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
