in New York!"
He gestured at the dust-laden old machine that, forlorn and in
sovereign disrepair, stood at the other end of the hangar. Together
they approached it.
"If it will work," the man exclaimed thickly; "_if it will only
work--_"
"But will it?" the girl exclaimed, her eyes lighting with the
excitement of the find, heart beating fast at thought of what it might
portend. "Can you put it in shape, boy? Or--"
"I don't know. Let me look! Who knows? Maybe--"
And already he was kneeling, peering at the mechanism, feeling the
frame, the gear, the stays, with hands that trembled more than ever
they had trembled since their great adventure had begun.
As he examined the machine, while Beatrice stood by, he talked to
himself.
"Good thing the framework is aluminum," said he, "or it wouldn't be
worth a tinker's dam after all this time. But as it is, it's taken no
harm that I can see. Wire braces all gone, rusted out and disappeared.
Have to be rewired throughout, if I can find steel wire; if not, I'll
use braided leather thongs. Petrol tank and feed pipe O. K. Girder
boom needs a little attention. Steering and control column
intact--they'll do!"
Part by part he handled the machine, his skilled eye leaping from
detail to detail.
"Canvas planes all gone, of course. Not a rag left; only the frame.
But, no matter, we can remedy that. Wooden levers, skids, and so on,
gone. Easily replaced. Main thing is the engine. Looks as though it
had been carefully covered, but, of course, the covering has rotted
away. No matter, we'll soon see. Now, this carbureter--"
His inspection lasted half an hour, while the girl, lost among so many
technicalities, sat down on the dusty concrete floor beside the
machine and listened in a kind of dazed admiration.
He gave her, finally, his opinion.
"This machine _will go_ if properly handled," said he, rising
triumphantly and slapping the dust off his palms. "The chassis needs
truing up, the equilibrator has sagged out of plumb, and the ailerons
have got to be readjusted, but it's only a matter of a few days at the
outside before she'll be in shape.
"The main thing is the engine, and so far as I can judge, that's
pretty nearly O. K. The magneto may have to be gone over, but that's a
mere trifle. Odd, I never thought of either finding one of these
machines in New York, or building one! When I think of all the weary
miles we've tramped it makes me sick!"
"I know," she answered; "but how about fuel? And another thing--have
you ever operated one? Could you--"
"Run one?" He laughed aloud. "I'm the man who first taught Carlton
Holmes to fly--you know Holmes, who won the Gordon-Craig cup for
altitude record in 1916. I built the first--"
"I know, dear; but Holmes was killed at Schenectady, you remember, and
this machine is different from anything you're used to, isn't it?"
Beatrice asked.
"It won't be when I'm through with it! I tell you, Beatrice, we're
going to fly. No more hiking through the woods or along beaches for
us. From now on we travel in the air--and the world opens out to us as
though by magic.
"Distance ceases to mean anything. The whole continent is ours. If
there's another human creature on it we find him! And if there isn't
then, perhaps we may find some in Asia or in Europe, who knows?"
"You mean you'd dare to attack the Atlantic with a patched-up machine
more than a thousand years old?"
"I mean that eventually I can and will build one that'll take us to
Alaska, and so across the fifty-mile gap from Cape Prince of Wales to
East Cape. The whole world lies at our feet, girl, with this new idea,
this new possibility in mind!"
She smiled at his enthusiasm.
"But fuel?" asked she, practical even in her joy. "I don't imagine
there's any gasoline left now, do you? A stuff as volatile as that,
after all these centuries? What metal could contain it for a thousand
years?"
"There's alcohol," he answered. "A raid on the ruins of a few saloons
and drug-stores will give me all I need to carry me to Boston, where
there's plenty, never fear. A few slight adjustments of the engine
will fit it for burning alcohol. And as for the planes, good stout
buckskin, well sewn together and stretched on the frames, will do the
trick as well as canvas--better, maybe."
"But--"
"Oh, what a little pessimist it is to-day!" he interrupted. "Always
coming at me with objections, eh?" He took her in his arms and kissed
her. "I tell you Beta, this is no pipe-dream at all, or anything like
it; the thing's reality--we're going to fly! But it'll mean the most
tremendous lot of sewing and stitching for you!"
"You're a dear!" she answered inconsequentially. "I do believe if the
whole world fell apart you could put it together again."
"With your help, yes," said he. "What's more, I'm going to--and a
better world at that than ever yet was dreamed of. Wait and see!"
Laughing, he released her.
"Well, now, we'll go to work," he concluded. "Nothing's accomplished
by mere words. Just lay hold of that lateral there, will you? And
we'll haul this old machine out where we can have a real good look at
her, what do yore say? Now, then, one, two, three--"
CHAPTER XVII
ALL ABOARD FOR BOSTON!
Nineteen days from the discovery of the biplane, a singular
happening for a desolate world took place on the broad beach that now
edged the city where once the sluggish Providence River had flowed
seaward.
For here, clad in a double suit of leather that Beatrice had made for
him, Allan Stern was preparing to give the rehabilitated Pauillac a
try-out.
Day by day, working incessantly when not occupied in hunting or
fishing, the man had rebuilt and overhauled the entire mechanism.
Tools he had found a-plenty in the ruins, tools which he had ground
and readjusted with consummate care and skill. Alcohol he had gathered
together from a score of sources. All the wooden parts, such as skids
and levers and propellers, long since vanished and gone, he had
cleverly rebuilt.
And now the machine, its planes and rudders covered with strongly sewn
buckskin, stretched as tight as drum heads, its polished screw of the
Chauviere type gleaming in the morning sun, stood waiting on
the sands, while Stern gave it a painstaking inspection.
"I think," he judged, as he tested the last stay and gave the engine
its final adjustment. "I think, upon my word, this machine's better
to-day than when she was first built. If I'm not mistaken, buckskin's
a better material for planes than ever canvas was--it's far stronger
and less porous, for one thing--and as for the stays, I prefer the
braided hide. Wire's so liable to snap.
"This compass I've rigged on gimbals here, beats anything Pauillac
himself ever had. What's the matter with my home-made gyrostat and
anemometer? And hasn't this aneroid barometer got cards and spades
over the old-style models?"
Enthusiastic as a boy, Stern shook his head and smiled delightedly at
Beatrice as he expounded the merits of the biplane and its fittings.
She, half glad, half anxious at the possible outcome of the venture,
stood by and listened and nodded as though she understood all the
minutiae he explained.
"So then, you're ready to go up this morning?" she asked, with just a
quiver of nervousness in her voice. "You're quite certain everything's
all right--no chance of accident? For if anything happened--"
"There, there, nothing can happen, nothing will!" he reassured her.
"This motor's been run three hours in succession already without
skipping an explosion. Everything's in absolute order, I tell you. And
as for the human, personal equation, I can vouch for that myself!"
Stern walked around to the back of the machine, picked up a long,
stout stake he had prepared, took his ax, and at a distance of about
twelve feet behind the biplane drove the stake very deep into the hard
sand.
He knotted a strong leather cord to the stake, brought it forward and
secured it to the frame of the machine.
"Now, Beatrice," he directed, "when I'm ready you cut the cord. I
haven't any corps of assistants to hold me back till the right moment
and then give me a shove, so the best I can do is this. Give a quick
slash right here when I shout. And whatever happens don't be alarmed.
I'll come back to you safe and sound, never fear. And this afternoon
it's 'All Aboard for Boston!'"
Smiling and confident, he cranked the motor. It caught, and now a
chattering tumult filled the air, rising, falling, as Stern
manipulated throttle and spark to test them once again.
Into the driver's seat he climbed, strapped himself in and turned to
smile at Beatrice.
Then with a practiced hand he threw the lever operating the
friction-clutch on the propeller-shaft. And now the great blades began
to twirl, faster, faster, till they twinkled and buzzed in the
sunlight with a hum like that of a gigantic electric fan.
The machine, yielding to the urge, tugged forward, straining at its
bonds like a whippet eager for a race. Beatrice, her face flushed with
excitement, stood ready with the knife.
Louder, faster whirled the blades, making a shiny blur; a breeze
sprang out behind them; it became a wind, blowing the girl's hair back
from her beautiful face.
Stern settled himself more firmly into the seat and gripped the wheel.
The engine was roaring like a battery of Northrup looms. Stern felt
the pull, the power, the life of the machine. And his heart leaped
within him at his victory over the dead past, his triumph still to be!
"All right!" he cried. "Let go--_let go!_"
The knife fell. The parted rope jerked back, writhing, like a wounded
serpent.
Gently at first, then with greater and greater speed, shaking and
bouncing a little on the broad, flat wheels that Stern had fitted to
the alighting gear, the plane rolled off along the firm-beaten sands.
Stern advanced the spark and now the screw sang a louder, higher
threnody. With ever-accelerating velocity the machine tooled forward
down the long stretch, while Beatrice stood gazing after it in rapt
attention.
Then all at once, when it had sped some three hundred feet, Stern
rotated the rising plane; and suddenly the machine lifted. In a long
smooth curve, she slid away up the air as though it had been a solid
hill--up, up, up--swifter and swifter now, till a suddenly accelerated
rush cleared the altitude of the tallest pines in the forest edging
the beach, and Stern knew his dream was true!
With a great shout of joy, he leaped the plane aloft! Its rise had all
the exhilarating suddenness of a seagull flinging up from the
foam-streaked surface of the breakers. And in that moment Stern felt
the bliss of conquest.
Behind him, the spruce propellers were making a misty haze of humming
energy. In front, the engine spat and clattered. The vast spread of
the leather wings, sewn, stretched and tested, crackled and boomed as
the wind got under them and heaved them skyward.
Stern shouted again. The machine, he felt, was a thing of life,
friendly and true. Not since that time in the tower, months ago, when
he had repaired the big steamengine and actually made it run, had he
enjoyed so real a sense of mastery over the world as now; had he
sensed so definite a connection with the mechanical powers of the
world that was, the world that still should be.
No longer now was he fighting the forces of nature, all barehanded and
alone. Now back of him lay the energy of a machine, a metal heart,
throbbing and inexhaustible and full of life! Now he had tapped the
vein of Power! And in his ears the ripping volley of the exhaust
sounded as sweetly as might the voice of a long-absent and beloved
girl returning to her sweetheart.
For a moment he felt a choking in his throat, a mist before his eyes.
This triumph stirred him emotionally, practical and cool and keen
though he was. His hand trembled a second; his heart leaped, throbbing
like the motor itself.
But almost immediately he was himself once more. The weakness passed.
And with a sweep of his clear eyes, he saw the speeding landscape,
woods, hills, streams, that now were running there beneath him like a
fluid map.
"My God, it's grand, though!" he exclaimed, swerving the plane in a
long, ascending spiral. All the art, the knack of flight came back to
him, at the touch of the wheel, as readily as swimming to an expert in
the water. Fear? The thought no more occurred to him than to you,
reading these words.
Higher he mounted, higher still, his hair whipping out behind in the
wild wind, till he could see the sparkle of Narragansett Bay, there in
the distance where the river broadened into it. At him the wind tore,
louder even than the spitting crackle of the motor. He only laughed,
and soared again.
But now he thought of Beatrice; and, as he banked and came about, he
peered far down for sight of her.
Yes, there she stood, a tiny dot upon the distant sand. And though he
knew she could not hear, in sheer animal spirits and overwhelming joy
he shouted once again, a wild, mad triumphant hurrah that lost itself
in empty space.
The test he gave the Pauillac convinced him she would carry all the
load they would need put upon her, and more. He climbed, swooped,
spiraled, volplaned, and rose again, executing a series of evolutions
that would have won him fame at any aero meet. And when, after half an
hour's exhaustive trial, he swooped down toward the beach again, he
found the plane alighted as easily as she had risen.
Like a sea-bird sinking with flat, outstretched wings, coming to rest
with perfect ease and beauty on the surface of the deep, the Pauillac
slid down the long hill of air. Stern cut off power. The machine took
the sand with no more than vigorous bound, and, running forward
perhaps fifty yards, came to a stand.
Stern had no sooner leaped from the seat than Beatrice was with him.
"Oh, glorious!" she cried, her face alight with joy and fine
enthusiasm. All her spontaneity, her love and admiration were aroused.
And she kissed him with so frank and glad a love that Stern felt his
heart jump wildly. He thought she never yet had been so beautiful.
But all he said was:
"Couldn't run finer, little girl! Barring a little stiffness here and
there, she's perfect. So, then, when do we start, eh? To-morrow
morning, early?"
"Why not this afternoon? I'm sure we can get ready by then."
"Afternoon it is, if you say so! But we've got to work, to do it!"
By noon they had gathered together all the freight they meant to
carry, and--though the sun had dimmed behind dull clouds of a peculiar
slaty gray, that drifted in from eastward--had prepared for the flight
to Boston. After a plentiful dinner of venison, berries and
breadfruit, they loaded the machine.
Stern calculated that, with Beatrice as a passenger, he could carry
seventy-five or eighty pounds of freight. The two rifles, ammunition,
knives, ax, tools and provisions they packed into the skin sack
Beatrice had prepared, weighed no more than sixty. Thus Stern reckoned
there would be a fair "coefficient of safety" and more than enough
power to carry them with safety and speed.
It was at 1:15 that the girl took her place in the passenger's seat
and let Stern strap her in.
"Your first flight, little girl?" he asked smiling, yet a trifle
grave. The barking motor almost drowned his voice.
She nodded but did not speak. He noted the pulse in her throat, a
little quick, yet firm.
"You're positive you're not going to be afraid?"
"How could I, with you?"
He made all secure, climbed up beside her, and strapped himself in his
seat.
Then he threw in the clutch and released the brake.
"Hold fast!" cried he. "All aboard for Boston! Hold fast!"
CHAPTER XVIII
THE HURRICANE
Soaring strongly even under the additional weight, humming with
the rush of air, the plane made the last turn of her spiral and
straightened out at the height of twelve hundred feet for her long
northward run across the unbroken wilderness.
Stern preferred to fly a bit high, believing the air-currents more
dependable there. Even as he rose above the forest-level, his
experienced eye saw possible trouble in the wind-clouds banked to
eastward and in the fall of the barometer. But with the thought, "At
this rate we'll make Boston in three-quarters of an hour at the
outside, and the storm can't strike so soon," he pushed the motor to
still greater speed and settled to the urgent business of steering a
straight course for Massachusetts Bay.
Only once did he dare turn aside his eyes even so much as to glance at
Beatrice. She, magnificently unafraid on the quivering back of this
huge airdragon, showed the splendid excitement of the moment by the
sparkle of her glance, the rush of eloquent blood to her cheeks.
Stern's achievement, typical of the invincible conquest of the human
soul over matter, time and space, thrilled her with unspeakable pride.
And as she breathed for the first time the pure, thin air of those
upper regions, her strong heart leaped within her breast, and she knew
that this man was worthy of her most profound, indissoluble love.
Far down beneath them now the forest sped away to southward. The gleam
of the river, dulled by the sunless sky, showed here and there through
the woods, which spread their unbroken carpet to the horizon,
impenetrable and filled with nameless perils. At thought of how he was
cheating them all, Stern smiled to himself with grim satisfaction.
"Good old engine!" he was thinking, as he let her out another notch.
"Some day I'll put you in a boat, and we'll go cruising. With you,
there's no limit to the possibilities. The world is really ours now,
with your help!"
Behind them now lay the debris of Pawtucket. Stern caught a glimpse of
a ruined building, a crumpled-in gas-tank with an elm growing up
through the stark ribs of it, a jumble of wreckage, all small and
toylike, there below; then the plane swooped onward, and all lay deep
buried in the wilderness again.
"A few minutes now," he said to himself, "and we'll be across what
used to be the line, and be spinning over Massachusetts. This
certainly beats walking all hollow! Whew!" as the machine lurched
forward and took an ugly drop. He jerked the rising-plane lever
savagely. "Still the same kind of unreliable air, I see, that we used
to have a thousand years ago!"
For a few minutes the biplane hummed on and on in long rising and
falling slants, like a swallow skimming the surface of a lake. The
even staccato of the exhaust, echoless in that height and vacancy,
rippled with cadences like a monster mowing-machine. And Stern was
beginning to consider himself as good as in Boston already--was
beginning to wonder where the best place might be to land, whether
along the shore or on the Common, where, perhaps, some open space
still remained--when another formidable air-pocket dropped him with
sickening speed.
He righted the plane with a wrench that made her creak and tremble.
"I've got to take a higher level, or a lower," he thought.
"Something's wrong here, that's certain!"
But as he shot the biplane sharply upward, hoping to find a calmer
lane, a glance at the sky showed trouble impending.
Over the gray background of wind-clouds, a fine-shredded drive was
beginning to scud. The whole east had grown black. Only far off to
westward did a little patch of dull blue show; and even this was
closing up with singular rapidity. And, though the motion of the
machine made this hard to estimate, Stern thought to see by the
lateral drift of the country below, that they were being carried
westward by what--to judge from the agitation of the tree-tops far
below--must already be a considerable gale.
For a moment the engineer cursed his foolhardiness in having started
in face of such a storm as now every moment threatened to break upon
them.
"I should have known," he told himself, "that it was suicidal to
attempt a flight when every indication showed a high wind coming. My
infernal impatience, as usual! We should have stayed safe in
Providence and let this blow itself out, before starting. But
now--well, it's too late."
But was it? Had he not time enough left to make a wide sweep and
circle back whence he had come? He glanced at the girl. If she showed
fear he would return. But on her face he saw no signs of aught but
confidence and joy and courage. And at sight of her, his own
resolution strengthened once again.
"Why retreat?" he pondered, holding the machine to her long soaring
rise. "We must have made a good third of the distance already--perhaps
a half. In ten or fifteen minutes more we ought to sight the blue of
the big bay. No use in turning back now. And as for alighting and
letting the storm blow over, that's impossible. Among these forests it
would mean only total wreckage. Even if we could land, we never could
start again. No; the only thing to do is to hold her to it and plow
through, storm or no storm. I guess the good old Pauillac can stand
the racket, right enough!"
Thus for a few moments longer he held the plane with her nose to the
northeast-by-north, his compass giving him direction, while far, far
below, the world slid back and away in a vast green carpet of swaying
trees that stretched to the dim, dun horizon.
Stern could never afterward recall exactly how or when the hurricane
struck them. So stunning was the blow that hurled itself, shrieking,
in a tumult of mad cross-currents, air maelstroms and frenzied whirls,
all across the sky; so overpowering the chill tempest that burst from
those inky clouds; so sudden the darkness that fell, the slinging hail
volleys that lashed and pelted them, that any clear perception of
their plight became impossible.
All the man knew was that direction and control had been knocked clean
from his hands; that the world had suddenly vanished in a black drive
of cloud and hail and wild-whipping vapor; that he no longer knew
north from south, or east from west; but that--struggling now even to
breathe, filled with sick fears for the safety of the girl beside
him--he was fighting, wrenching, wrestling with the motor and the
planes and rudders, to keep the machine from up-ending, from turning
turtle in mid-air, from sticking her nose under an air-layer and
swooping, hurtling over and over, down, down, like a shattered rocket,
to dash herself to pieces on the waiting earth below.
The first furious onset showed the engineer he could not hope to head
up into that cyclone and live. He swung with it, therefore; and now,
driving across the sky like a filament of cloud-wrack, rode on the
crest of the great storm, his motor screaming its defiance at the
shrieking wind.
Did Beatrice shout out to him? Did she try to make him hear? He could
not tell. No human voice could have been audible in such a turmoil.
Stern had no time to think even of her at such a moment of deadly
peril.
As a driver with a runaway stallion jerks and saws and strains upon
the leather to regain control, so now the man wrestled with his
storm-buffeted machine. A less expert aeronaut must have gone down to
death in that mad nexus of conflicting currents; but Stern was cool
and full of craft and science. Against the blows of the huge tempest
he pitted his own skill, the strength of the stout mechanism, the
trained instincts of the born mechanician.
And, storm-driven, the biplane hurtled westward, ever westward,
through the gloom. Nor could its two passengers by any sight or sound
determine what speed they traveled at, whither they went, what lay
behind, or what ahead.
Concepts of time, too, vanished. Did it last one hour or three? Five
hours, or even more? Who could tell? Lacking any point of contact with
reality, merged and whelmed in that stupendous chill nightmare, all
wrought of savage gale, rain, hail-blasts, cloud and scudding vapor,
they sensed nothing but the fight for life itself, the struggle to
keep aloft till the cyclone should have blown itself out, and they
could seek the shelter of the earth once more.
Reality came back with a reft in the jetty sky, the faint shine of a
little pale blue there, and--a while later--a glimpse of water, or
what seemed to be such, very far below.
More steady now the currents grew. Stern volplaned again; and as the
machine slid down toward earth, came into a calmer and more peaceful
stratum.
Down, down through clouds that shifted, shredded and reassembled, he
let the plane coast, now under control once more; and all at once
there below him, less than three thousand feet beneath, he saw, dim
and vague as though in the light of evening, a vast sheet of water
that stretched away, away, till the sight lost it in a bank of
low-hung vapors on the horizon.
"_The sea?_" thought Stern, with sudden terror. Who could tell?
Perhaps the storm, westbound, had veered; perhaps it might have
carried them off the Atlantic coast! This might be the ocean, a
hundred or two hundred miles from land. And if so, then good-by!
Checking the descent, he drove forward on level wings, peering below
with wide eyes, while far above him the remnants of the storm fled,
routed, and let a shaft of pallid sunlight through.
Stern's eye caught the light of that setting beam, which still reached
that height, though all below, on earth, was dusk; and now he knew the
west again and found his sense of direction.
The wind, he perceived, still blew to westward; and with a thrill of
relief he felt, as though by intuition, that its course had not varied
enough to drive him out to sea.
Though he knew the ripping clatter of the engine drowned his voice, he
shouted to the girl:
"Don't be alarmed! Only a lake down there!" and with fresh courage
gave the motor all that she would stand.
A lake! But what lake? What sheet of water, of this size, lay in New
England? And if not in New England, then where were they?
A lake? One of the Great Lakes? Could that be? Could they have been
driven clear across Massachusetts, its whole length, and over New York
State, four hundred miles or more from the sea, and now be speeding
over Erie or Ontario?
Stern shuddered at the thought. Almost as well be lost over the sea as
over any one of these tremendous bodies! Were not the land near,
nothing but death now faced them; for already the fuel-gage showed but
a scant two gallons, and who could say how long the way might be to
shore?
For a moment the engineer lost heart, but only for a moment.
His eye, sweeping the distance, caught sight of a long, dull, dark
line on the horizon.
A cloud-bank, was it? Land, was it? He could not tell.
"I'll chance it, anyhow," thought he, "for it's our only hope now.
When I don't know where I am, one direction's as good as any other.
We've got no other chance but that! Here goes!"
Skilfully banking, he hauled the plane about, and settled on a long,
swift slant toward the dark line.
"If only the alcohol holds out, and nothing breaks!" his thought was.
"If only that's the shore, and we can reach it in time!"
CHAPTER XIX
WESTWARD HO!
Fate meant that they should live, those two lone wanderers on
the face of the great desolation; and, though night had gathered now
and all was cloaked in gloom, they landed with no worse than a hard
shake-up on a level strip of beach that edged the confines of the
unknown lake.
Exhausted by the strain and the long fight with death, chilled by that
sojourn in the upper air, drenched and stiffened and half dead, they
had no strength to make a camp.
The most that they could do was drag themselves down to the water's
edge and--finding the water fresh, not salt--drink deeply from
hollowed palms. Then, too worn-out even to eat, they crawled under the
shelter of the biplane's ample wings, and dropped instantly into the
long and dreamless sleep of utter weariness.
Mid-morning found them, still lame and stiff but rested, cooking
breakfast over a cheery fire on the beach near the machine. Save for
here and there a tree that had blown down in the forest, some dead
branches scattered on the sands, and a few washed-out places where the
torrent of yesterday's rain had gullied the earth, nature once more
seemed fair and calm.
The full force of the terrific wind-storm had probably passed to
northward; this land where they now found themselves--whatever it
might be--had doubtless borne only a small part of the attack. But
even so, and even through the sky gleamed clear and blue and sunlit
once again, Stern and the girl knew the hurricane had been no ordinary
tempest.
"It must have been a cyclone, nothing less," judged the engineer, as
he finished his meal and reached for his comforting pipe. "And God
knows where it's driven us to! So far as judging distances goes, in a
hurricane like that it's impossible. This may be any one of the Great
Lakes; and, again, it may not. For all we know, we may be up in the
Hudson Bay region somewhere. This may be Winnipeg, Athabasca, or Great
Slave. With the kind of storms that happen nowadays, anything's
possible."
"Nothing matters, after all," the girl assured him, "except that we're
alive and unhurt; and the machine can still travel, for--"
"Travel!" cried Stern. "With about a quart of fuel or less! How far,
I'd like to know?"
"That's so; I never thought of that!" the girl replied, dismayed. "Oh,
dear, what shall we do now?"
Stern laughed.
"Hunt for a town, of course," he reassured her. "There, there, don't
worry! If we find alcohol, we're all right, anyhow. If not, we're
better off than we were after the maelstrom almost got us, at any
rate. Then we had no arms, ammunition, tools, or means to make fire,
while now we've got them all. Forgive my speaking as I did, little
girl. Don't worry--everything will come right in the end."
Reassured, she sat before the fire, and for an hour or more they drew
maps and diagrams in the sand, made plans, and laid out their next
step in this long campaign against the savage power of a deserted
world.
At last, their minds made up, they wheeled the plane back to the
forest, where Stern cut out among the trees a space for its
protection. And, leaving it here, covered with branches of the
thick-topped fern-tree, they took provisions and once more set out on
their exploration.
But this time they had an ax and their two rifles, and as they strode
northward along the shore they felt a match for any peril.
An hour's walk brought them to the ruins of a steel recreation-pier,
with numerous traces of a town along the lake behind it.
"That settles the Hudson Bay theory," Stern rejoiced, as they wandered
among the debris. "This is certainly one of the Great Lakes, though
which one, of course, we can't tell as yet. And now if we can round up
some alcohol we'll be on our way before very long."
They found no alcohol, for the only ruin where drugs or liquors had
evidently been sold had caved in, a mass of shattered brickwork,
smashing every bottle in the place. Stern found many splintered shards
of glass; but that was all, so far as fuel was concerned. He
discovered something else, however, that proved of tremendous
value--the wreck of a printing-office.
Presses and iron of all kind had gone to pieces, but some of the
larger lead types and quads still were recognizable. And, the crucial
thing, he turned up a jagged bit of stereotype-sheet from under the
protection of a concrete plinth that had fallen into the cellar.
All corroded and discolored though it was, he still could make out a
few letters.
"A newspaper head, so help me!" he exclaimed, as with a trembling
finger he pointed the letters out to Beatrice: "Here's an 'H'--here's
'mbur'--here's 'aily,' and 'ronicl'! Eh, what? 'Chronicle,' it must
have been! By Jove, you're right! And the whole thing used to spell
'Hamburg Daily Chronicle,' or I'm a liar!"
He thought a moment--thought hard--then burst out:
"Hamburg, eh? Hamburg, by a big lake? Well, the only Hamburg by a lake
that I know of used to be Hamburg, New York. I ought to remember. I
drew the plans for the New York Central bridge, just north of here,
over the Spring Creek ravine.
"Yes, sir, this certainly is Hamburg, New York. And this lake must be
Erie. Now, if I'm correct, just back up there on that hill we'll find
the remains of the railway cut, and less than ten miles north of here
lies all that's left of Buffalo. Some luck, eh? Cast away, only
fifteen miles or so from a place like that. And we might have gone to
Great Bear Lake, or to--h-m!--to any other place, for all the cyclone
cared.
"Well, come on now, let's see if the railway cut is still there, and
my old bridge; and if so, it's Buffalo for ours!"
It was all as he had said. The right-of-way of the railroad still
showed distinctly, in spite of the fact that ties and rails had long
since vanished. Of the bridge nothing was left but some rusted steel
stringers lying entangled about the disintegrated concrete piers. But
Stern viewed them with a melancholy pride and interest--his own
handiwork in the very long ago.
They had no time, however, for retrospection; but, once more taking
the shore, kept steadily northward. And before noon they reached the
debris of Buffalo, stark and deserted by the lake where once its busy
commerce and its noisy life had thronged. By four o'clock that
afternoon they had collected fuel enough for the plane to do that
distance on, and more. Late that night they were again back at the
spot where they had landed the night before.
And here, in high spirits and with every hope of better fortune now to
follow evil, they cooked their meal and spent an hour in planning
their next move, then slept the sleep of well-earned rest.
They had now decided to abandon the idea of visiting Boston. This
seeming change of front was not without its good reasons.
"We're half-way to Chicago as it is," Stern summed up next morning.
"Conditions are probably similar all along the Atlantic coast; there's
no life to be found there: On the other hand, if we strike for the
West there's at least a chance of running across survivors. If we
don't find them there, then we probably sha'n't find them anywhere. In
Chicago we can live and restock for further explorations, and as for
locating a telescope, the University of Chicago ruins are as promising
as those of Harvard. Chicago, by all means!"
They set out at nine o'clock, and, having made a good start, reached
Buffalo by twenty minutes past, flying easily along the shore at not
more than five hundred feet elevation.
Gaily the lake sparkled and wimpled in the morning sun, unvexed now by
any steamer's prow, unshaded by any smoke from cities or roaring mills
along its banks.
Despite the lateness of the season, the morning was warm; a mild
breeze swayed the treetops and set the little whitecaps foaming here
and there over the broad expanse of blue. Beatrice and Stern felt the
joy of life reborn in them at that sight.
"Magnificent!" cried the engineer. "Now for a swing up past Niagara,
and we're off!"
The river, they found as the plane swept onward, had dwindled to a
brook that they could almost leap across. The rapids now were but a
dreary waste of blackened rocks, and the Falls themselves, dry save
for a desolate trickle down past Goat Island, presented a spectacle of
death--the death of the world as Beatrice and Stern had known it,
which depressed them both.
That this tremendous cataract could vanish thus; that the gorge and
the great Falls which for uncounted centuries had thundered to the
rush and tumult of the mighty waters could now lie mute and dry and
lifeless, saddened them both beyond measure.
And they were glad when, with a wide sweep of her wings, the Pauillac
veered to westward again along the north shore of Lake Erie and
settled into the long run of close on two hundred and fifty miles to
Detroit, where Stern counted on making his first stop.
Without mishap, yet without sighting a single indication of the
presence of man, they coasted down the shore and ate their dinner on
the banks of Lake Saint Clair, near the ruins of Windsor, with those
of Detroit on the opposite side. For some reason or other, impossible
to solve, the current now ran northward toward Huron, instead of south
to Erie. But this phenomenon they could do little more than merely
note, for time lacked to give it any serious study.
Mid-afternoon found them getting under way again westbound.
"Chicago next," said Stern, making some slight but necessary
adjustment of the air-feed in the carburetor. "And here's hoping
there'll be some natives to greet us!"
"Amen to that!" answered the girl. "If any life has survived at all,
it ought to be on the great central plain of the country, say from
Indiana out through Nebraska. But do you know, Allan, if it should
come right down to meeting any of our own kind of people--savages, of
course, I mean, but white--I really believe I'd be awfully afraid of
them. Imagine white savages dressed in skins--"
"Like us!" interrupted Stern, laughing.
"And painted with woad, whatever woad is; I remember reading about it
in the histories of England; all the early Britons used it. And
carrying nice, knobby stone creeks to stave in our heads! It _would_
be nice to meet a hundred or a thousand of them, eh? Rather a
different matter from dealing with a horde of those anthropoid
creatures, I imagine."
Stern only smiled, then answered:
"Well, I'll take _my_ chances with 'em. Better a fight, say I, with my
own kind, than solitude like this--you and I all alone, girl, getting
old some time and dying with never a hand-clasp save perhaps such as
it may please fate to give us from whatever children are to be. But
come, come, girl. No time for gloomy speculations of trouble. In you
get now, and off we go--westward bound again."
Only half an hour out of Detroit it was that they first became aware
of some strange disturbance of the horizon, some inexplicable
appearance such as neither of them had ever seen, a phenomenon so
peculiar that, though both observed it at about the same time, neither
Stern could believe his own senses nor Beatrice hers.
For all at once it seemed to them the sky-line was drawing suddenly
nearer; it seemed that the horizon was approaching at high speed.
The dark, untrodden forest mass still stretched away, away, until it
vanished against the dim blue of the sky; but now, instead of that
meeting-line being forty miles off, it seemed no farther than twenty,
and minute by minute it indubitably was rushing toward them with a
speed equal to their own.
Stern, puzzled and alarmed at this unusual sight, felt an impulse to
slow, to swerve, to test the apparition in some way; but second
thought convinced him it must be deception of some sort.
"Some peculiar state of the atmosphere," thought he, "or perhaps we're
approaching a high ridge, on the other side of which lie clouds that
cut away the farther view. Or else--no, hang it! the world seems to
end right there, with no clouds to veil it--nothing, only--what?"
He saw the girl pointing in alarm. She, too, was clearly stirred by
the appearance.
What to do? Stern felt indecision for the first time since he had
started on this long, adventurous journey. Shut off and descend?
Impossible among those forests. Swing about and return? Not to be
thought of. Keep on and meet perils perhaps undreamed of? Yes--at all
hazards he would keep on.
And with a tightening of the jaw he drove the Pauillac onward, ever
onward--toward the empty space that yawned ahead.
"End o' the world?" thought he. "All right, the old machine is good
for it, and so are we. Here goes!"
CHAPTER XX
ON THE LIP OF THE CHASM
Very near, now, was the strange apparition. On, on, swift as a
falcon, the plane hurtled. Stern glanced at Beatrice. Never had he
seen her more beautiful. About her face, rosy and full of life, the
luxuriant loose hair was whipping. Her eyes sparkled with this new
excitement, and on her full red lips a smile betrayed her keen
enjoyment. No trace of fear was there--nothing but confidence and
strength and joy in the adventure.
The phenomenon of the world's end--for nothing else describes it
adequately--now appeared distinctly as a jagged line, beyond which
nothing showed. It differed from the horizon line, inasmuch as it was
close at hand. Already the adventurers could peer down upon it at an
acute angle.
Plainly could they see the outlines of trees growing along the verge.
But beyond them, nothing.
It differed essentially from a canyon, because there was no other side
at all. Strain his eye as he might, Stern could detect no opposite
wall. And now, realizing something of the possibilities of such a
chasm, he swung the Pauillac southward. Flying parallel to the edge of
this tremendous barrier, he sought to solve the mystery of its true
nature.
"If I go higher, perhaps I may be able to get some notion of it,"
thought he, and swinging up-wind, he spiraled till the barometer
showed he had gained another thousand feet.
But even this additional view profited him nothing. Half a mile to
westward the ragged tree-line still showed as before, with vacancy
behind it, and as far as Stern could see to north, to south, it
stretched away till the dim blue of distance swallowed it. Yet,
straight across the gulf, no land appeared. Only the sky itself was
visible there, as calm and as unbroken as in the zenith, yet extending
far below where the horizon-line should have been--down, in fact, to
where the tree-line cut it off from Stern's vision.
The effect was precisely that of coming to the edge of a vast plain,
beyond which nothing lay, save space, and peering over.
"The end of the world, indeed!" thought the engineer, despite himself.
"But what can it mean? What can have happened to the sphere to have
changed it like this? Good Heavens, what a marvel--what a
catastrophe!"
Determined at all hazards to know more of this titanic break or
"fault," or whatsoever it might be, he banked again, and now, on a
descending slant, veered down toward the lip of the chasm.
"Going out over it?" cried Beatrice.
He nodded.
"It may be miles deep!"
"You can't get killed any deader falling a hundred miles than you can
a hundred feet!" he shouted back, above the droning racket of the
motor.
And with a fresh grip on the wheel, head well forward, every sense
alert and keen to meet whatever conditions might arise, to battle with
cross-currents, "air-holes," or any other vortices swirling up out of
those unknown depths, he skimmed the Pauillac fair toward the lip of
the monstrous vacancy.
Now as they rushed almost above the verge he could see conclusively
they were not dealing here with a canyon like the Yosemite or like any
other he had ever seen or heard of in the old days.
There was positively no bottom to the terrific thing!
Just a sheer edge and beyond that--nothing.
Nowhere any sign of an opposite bank; nowhere the faintest trace of
land. Far, far below, even a few faint clouds showed floating there as
if in mid-heaven.
The effect was ghastly, unnerving and altogether terrible. Not that
Stern feared height. No, it was the unreality of the experience, the
inexplicable character of this yawning edge of the world that almost
overcame him.
Only by a strong exercise of will-power could he hold the biplane to
her course. His every instinct was to veer, to retreat back to solid
earth, and land somewhere, and once more, at all hazards, get the
contact of reality.
But Stern resisted all these impulses, and now already had driven the
Pauillac right to the lip of the vast nothingness.
Now they were over!
"My God!" he cried, stunned by the realization of this thing. "Sheer
space! No bottom anywhere!"
For all at once they had shot, as it were, out into a void which
seemed to hold no connection at all with the earth they now were
quitting.
Stern caught a glimpse of the tall forest growing up to within a
hundred yards of the edge, then of smaller trees, dwindling to bushes
and grasses, and strange red sand that bordered the gap--sand and
rocks, barren as though some up-draft from the void had killed off
vegetable growth along the very brink.
Then all slid back and away. The red-ribbed wall of the great chasm,
shattered and broken as by some inconceivable disaster, some cosmic
cataclysm, fell away and away, downward, dimmer and more dim, until it
faded gradually into a blue haze, then vanished utterly.
And there below lay nothingness--and nothingness stretched out in
front to where the sight lost itself in pearly vapors that overdimmed
the sky.
Beatrice glanced at Stern as the Pauillac sped true as an arrow in its
flight, out into this strange and incomprehensible vacuity.
Just a shade paler now he seemed. Despite the keen wind, a glister of
sweat-drops studded his forehead. His jaw was set, set hard; she could
see the powerful maxillary muscles knotted there where the
throat-cords met the angle of the bone. And she understood that, for
the first time since their tremendous adventure had begun, the man
felt shaken by this latest and greatest of all the mysteries they had
been called upon to face.
Already the verge lay far behind; and now the sense of empty space
above and on all sides and there below was overpowering.
Stern gasped with a peculiar choking sound. Then all at once, throwing
the front steering plane at an angle, he brought the machine about and
headed for the distant land.
He spoke no word, nor did she; but they both swept the edge of the
chasm with anxious eyes, seeking a place to light.
It was with tremendous relief that they both saw the solid earth once
more below them. And when, five minutes later, having chosen a clear
and sand-barren on the verge, some two miles southward along the
abyss, Stern brought the machine to earth, they felt a gratitude and a
relief not to be voiced in words.
"By Jove!" exclaimed the man, lifting Beatrice from the seat, "if that
isn't enough to shake a man's nerve and upset all his ideas,
geological or otherwise, I'd like to know what is!"
"Going to try to cross it?" she asked anxiously; "that is, if there is
any other side? I know, of course, that if there is you'll find out,
some way or other!"
"You overestimate me," he replied. "All I can do, for now, is to camp
down here and try to figure the problem out--with your help. Whatever
this thing is, it's evident it stands between us and our plan. Either
Chicago lies on the other side--(provided, of course, as you say, that
there is one)--or else it's been swallowed up, ages ago, by whatever
catastrophe produced this yawning gulf.
"In either event we've got to try to discover the truth, and act
accordingly. But for now, there's nothing we can do. It's getting late
already. We've had enough for one day, little girl. Come on, let's
make the machine ready for the night, and camp down here and have a
bite to eat. Perhaps by to-morrow we may know just what we're up
against!"
The moon had risen, flooding the world with spectral light, before
the two adventurers had finished their meal. All during it they had
kept an unusual silence. The presence of that terrible gulf, there not
two hundred feet away to westward of them, imposed its awe upon their
thoughts.
And after the meal was done, by tacit understanding they refrained
from trying to approach it or to peer over. Too great the risks by
night. They spoke but little, and presently exhausted by the trying
events of the day--sought sleep under the vanes of the Pauillac.
But for an hour, tired as he was, the engineer lay thinking of the
chasm, trying in vain to solve its problem or to understand how they
were to follow any further the search for the ruins of Chicago, where
fuel was to be had, or carry on the work of trying to find some living
members of the human race.
Morning found them revived and strengthened. Even before they made
their fire or prepared their breakfast they were exploring along the
edge of the gigantic cleft.
Going first to make sure no rock should crumble under the girl's
tread, no danger threaten, Stern tested every foot of the way to the
very edge of the sheer chasm.
"Slowly, now!" he cautioned, taking her hand. "We've got to be careful
here. My God, what a drop!"
Awed, despite themselves, they stood there on a flat slab of schist
that projected boldly over the void. Seen from this point, the immense
nothingness opened out below them even more terrible than it had
seemed from the biplane.
The fact is common knowledge that a height, viewed from a balloon or
aeroplane, is always far less dizzying than from a lofty building or a
monument. Giddiness vanishes when no solid support lies under the
feet. This fact Stern and the girl appreciated to the full as they
peered over the edge. Ten times more ominous and frightful the vast
blue mystery beneath them now appeared than it had seemed before.
"Let's look sheer down," said the girl. "By lying flat and peering
over, there can't be any danger."
"All right, but only on condition that I keep tight hold of you!"
Cautiously they lay down and worked their way to the edge. The
engineer circled Beta's supple waist with his arm.
"Steady, now!" he warned. "When you feel giddy, let me know, and we'll
go back."
The effect of the chasm, from the very edge of the rock, was
terrifying. It was like nothing ever seen by human eyes. Peering down
into the Grand Canyon of the Colorado would have been child's play
beside it. For this was no question of looking down a half-mile, a
mile, or even five, to some solid bottom.
Bottom there was none--nothing save dull purple haze, shifting vapors,
and an unearthly dim light which seemed to radiate upward as though
the sun's rays, reflected, were striving to beat up again.
"There must be miles and miles of air below us," said Stern, "to
account for this curious light-effect. Air, of course, will eventually
cut off the vision. Given a sufficiently thick layer, say a few
hundred miles, it couldn't be seen through. So if there _is_ a bottom
to this place, be it one hundred or even five hundred miles down, of
course we couldn't see it. All we could see would be the air, which
would give this sort of blue effect."
"Yes; but in that case how can we see the sun, or the moon, or stars?"
"Light from above only has to pierce forty or fifty miles of really
dense air. Above that height it's excessively rarified. While down
below earth-level, of course, it would get more and more dense all the
time, till at the bottom of a five-hundred-mile drop the density and
pressure would be tremendous."
Beatrice made no answer. The spectacle she was gazing at filled her
with solemn thoughts. Jagged, rent and riven, the rock extended
downward. Here vast and broken ledges ran along its flanks--red,
yellow, black, all seared and burned and vitrified as by the fire of
Hell; there huge masses, up-piled, seemed about to fall into the
abyss.
A quarter-mile to southward, a rivulet had found its way over a
projecting ledge. Spraying and silvery it fell, till, dissipated by
the up-draft from the abyss, it dissolved in mist.
The ledge on which they were lying extended downward perhaps three
hundred yards, then sloped backward, leaving sheer empty space beneath
them. They seemed to be poised in mid-heaven. It was totally unlike
the sensation on a mountain-top, or even floating among the clouds;
for a moment it seemed to Stern that he was looking up toward an
unfathomable, infinite dome above him.
He shuddered, despite his cool and scientific spirit of observation.
"Some chemical action going on somewhere down there," said he, half to
divert his own attention from his thoughts. "Smell that sulphur? If
this place wasn't once the scene of volcanic activities, I'm no
judge!"
A moderate yet very steady wind blew upward from the chasm, freighted
with a scent of sulphur and some other substance new to Stern.
Beatrice, all at once overcome by sudden giddiness, drew back and hid
her face in both hands.
"No bottom to it--no end!" she said in a scared tone. "Here's the end
of the world, right here, and beyond this very rock--nothing!"
Stern, puzzled, shook his head.
"That's really impossible, absurd and ridiculous, of course," he
answered. "There _must_ be something beyond. The way this stone falls
proves that."
He pitched a two-pound lump of granite far out into the air. It fell
vertically, whirling, and vanished with the speed of a meteor.
"If a whole side of the earth had split off, and what we see down
below there were really sky, of course the earth's center of gravity
would have shifted," he explained, "and that rock would have fallen in
toward the cliff below us, not straight down."
"How can you be sure it doesn't fall that way after the impulse you
gave it has been lost?"
"I shall have to make some close scientific tests here, lasting a day
or two, before I'm positive; but my impression is that this, after
all, is only a canyon--a split in the surface--rather than an actual
end of the crust."
"But if it were a canyon, why should blue sky show down there at an
angle of forty-five degrees?"
"I'll have to think that out, later," he replied. "Directly under us,
you see all seems deep purple. That's another fact to consider. I tell
you, Beatrice, there's more to be figured out here than can be done in
half an hour.
"As I see it, some vast catastrophe must have rent the earth, a
thousand or fifteen hundred years ago, as a result of which everybody
was killed except you and me. We're standing now on the edge of the
scar left by that explosion, or whatever it was. How deep or how wide
that scar is, I don't know. Everything depends on our finding out, or
at least on our guessing it with some degree of accuracy."
"How so?"
"Because, don't you see, this chasm stands between us and Chicago and
the West, and all our hopes of finding human life there. And--"
"Why not coast south along the edge here, and see if we can't run
across some ruined city or other where we can refill the tanks?"
"I'll think it over," the engineer answered. "In the meantime we can
camp down here a couple of days or so, and rest; and I can make some
calculations with a pendulum and so on."
"And if you decide there's probably another side to this gulf, what
then?"
"We cross," he said; then for a while stood silent, musing as he
peered down into the bottomless abyss that stretched there hungrily
beneath their narrow observation-rock.
"We cross, that's all!"
CHAPTER XXI
LOST IN THE GREAT ABYSS
For two days they camped beside the chasm, resting, planning,
discussing, while Stern, with improvised transits, pendulums and other
apparatus, made tests and observations to determine, if possible, the
properties of the great gap.
During this time they developed some theories regarding the
catastrophe which had swept the world a thousand years ago.
"It seems highly and increasingly probable to me," the engineer said,
after long thought, "that we have here the actual cause of the vast
blight of death that left us two alone in the world. I rather think
that at the time of the great explosion which produced this rent,
certain highly poisonous gases were thrown off, to impregnate the
entire atmosphere of the world. Everybody must have been killed at
once. The poison must have swept the earth clean of human life."
"But how did _we_ escape?" asked the girl.
"That's hard telling. I figure it this way: The mephitic gas probably
was heavy and dense, thus keeping to the lower air-strata, following
them, over plain and hill and mountain, like a blanket of death.
"Just what happened to us, who can tell? Probably, tightly housed up
there in the tower, the very highest inhabited spot in the world, only
a very slight infiltration of the gas reached us. If my theory won't
work, can you suggest a better one? Frankly, I can't; and until we
have more facts, we've got to take what we have. No matter, the
condition remains--we're alive and all the rest are dead; and I'm
positive this cleft here is the cause of it."
"But if everybody's dead, as you say, why hunt for men?"
"Perhaps a handful may have survived among the highlands of the
Rockies. I imagine that after the first great explosion there followed
a series of terrible storms, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tidal
waves and so on. You remember how I found the bones of a whale in
lower Broadway; and many of the ruins in New York show the action of
the sea--they're laid flat in such a manner as to indicate that the
island was washed on one or two occasions by monster waves.
"Well, all these disturbances probably finished up what few survivors
escaped, except possibly among the mountains of the West. A few
scattered colonies may have survived a while--mining camps, for
instance, or isolated prospectors, or what-not. They may all have died
out, or again, they may have come together and reestablished some
primitive form of barbarous or even savage life by this time. There's
no telling. Our imperative problem is to reach that section and
explore it thoroughly. For there, if anywhere, we'll find survivors of
our race."
"How about that great maelstrom that nearly got us?" asked the girl."
Can you connect that with the catastrophe?"
"I think so. My idea is that, in some way or other, the sea is being
sucked down into the interior of the earth and then hurled out again;
maybe there's a gradual residue being left; maybe a great central lake
or sea has formed. Who knows? At any rate all the drainage system of
the country seems to have been changed and reversed in the most
curious and unaccountable manner. I think we should find, if we could
investigate everything thoroughly, that this vast chasm here is
intimately connected with the whole thing."
These and many other questions perplexed the travelers, but most of
all they sought to know the breadth of the vast gap and to determine
if it had, as they hoped, another side, or if it were indeed the edge
of an enormous mass split bodily off the earth.
Stern believed he had an answer to this problem on the afternoon of
the second day. For many hours he had hung his pendulums over the
cliff, noted deflections, taken triangulations, and covered the
surface of the smooth stone with X's, Y's, Z's, sines and cosines and
abstruse formulae--all scrawled with charcoal, his only means of
writing.
At last he finished the final equation, and, with a smile of triumph
and relief, got to his feet again.
Back to the girl, who was cooking over an odorous fire of cedar, he
made his way, rejoicing.
"I've got it!" he shouted gladly. "Making reasonable allowances for
depth, I've got it!"
"Got what?"
"The probable width!"
"Oh!" And she stood gazing at him in admiration, beautiful and strong
and graceful. "You mean to say--"
"I'm giving the chasm a hundred miles' depth. That's more than anybody
could believe possible--twice as much. On that assumption, my tests
show the distance to the other side--and there is another side, by the
way!--can't be over--"
"Five hundred miles?"
"Nonsense! Not over one hundred to one-fifty. I'm going on a liberal
allowance for error, too. It may not be over seventy-five. The--"
"But if that's as far as it is, why can't we see the other side?"
"With all that chemicalized vapor rising constantly? Who knows what
elements may be in it? Or what polarization may be taking place?"
"Polarization?"
"I mean, what deflection and alteration of light? No wonder we can't
see! But we can fly! And we're going to, what's more!"
"Going to make a try for Chicago, then?" she asked, her eyes lighting
up joyfully at thought of the adventure.
"To-morrow morning, sure!"
"But the alcohol?"
"We've still got what we started with from Detroit, minus only what
we've burned reaching this place. And we reckoned when we set out that
it would far more than be enough. Oh, that part of it's all right!"
"Well, you know best," she answered. "I trust you in all things,
Allan. But now just look at this roast partridge; come, dear, let
to-morrow take care of itself. It's supper-time now!"
After the meal they went to the flat rock and sat for an hour while
the sun went down beyond the void. Its disappearance seemed to
substantiate the polarization theory. There was no sudden obliteration
of the disk by a horizon. Rather the sun faded away, redder and
duller; then slowly losing form and so becoming a mere blur of
crimson, which in turn grew purple and so gradually died away to
nothing.
For a long time they sat in the deepening gloom, their rifles close at
hand, saying little, but thinking much. The coming of night had
sobered them to a sense of what now inevitably lay ahead. The solemn
purple pall that adumbrated the world and the huge nothingness before
them, so silent, so immutable and pregnant with terrible mysteries,
brought them close together.
The vague, untrodden forest behind them, where the night-sounds of the
wild dimly reechoed now and then, filled them with indefinable
emotions. And that night sleep was slow in coming.
Each realized that, despite all calculations and all skill, the morrow
might be their last day of life. But the morning light, golden and
clear above the eastern sky-line of tall conifers, dispelled all
brooding fears. They were both up early and astir, in preparation for
the crucial flight. Stern went over the edge of the chasm, while
Beatrice prepared breakfast, and made some final observations of wind,
air currents and atmosphere density.
An eagle which he saw soaring over the abyss, more than half a mile
from its edge, convinced him a strong upward current existed to-day,
as on the day when they had made their short flight over the void. The
bird soared and circled and finally shot away to northward, without a
wing-flap, almost in the manner of a vulture. Stern knew an eagle
could not imitate the feat without some aid in the way of an up-draft.
"And if that draft is steady and constant all the way across," thought
he, "it will result in a big saving of fuel. Given a sufficient rising
current, we could volplane all the way across with a very slight
expenditure of alcohol. It looks now as though everything were coming
on first-rate. Couldn't be better. And what a day for an excursion!"
By nine o'clock all was ready. Along the land a mild south wind was
blowing. Though the day was probably the 5th of October or thereabout,
no signs of autumn yet were blazoned in the forest. The morning was
perfect, and the travelers' spirits rose in unison with the abounding
beauty of the day.
Stern had given the Pauillac another final going over, tightening the
stays and laterals, screwing up here a loosened nut, there a bolt,
making certain all was in perfect order.
At nine-fifteen, after he had had a comforting pipe, they made a clean
getaway, rising along the edge of the chasm, then soaring in huge
spirals.
"I want all the altitude I can get," Stern shouted at the girl as they
climbed steadily higher. "We may need it to coast on. And from a mile
or two up maybe we can get a glimpse of the other side."
But though they ascended till the aneroid showed eight thousand five
hundred feet, nothing met their gaze but the same pearly blue vapor
which veiled the mystery before them. And Stern, satisfied now that
nothing could be gained by any further ascent, turned the machine due
west, and sent her skimming like a swallow out over the tremendous
nothingness below.
As the earth faded behind them they began to feel distinctly a warm
and pungent wind that rose beneath--a steady current, as from some
huge chimney that lazily was pouring out its monstrous volume of hot
vapors.
Away and away behind them slid the lip of this gigantic gash across
the world; and now already with the swift rush of the plane the solid
earth had begun to fade and to grow dim.
Stern only cast a glance at the sun and at his compass, hung there in
gimbals before him, and with firm hand steadied the machine for the
long problematical flight to westward. Behind them the sun kept even
with their swift pace; and very far below and ahead, at times they
thought to see the fleeing shadow of the biplane cast now and then on
masses of formless vapor that rose from the unsounded deeps.
Definitely committed now to this tremendous venture, both Stern and
the girl settled themselves more firmly in their seats. No time to
feel alarm, no time for introspection, or for thoughts of what might
lie below, what fate theirs must be if the old Pauillac failed them
now!
No time save for confidence in the stout mechanism and in the skill of
hand and brain that was driving the great planes, with a roaring rush
like a gigantic gull, a swooping rise and fall in long arcs over the
hills of air, across the vast enigma of that space!
Stern's whole attention was fixed on driving, just on the manipulation
of the swift machine. Exhaust and interplay, the rhythm of each
whirling cam and shaft, the chatter of the cylinders, the droning
diapason of the blades, all blent into one intricate yet perfect
harmony of mechanism; and as a leader knows each instrument in the
great orchestra and follows each, even as his eye reads the score, so
Stern's keen ear analyzed each sound and action and reaction and knew
all were in perfect tune and resonance.
The machine--no early and experimental model, such as were used in the
first days of flying, from 1900 to 1915, but one of the perfected and
self-balancing types developed about 1920, the year when the Great
Death had struck the world--responded nobly to his skill and care.
From her landing-skids to the farthest tip of her ailerons she seemed
alive, instinct with conscious and eager intelligence.
Stern blessed her mentally with special pride and confidence in her
mercury equalizing balances. Proud of his machine and of his skill,
superb like Phaeton whirling the sun-chariot across the heavens, he
gave her more and still more speed.
Below nothing, nothing save vapors, with here and there an open space
where showed the strange dull purple of the abyss. Above, to right, to
left, nothing--absolute vacant space.
Gone now was all sight of the land that they had left. Unlike
balloonists who always see dense clouds or else the earth, they now
saw nothing. All alone with the sun that rushed behind them in their
skimming flight, they fled like wraiths across the emptiness of the
great void.
Stern glanced at the barometer, and grunted with surprise.
"H'm! Twelve thousand four hundred and fifty feet--and I've been
jockeying to come down at least five hundred feet already!" thought
he. "How the devil can _that_ be?"
The explanation came to him. But it surprised him almost as much as
the noted fact.
"Must be one devil of a wind blowing up out of that place," he
pondered, "to carry us up nearly four thousand feet, when I've been
trying to descend. Well, it's all right, anyhow--it all helps."
He looked at the spinning anemometer. It registered a speed of
ninety-seven miles an hour. Yet now that they were out of sight of any
land, only the rush of the wind and the enormous vibration of the
plane conveyed an idea of motion. They might as well have been hung in
mid-space, like Mohammed's tomb, as have been rushing forward; there
was no visible means of judging what their motion really might be.
"Unique experience in the history of mankind!" shouted Stern to the
girl. "The world's invisible to us."
She nodded and smiled back at him, her white teeth gleaming in the
strange, bluish light that now enveloped them.
Stern, keenly attentive to the engine, advanced the spark another
notch, and now the needle crept to 102 1/2.
"We'll be across before we know it," thought he. "At this rate, I
shouldn't be surprised to sight land any minute now."
A quarter-hour more the Pauillac swooped along, cradling in her swift
flight to westward.
But all at once the man started violently. Forward he bent, staring
with widened eyes at the tube of the fuel-gage.
He blinked, as though to convince himself he had not seen aright, then
stared again; and as he looked a sudden grayness overspread his face.
"_What?_" he exclaimed, then raised his head and for a moment sniffed,
as though to catch some odor, elusive yet ominous, which he had for
some time half sensed yet paid no heed to.
Then suddenly he knew the truth; and with a cry of fear bent, peering
at the fuel-tank.
There, quivering suspended from the metal edge of the aluminum tank,
hung a single clear white drop--_alcohol!_
Even as Stern looked it fell, and at once another took its place, and
was shaken off only to be succeeded by a third, a fourth, a fifth!
The man understood. The ancient metal, corroded almost through from
the inside, had been eaten away. That very morning a hole had formed
in the tank. And now a leak--existing since what moment he could not
tell--was draining the very life-blood of the machine.
"The alcohol!" cried Stern in a hoarse, terrible voice, his wide eyes
denoting his agitation. With a quivering hand he pointed.
"My God! It's all leaked out--there's not a quart left in the tank!
We're lost--lost in the bottomless abyss!"
CHAPTER XXII
LIGHTS!
At realization of the ghastly situation that confronted them,
Stern's heart stopped beating for a moment. Despite his courage, a
sick terror gripped his soul; he felt a sudden weakness, and in his
ears the rushing wind seemed shouting mockeries of death.
As in a dream he felt the girl's hand close in fear upon his arm, he
heard her crying something--but what, he knew not.
Then all at once he fought off the deadly horror. He realized that
now, if ever, he needed all his strength, resource, intelligence. And,
with a violent effort, he flung off his weakness. Again he gripped the
wheel. Thought returned. Though the end might be at hand, thank God
for even a minute's respite!
Again he looked at the indicator.
Yes, only too truly it showed the terrible fact! No hallucination,
this. Not much more than a pint of the precious fluid now lay in the
fuel tank. And though the engine still roared, he knew that in a
minute or two it must slacken, stop and die.
What then?
Even as the question flashed to him, the engine barked its protest. It
skipped, coughed, stuttered. Too well he knew the symptoms, the
imperative cry: "More fuel!"
But he had none to give. In vain for him to open wide the supply
valve. Vain to adjust the carburetor. Even as he made a despairing,
instinctive motion to perform these useless acts--while Beatrice,
deathly pale and shaking with terror, clutched at him--the engine spat
forth a last, convulsive bark, and grew silent.
The whirling screws hummed a lower note, then ceased their song and
came to rest.
The machine lurched forward, swooped, spiraled, and with a sickening
rush, a flailing tumult of the stays and planes, plunged into
nothingness!
Had Stern and the girl not been securely strapped to their seats, they
must have been precipitated into space by the violent, erratic dashes,
drops, swerves and rushes of the uncontrolled Pauillac.
For a moment or two, instinctively despite the knowledge that it could
do no good, Stern wrenched at the levers. A thousand confused, wild,
terrible impressions surged upon his consciousness.
Swifter, swifter dropped the plane; and now the wind that seemed to
rise had grown to be a hurricane! Its roaring in their ears was
deafening. They had to fight even for breath itself.
Beatrice was leaning forward now, sheltering her face in the hollow of
her arm. Had she fainted? Stern could not tell. He still was fighting
with the mechanism, striving to bring it into some control. But,
without headway, it defied him. And like a wounded hawk, dying even as
it struggled, the Pauillac staggered wildly down the unplumbed abyss.
How long did the first wild drop last? Stern knew not. He realized
only that, after a certain time, he felt a warm sensation; and,
looking, perceived that they were now plunging through vapors that
sped upward--so it seemed--with vertiginous rapidity.
No sensation now was there of falling. All motion seemed to lie in the
uprushing vapors, dense and warm and pale violet in hue. A vast and
rhythmic spiraling had possessed the Pauillac. As you have seen a
falling leaf turn in air, so the plane circled, boring with terrific
speed down, down, down through the mists, down into the unknown!
Nothing to be seen but vapors. No solid body, no land, no earth to
mark their fall and gauge it. Yet slowly, steadily, darkness was
shrouding them. And Stern, breathing with great difficulty even in the
shelter of his arms, could now hardly more than see as a pale blur the
white face of the girl beside him.
The vast wings of the machine, swirling, swooping, plunging down,
loomed hugely vague in the deepening shadows. Dizzy, sick with the
monstrous caroming through space, deafened by the thunderous roaring
of the up-draft, Stern was still able to retain enough of his
scientific curiosity to peer upward. The sun! Could he still see it?
Vanished utterly was now the glorious orb! There, seeming to circle
round and round in drunken spirals, he beheld a weird, diffused,
angry-looking blotch of light, tinted a hue different from any ever
seen on earth by men. And involuntarily, at sight of this, he
shuddered.
Already with the prescience of death full upon him, with a numb
despair clutching his soul, he shrank from that ghastly, hideous
aspect of what he knew must be his last sight of the sun.
Around the girl he drew his right arm; she felt his muscles tauten as
he clasped her to him. Useless now, he knew, any further struggles
with the aeroplane. Its speed, its plummetlike drop checked only by
the huge sweep of its parachute wings, Stern knew now it must fall
clear to the bottom of the abyss--if bottom there were. And if
not--what then?
Stern dared not think. All human concepts had been shattered by this
stupendous catastrophe. The sickly and unnatural hue of the rushing
vapors that tore and slatted the planes, confused his senses; and,
added to this, a stifling, numbing gas seemed diffused through the
inchoate void. He tried to speak, but could not. Against the girl's
cheek he pressed his own. Hers was cold!
In vain he struggled to cry out. Even had his parched tongue been able
to voice a sound, the howling tempest they themselves were creating as
they fell, would have whipped the shout away and drowned it in the
gloom.
In Stern's ears roared a droning as of a billion hornets. He felt a
vast, tremendous lassitude. Inside his head it seemed as though a
huge, merciless pressure were grinding at his very brain. His breath
came only slowly and with great difficulty.
"My God!" he panted. "Oh, for a little fuel! Oh, for a chance--a
chance to fight--for life!"
But chance there was none, now. Before his eyes there seemed to
darken, to dazzle, a strange and moving curtain. Through it, piercing
it with a supreme effort of the will, he caught dim sight of the dial
of the chronometer. Subconsciously he noted that it marked 11.25.
How long had they been falling? In vain his wavering intelligence
battered at the problem. Now, as in a delirium, he fancied it had been
only minutes; then it seemed hours. Like an insane man he laughed--he
tried to scream--he raved. And only the stout straps that had held
them both prevented him from leaping free of the hurtling machine.
"Crack!"
A lashing had given way! Part of the left hand plane had broken loose.
Drunkenly, whirling head over like an albatross shot in mid-air, the
Pauillac plunged.
It righted, swerved, shot far ahead, then once again somersaulted.
Stern had disjointed, crazy thoughts of air-pressure, condensation and
compression, resistance, abstruse formulae. To him it seemed that some
gigantic problem in stress-calculation were being hurled at him, to
solve--it seemed that, blind, deaf, dumb, some sinister and ghoul-like
demon were flailing him until he answered--and that he could not
answer!
He had a dim realization of straining madly at his straps till the
veins started big and swollen in his hammering brows. Then
consciousness lapsed.
Lapsed, yet came again--and with it pain. An awful pain in the
ear-drums, that roared and crackled without cease.
Breath! He was fighting for breath!
It was a nightmare--a horrible dream of darkness and a mighty booming
wind--a dream of stifling vapors and an endless void that sucked them
down, down, down, eternally!
Delusions came, and mocking visions of safety. Both hands flung out as
though to clutch the roaring gale, he fought the intangible.
Again he lost all knowledge.
And once again--how long after, how could he know?--he came to some
partial realization of tortured existence.
In one of the mad downward rushes--rushes which ended in a long spiral
slant--his staring, bloodshot eyes that sought to pierce the murk,
seemed to behold a glimmer, a dull gleam of light.
The engineer screamed imprecations, mingled with wild, demoniac
laughter.
"Another hallucination!" was his thought. "But if it's not--if it's
Hell--then welcome, Hell! Welcome even that, for a chance to stop!"
A sweep of the Pauillac hid the light from view. Even that faintest
ray vanished. But--what? It came again! Much nearer now, and brighter!
And--another gleam! Another still! Three of them--and they were
real!
With a tremendous effort, Stern fixed his fevered eyes upon the
lights.
Up, up at a tremendous rate they seemed speeding. Blue and ghastly
through the dense vapors, spinning in giddy gyrations, as the machine
wheeled, catapulted and slid from one long slant to another, their
relative positions still remained fixed.
And, with a final flicker of intelligence, Stern knew they were no
figment of his brain.
"Lights, Beatrice! Lights, lights, real lights!" he sought to scream.
But even as he fought to shake her from the swoon that wrapped her
senses, his own last fragment of strength deserted him.
He had one final sense impression of a swift upshooting of the lights,
a sudden brightening of those three radiant points.
Then came a sudden gleam as though of waters, black and still.
A gleam, blue and uncanny, across the inky surface of some vast,
mysterious, hidden sea.
Up rushed the lights at him; up rushed the sea of jetty black!
Stern shouted some wild, incoherent thing.
Crash!
A shock! A frightful impact, swift, sudden, annihilating!
Then in a mad and lashing struggle, all knowledge and all feeling
vanished utterly. And the blackness of oblivion received him into its
insensate bosom.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE WHITE BARBARIANS
Warmth, wetness, and a knowledge of great weakness--these,
joined with a singular lassitude, oppression of the lungs and stifling
of the breath, were Allan Stern's sensations when conscious life
returned.
Pain there was as well. His body felt sorely bruised and shaken. His
first thought, his intense yearning wonder for the girl's welfare and
his sickening fear lest she be dead, mingled with some attempt to
analyze his own suffering; to learn, if possible, what damage he had
taken in flesh and bone.
He tried to move, but found he could not. Even lying inert, as he now
found himself, so great was the exertion to breathe that only by a
fight could he keep the breath of life in his shaken frame.
He opened his eyes.
Light! Could it be? Light in that place?
Yes, the light was real, and it was shining directly in his face.
At first all that his disturbed, half-delirious vision could make out
was a confused bluish glare. But in a moment this resolved itself into
a smoking, blazing cresset. Stern could now distinctly see the metal
bands of the fire-basket in which it lay, as well as a supporting
staff, about five feet long, that seemed to vanish downward in the
gloom.
And, understanding nothing, filled with vague, half-insane
hallucinations and wild wonders, he tried to struggle upward with a
babbling cry:
"Beatrice! Oh, Beatrice--_where are you?_"
To his intense astonishment, a human hand, bluish in the strange
glare, laid itself upon his breast and pushed him down again.
Above him he saw a face, wrinkled, bearded and ghastly blue. And as he
struggled still he perceived by the unearthly light that a figure was
bending over him.
"A man!" he gulped. "Man! _Man!_ Oh, my God! At last--a man!"
He tried to raise himself upon his elbow, for his whole soul was
flooded with a sudden gratitude and love and joy in presence of that
long-sought goal. But instantly, as soon as his dazed senses could
convey the terrible impression to his brain, his joy was curdled into
blank astonishment and fear and grief.
For to his intense chagrin, strive as he might, he could move neither
hand nor foot!
During his unconsciousness, which had lasted he could not tell how
long, he had been securely bound. And now, awakening slowly, once
more, fighting his way up into consciousness, he found himself a
prisoner!
_A prisoner!_ With whom? Among what people--with what purpose? After
the long quest, the frightful hardships and the tremendous fall into
the abyss, a prisoner!
"Merciful God!" groaned Stern, and in his sudden anguish, strained
against the bonds, that drawn tight and fast, were already cutting
painfully into his swollen, water sodden flesh.
In vain did he struggle. Terrible thoughts that Beatrice, too, might
be subjected to this peril and humiliation branded themselves upon his
brain. He shouted wildly, calling her name, with all the force of his
spent lungs; but naught availed. There came no answer but the
shrouding fogs.
The strange man bent above him, peering from beneath wrinkled brows.
Stern heard a few words in a singular, guttural tone--words rendered
dull by the high compression of the air. What the words might be he
could not tell, yet their general sound seemed strangely familiar and
their command was indubitable.
But, still half-delirious, Stern tried again to stretch up his arms,
to greet this singular being, even as a sick man recovering from
etherization raves and half sees the nurses and doctors, yet dreams
w 
Darkness and Dawn / England, George Allan, 1877-1936