Authors: George England
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!
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!
"
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.