Beforedaybreak 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 strangemilieu.
“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.
Stern'sweakness--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 aDanaus 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?Xminus 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 surpriseher, 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 besomethingleft.”
“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 wasa broad, fat, flint assegai-point!
Sterngazed 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 inthat,” 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, whatdoesn'tit 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,ifthis 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. Alwayshavegot 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 likethat?” 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 willshethink, 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 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, forxyears!”
“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 wearThe beauty of the morning. Silent, bare,Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lieOpen unto the fields and to the skyAll 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 steepIn 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!”
Noonfound 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'drathergo 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 thesexyears!” 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, andthatin 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? Andtheytalked 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.
“Mywork!” 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. Andnow--”
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 haveher?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 matternow?”
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!
Sickenedwith 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 heshouldn'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?”
“Iwouldlike 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'smorethan 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!”
Dayspassed, 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. “Andthis, 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 guessthatought 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 hadbeenthe 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 therapprochementbetween 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, “therewereothers, 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--?