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, commonplacely 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 Cañon 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 t
hey 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 spearhead 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 onetime 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 h
im 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.
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