Bright gleamed her gray eyes by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the robe, made colorful contrasts, barbarous, seductive.
Half hidden, the woman’s perfect body, beautiful as that of a wood-nymph or a pagan dryad, roused atavistic passions in the engineer.
He dared speak no other word for the moment, but bent beside the shattered chest again and fell to looking over the furs.
A polar-bear skin attracted his attention, and this he chose. Then, with it slung across his shoulder, he stood up.
“Come,” said he, steadying his voice with an effort; “come, we must be going now. Our light won’t hold out very much longer. We’ve got to find food and drink before the alcohol’s all gone; got to look out for practical affairs, whatever happens. Let’s be going.”
Fortune favored them.
In the wreck of a small fancy grocer’s booth down toward the end of the arcade, where the post-office had been, they came upon a stock of goods in glass jars.
All the tinned foods had long since perished, but the impermeable glass seemed to have preserved fruits and vegetables of the finer sort, and chipped beef and the like, in a state of perfect soundness.
Best of all, they discovered the remains of a case of mineral water. The case had crumbled to dust, but fourteen bottles of water were still intact.
“Pile three or four of these into my fur robe here,” directed Stern. “Now, a few of the other jars—that’s right. To-morrow we’ll come down and clean up the whole stock. But we’ve got enough for now.”
“We’d best be getting back up the stairs again,” said he. And so they started.
“Are you going to leave that fire burning?” asked the girl, as they passed the middle of the arcade.
“Yes. It can’t do any harm. Nothing to catch here; only old metal and cement. Besides, it would take too much time and labor to put it out.”
Thus they abandoned the gruesome place and began the long, exhausting climb.
It must have taken them an hour and a half at least to reach their eerie. Both found their strength taxed to the utmost.
Before they were much more than halfway up, the ultimate drop of alcohol had been burned.
The last few hundred feet had to be made by slow, laborious feeling, aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some break in the walls.
At length, however—for all things have an end—breathless and spent, they found their refuge. And soon after that, clad in their savage robes, they supped.
Allan Stern, consulting engineer, and Beatrice Kendrick stenographer, now king and queen of the whole wide world domain (as they feared), sat together by a little blaze of punky wood fragments that flickered on the eroded floor.
They ate with their fingers and drank out of the bottles, sans apology. Strange were their speculations, their wonderings, their plans—now discussed specifically, now half-voiced by a mere word that thrilled them both with sudden, poignant emotion.
An so an hour passed, and the night deepened toward the birth of another day. The fire burned low and died, for they had little to replenish it with.
Down sank the moon, her pale light dimming as she went, her faint illumination wanly creeping across the disordered, wrack-strewn floor.
And at length Stern, in the outer office, Beatrice in the other, they wrapped themselves within their furs and laid them down to sleep.
Despite the age-long trance from which they both had but so recently emerged, a strange lassitude weighed on them.
Yet long after Beatrice had lost herself in dreams, Stern lay and thought strange thoughts, yearning and eager thoughts, there m the impenetrable gloom.
CHAPTER VII. THE OUTER WORLD
BEFORE daybreak the engineer was up again, and active. Now that he faced the light of morning, with a thousand difficult problems closing in on every hand, he put aside his softer moods, his visions and desires, and—like the scientific man he was—addressed himself to the urgent matters in hand.
“The girl’s safe enough alone, here, for a while,” thought he, looking in upon her where she lay, calm as a child, folded within the clinging masses of the tiger-skin.
“I must be out and away for two or three hours, at the very least. I hope she’ll sleep till I get back. If not—what then?”
He thought a moment; then, coming over to the charred remnants of last night’s fire, chose a bit of burnt wood. With this he scrawled in large, rough letters on a fairly smooth stretch of the walclass="underline"
“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.