The scene at the Aquitaine was one of the utmost panic and confusion. Only a little way to the north the firemen had been blowing up buildings in another futile effort to check the fire which would not be checked, and the dynamiting, coupled with the close approach of the fire itself, had demoralized most of the hotel attendants. Almost all the guests had long since taken their belongings and departed. Porters, waiters, and clerks alike were engaged in collecting whatever in the building could be moved and carrying it to trucks which were backed along the curb to receive the property and bear it to a place of safety.

No one was at the desk; Smith found his own key. The elevator was piled full of salvaged furniture and curtains, and he walked up to his room on the fifth floor. There he collected his belongings and returned to the office. Thinking to himself that he would defer paying his bill until there was some one in a mental condition capable of receipting it, he went forth into the street, suitcase in hand.

"Where now?" he thought. The answer was not difficult. There was only one place where he wanted to go, and he had promised to go there.

To Deerfield Street, then, he went. There he found two anxious women whose questions he answered as best he could, and whom, after an hour's rest, he left, having promised that he would warn them if by any chance the conflagration turned in their direction. Warmed at heart, and much refreshed by the luncheon they had insisted on his taking, he left the Maitlands, and turned once again toward the path of the fire.

It had been nearly thirty hours since he had slept; and he found his eyes hot and dry and heavy in his head. Whether it was the smoke he had breathed, or the steady strain of the long night, or the lack of sleep and sheer fatigue, he did not know; but he found developing in his brain a strange, numb sense of remoteness, a want of coordination and identity between it and his body. In remembering this day, he was always afterwards to associate it with a smell of stale smoke in his nostrils and a vague dimness of sight. Even the thousand vivid incidents of the great conflagration were always to come back to him with this haunting sense of unreality, the feeling that it was not actually he but some one else who had witnessed and shared and lived through them—some one not alien, yet not wholly kin to himself. The gray and ochre smoke haze, and the diffused heat, and the sense of intimate danger long faced and hence grown hardly noted, clouded and filmed the facts, the colors, and the emotions of this day in the dim light of a dream.

They were wild facts, too; great deeds; and glorious colors, which would have been worth a clearer recollection. The color of the midnight sky, its velvet blackness shot with crimson gleams. The waves of smoke, now like densest ink pouring up from some unseen funereal funnel—now blindingly white, flung like the plume of Navarre above the tumult of the fray. The tall, cold buildings standing almost defiantly in the winter air, lifting their immobile fronts to face the onrush—and the same buildings a little later, when the flames had passed, leaving only gnawed skeletons and heaped and smoldering ruins in their wake. The grim and terrible anguish of twisted steel girders that lay writhen like petrified snakes among the ashes, or lifted their tortured length to reach some last hold on sanity at the wall which they had once helped maintain. Great heaps and piles of ashes, and half-consumed beams and crushed and broken brick, lying in smoldering humility, punctuated by stray relics and remnants of an unburned world—pieces of furniture, by some miracle left unharmed, or bric-a-brac of some more than usual inanity. Fireproof buildings through which the flood of destruction had passed, burning all that was burnable, and leaving the gaunt frames naked in the air, their exteriors perhaps scorched and defaced, but with their vast strength unshaken and undismayed. The thousand sounds and odors of the fearful night and of the slow dawn; the fire whistles shrilling through the wintry air, the gongs on truck and cart adding their clangor to the mad mellay, the shouts of men, the bawling of orders, the screams of frightened women, the uncanny sound of the mewing of an imprisoned cat in a window, whose instinct told it what its sense could not. The hammer of horses' hoofs on the stones of the street, with the sparks flung out to left and right beneath the flying feet; the steady chug-chug of the tireless engines with their fireboxes seething white-hot in the effort to hold the steam to its figure on the gauge. The far shock and the dull boom of dynamiting that was like the rumor of a distant heavy cannonade. Then the men, the leagued enemies against this arch conspirator—the thousand heroisms of these men who contended without fear against unbeatable odds; the stark, cold bravery that is a thing outside of human experience save in some sublimated essence such as this—men who spanned impossible gaps, bore impossible weights, scaled unscalable heights, died incredibly heroic and unutterably tragic deaths, and who did these preposterous things as simply and unquestioningly as a child falling to sleep. The bitter humors of this prank of fate—the things shattered which should have been whole, the things preserved which no hand but that of error had ever created. The ruthless mixture of the farcical and the pathetic; the fire horse struck to earth by a falling wall, screaming in anguish—and the coal heaver, carrying hurriedly toward safety a gilt and white ormolu clock. And behind all this the swaying, eddying, swirling, but inexorably onward movement of the Fire, and the muffled drum beat that served it for a pulse; behind all this the Fire's voice, the low, purring, sinister roar which never ceased and which was deeper than the sound of any surges on any shore; behind all this the valley of the shadow, with its grim processional of life and fear and death, a processional spurred and driven to a speed which never slackened, under the wind which for twenty hours had hardly tired, but had blown so steadfastly that to the people of the city it seemed to be what in reality it must have been—the breath of God out of the north.



CHAPTER XXIII

It was nearly nine o'clock in the evening when there came a ring at the Maitlands' doorbell. It had not been the easiest waiting in the world, that of the two women in the half-deserted apartment building through the long night and longer day. Helen would have preferred to go out of doors, feeling that there she could see and follow, at a distance at least, the progress of the conflagration; but Mrs. Maitland in a strange and unlooked-for obstinacy absolutely declined to leave the apartment or to permit her daughter to do so.

"I don't know anything about fires, but if this one starts in this direction I want to be here, and not away somewhere," she repeated to her daughter's urging; nor could she be induced to take any other viewpoint. So in their rooms they remained, and their only news from without was transmitted to them from the servants and visitors to the building. The telephone was out of commission, and Helen felt as though she were marooned in full sight of a civilization with which she could not communicate and which afforded her no benefits.

It had been past one o'clock in the morning when Smith had brought her home from the fire. Long after that the excitement had kept her awake; but she had fallen asleep at last, and wakened again only when it was broad day. It was, however, to be one of the longest days in her calendar, and by noon she felt as though she had been waiting for years in expectation of she did not know what. She tried to read, but found it impossible to fix her attention on the book. She began to run over some operatic scores on the piano, but the sound seemed to ring so oddly that she gave up this also. Between her mother and herself conversation languished—and thus the slow hours wore on. She could not but think how infinitely more desirable it was to be out in the streets, even though that might mean a certain amount of physical danger, than to remain in unsatisfactory helplessness thus. If it be woman's heritage to wait, that heritage certainly did not appeal to Helen on this occasion. It is doubtful if it ever appeals to any one.

Only two incidents of relief had marked the passage of the dragging hours. The first was when Smith had called, in the morning, to leave his suitcase and to promise to return in case the fire should come dangerously near; the second was a visit from Mr. Silas Osgood. This latter call occurred in the middle of the afternoon, when the suspense of doing nothing at all had become almost intolerable and the nerves of both women had come almost to the snapping point, and they both consequently greeted him with even more than their usual affection.

"I'm so glad you've come, Uncle Silas, I can hardly speak!" Helen said; and her mother's welcome, while somewhat less extreme in expression, was equally sincere.

"I tried to get you on the telephone, but I couldn't, so I thought I'd better come and see how you were getting on," Mr. Osgood explained. "I'm glad you're all right. This is a fearful thing, a terrible business! Nobody knows where it may end."

"Tell us about it—everything," the girl demanded. "We have really heard nothing all day. What we have heard has been chiefly what we could learn from the servants, and they understand so little of what is actually happening."

"I have been out near the Public Gardens," said her uncle; "and though I couldn't see much, I probably could see almost as much as though I had been a good deal nearer. On the whole, things seem very favorable. I would not go so far as to say that the end is in sight; but in a certain sense the fire is under control, and I believe that the worst is over at last."

"How far does it extend now?"

"Well, they have managed to prevent its getting across Tremont Street; in fact, they have held it on both east and west. You see, most of the railroad yards below the South Station were cleared in time, and that left little or no fuel on the east side. The fire now, instead of having a clean sweep from the Common to the Channel, has a path barely half that width. It is now as far south as Oak Street, and Hollis Street west of that."

"Dear me! Has the good old Hollis Theater gone, then?"

"I don't see how it could very well have escaped. But it wasn't a very attractive theater, though, anyway. Why do you ask about it? They have needed a new building there for a long time."

"Yes—but some of the happiest evenings I have ever had were there. It isn't the upholstery of the seats or the mural decorations or what the theater looks like, but what you hear there. Don't you think that a theater gets to retain some of its traditions and its greatest associations? It sounds as though I were an old woman; but every time I go there, I seem to feel that the theater remembers, just as I do, the thrills that its walls have known."

"Would you rather it had been left to be torn down, then?" inquired her uncle, with a smile.

"Well, possibly not. That would be worse than this. Perhaps it is better to 'give her to the God of Storms,' after all."

"Perhaps," agreed Mr. Osgood, gently.

For a half an hour longer they talked, and he told them as much as he knew of what already had been destroyed, and what the final reckoning would unclose. He spoke as cheerfully as he could, but Helen, watching him closely, saw that back of this there was a profound sadness.

"Is it so very terrible, Uncle Silas?" she asked at last, laying her hand affectionately on his sleeve.

"Very. It is as bad as it could be, my child," he answered. "Bad for Boston—bad for us all. I have been through this sort of calamity before; but that was many years ago. I did not mind it so much when I was a young man. It is different now."

"But surely the city can survive it, can it not?"

"Yes—the property loss, no doubt; and I am glad to say that very few lives have been lost. But it is a fearful catastrophe. The city is crippled—shaken to its very heart! Think of the hundreds of families driven into the streets, the businesses wrecked, the uncountable number of men left without employment, even if the fire cease at once!"

A new idea had come to Helen.

"What difference will it make to Silas Osgood and Company?" she asked, with some hesitation. "It won't injure your firm, will it?"

"Oh, to a certain extent, temporarily, but nothing to be troubled about. Of course the local agent does not have to pay any part of his companies' losses. But—" he paused.

"But what?" asked the girl.

"Well, I have been in the business so long, my dear, that I have come to look at this sort of thing more from the standpoint of my companies than my own. I am ashamed—yes, sorry and ashamed—to have my city hurt my companies so sorely."

"But you couldn't have helped it—it isn't your fault," said Mrs. Maitland, somewhat mystified, but guessing a little of what he felt.

"No," said Mr. Osgood, slowly; "I couldn't have helped it. But if it had to happen in Boston, I'm sorry it didn't wait until I was through."

"Then I hope it would be never!" Helen said, a little incoherently; but the point was plain.

"On the business side there is only one feature that cheers me," continued Mr. Osgood, "and that is the fact that my old friend James Wintermuth and his company, the Guardian of New York, are practically out of it all."

"How do you mean—out of it?" Helen's mother asked.

"You see, the Guardian, when it had to leave my office, lost all its local business. A good deal of it was naturally in this very part of the city which is burning. They undoubtedly have some term lines still in force,—policies written for three or five years,—but not many. They will escape with a very light loss indeed—whereas two years ago this conflagration would have involved them for an amount such as not many companies would care to meet."

"Then there must be other companies now who will lose more in this fire than they can pay?"

"Without a doubt. There has never been a fire of this magnitude that has not absolutely ruined many of the smaller companies. It takes either a very strong or a very conservative insurance company to weather a great conflagration. After each of our big city fires in this country many and many a company has found that after it paid its losses there would be nothing left to carry it to further existence—capital and surplus were both wiped out. And it must be said to their credit that most of them, at a time like this, pay every cent they owe, even if they have to go out of business directly afterwards."

"But if they haven't enough money to pay their losses? Suppose their capital and surplus isn't sufficient?"

"Then they either fail, and the receiver pays what he can to each claimant, or else they call upon their stockholders—assess them. Once in a while you will find a company refusing to pay, on the ground that so great a calamity is an act of God, which no indemnity was ever designed or intended to cover. Quite a few foreign companies took this stand after the San Francisco earthquake-fire; but the leading companies, American and foreign, paid dollar for dollar. The smaller fry tried to compromise a bit; but most of them eventually made pretty fair settlements, in the main. We'll see what they'll do in Boston."

"After the fire is out."

"Yes; and I really must go now, for I'm very anxious to see how they're handling it."

"It was very good of you to come."

"I'll come again, if there is anything of consequence to report. I'm certain you'll be all right here. You haven't worried too much, have you?"

"Well, the waiting has been pretty bad," the girl confessed.

"Then don't worry any more, either of you, for if there should be the slightest danger, I'll come back at once."

Helen hesitated a moment.

"Mr. Smith promised to come and 'save us,' if we needed saving," she said, with the merest trace of a flush.

"Ah," replied her uncle, slowly. "Then I think we may safely leave your rescue to him. I will come as a reporter only. Good-by."

From the time of his departure there had been no visitor from the outside world until Smith's ring came as the clock made ready to strike nine. Helen herself opened the door, as the maid had gone downstairs for further enlightenment from the authorities below; and Miss Maitland found herself confronted by a man whom at first she hardly recognized, so hollow-eyed, so weary, and withal so grimy did he look. Her little start at seeing him was noted by Smith, and he guessed the reason for it.

"Don't be alarmed," he said, with a shadow of his old smile. "Under all the disguises it's really I. I know that I must look like a dissipated coal heaver, but I flatter myself that you'll be glad to see me, just the same, for I came to tell you that the danger is over—the fire is practically out."

"Then you must come in and let me get you something to eat," said the girl.

"Thank you very much, but I don't think I will. Somehow I don't seem to feel very hungry. But I'm horribly sleepy. I don't believe I was ever so sleepy in my life. So good-night."

But she stood with her back to the door.

"Where did you intend to go?" she demanded. "The hotels that are not burned are probably filled to the brim. Besides, your clothes are here. You can't go away. You must stay here."

"That's awfully kind of you, to offer to take me in," the other rejoined; "but you cannot house a disreputable chimney sweep. Besides—"

But she did not give him any opportunity to complete the sentence.

"Don't be absurd; you're usually quite sensible. Mother and I had it all decided hours ago. You're to stay with us. Your room is all ready for you—and your bath," she added.

He acknowledged the touch with an appreciative but weary smile.

"Well, then, if you really don't mind, I'll take you up," he said.

"Will you have supper first?"

"Thanks, no—nothing but sleep. I'm ashamed of being so fearfully tired—you must excuse me. But I don't believe any man can stay awake indefinitely."

"No, I don't believe any man can," Helen agreed.

It was ten o'clock the next day when Smith opened his eyes once more upon a normal world. The sun was shining brightly, but it was some moments before he could assure himself that he was actually awake again. The twelve hours' sleep, during which apparently not one muscle had he stirred, had gone far to repair the ravages of thirty-six hours' steady wakefulness, and a cold bath did the rest. The two ladies were found to be in the dining room, still absorbed in the morning edition of a newspaper whose building had escaped the sweep of the conflagration.

"Why, it's only half-past ten!" was Helen's greeting. "I didn't expect you so early. Mother suggested that we wait breakfast for you; but I said it would be much closer your wishes if we waited lunch instead."

"Well, I think I must have condensed an enormous amount of sleep into the last twelve hours," said Smith; "for I feel as well as ever. Tell me what has happened—I see you have the papers."

"What is going to happen is also important—your breakfast," the girl responded. "Go over there, where you see that napkin sitting expectantly on its haunches, and Marie will be in directly."

"Thank you. I hope you won't be scandalized at my appetite. Is the fire entirely out?"

"Yes—practically. Here's the paper."

"That's very good of you. You'll pardon me if I just look at the headlines?"

"Of course." And for a few moments there was little conversation in the sunny dining room.

"And now will you do me a favor?" said Miss Maitland.

Smith looked at her; a long moment.

"I will do anything in the world for you," he said, "except one thing."

The girl flushed a little.

"I want you to take me out to the fire," she responded.

The other looked at her in surprise.

"Why, of course," he said. "I never thought of doing anything else. If my calculations are correct, it will take me exactly as long to finish those three pieces of toast as for you to get ready. Better wear old clothes—it may be pretty dirty."

Five minutes later they descended to the street.

"Why, it's been snowing!" said Smith, in surprise.

A light fall of snow covered sidewalk and lawns; there were few men this day with sufficient leisure to sweep away snow. As the two went northward through the bright morning, they walked for the most part in silence. All seemed very still, for there were no street cars moving, and most of the customary confusion of a city's streets was oddly hushed. Few people were abroad, at least along where their path lay; it was almost as though they were passing through a deserted city.

"Look at that," Smith said once. "I don't believe you were ever on this corner when you couldn't see a single person."

"Where do you suppose every one is?" asked Helen, curiously.

"At the ruins. Do you know, this reminds me of one of the strangest things I ever saw."

"What was that?" the girl inquired, turning toward him.

"The only absolutely deserted town in America—at least I think it must be the only one. I never heard any one speak of another. But I know this one exists, for I saw it myself."

"Where is it? I never heard of such a thing. It sounds like Herculaneum or some of those Assyrian cities where they are always digging up statues and tablets and things."

"But this isn't a buried town. It's a real town, built perhaps twenty or thirty years ago; and it's located out in northern Indiana. And a perfectly nice little town, with brick stores and a couple of paved streets and other advantages. Everything—except inhabitants. No one lives there."

"Why not? Is this really true?"

"True as gospel. I saw it myself. I walked through the deserted streets. And a rather uncanny feeling it gave me, too."

"Was it unhealthy? Why did the people leave?"

"I haven't the vaguest idea," said Smith; and as he answered he raised his arm to point eastward along the street they had that moment reached. Following the direction in which he was pointing, Helen saw a thin line of smoke rising feebly from a pile of debris upon the ground. Near by were similar piles, sullenly smoldering.

"There's where they stopped it," said Smith.

They walked quickly along until they came to the very corner on which the last ebbing wave of the sea of fire had turned. This corner was at the intersection of Shawmut Avenue with the railroad's right of way. Over the tracks at this point was a raised steel bridge, and to this they now directed their steps. At the end of the bridge they stopped. The bridge was elevated sufficiently so that they could see a considerable distance northward, and for some moments they stood and looked in silence at the sight which lay beyond them.

It was something which is only to be seen once in the course of an ordinary lifetime—the complete ruin of the integral part of a great city. With something too remote yet too bitterly real for any words gripping at her heart, Helen stood looking out over a scene such as she never could have imagined. Here was ruin incarnate, desolation supreme; this was the bitter tragedy of that which once was great turned suddenly into pitiful nothingness before her very eyes.

In the foreground, at their feet, lay the heaped debris of the bricks, timbers, and contents of a whole row of dynamited buildings—the sacrificed buildings which by their own destruction had checked the conflagration at the last. There they lay, still smoldering or blazing in some places, utterly still and lifeless in others, with stray beams and bits of cornice or of tin roofing, twisted into weird shapes, sticking out at odd angles. Here and there unconsumed and hardly damaged articles that had been contained in these buildings lay unheeded; for here where the flames had died, they had not destroyed everything combustible, as they had seemed to do almost everywhere else. On the west side of Shawmut Avenue, where the houses still stood intact, a few men were to be seen; these were the state militiamen in their fatigue uniforms, patrolling the ruins. Smith called Helen's attention to them.

"Why are they there?" she asked.

"To watch the vultures gathering for the feast. See! There goes one of them now—over there to the left."

Helen looked; skulking along in the shadow of a ruined wall was a shabby, rough-looking man who stole swiftly out of sight behind a pile of rubbish.

"One of the scavengers. They come almost automatically after every great disaster—fire, flood, battle, or pestilence. Ghouls, you understand, from heaven knows where. That man's great-grandfather probably robbed the dead grenadiers of the Legion of Honor at Waterloo."

"Thieves?" said the girl, in horror.

"Worse than thieves. Vandals, body-snatchers, murderers, if it came to that. The kind of man who'd cut the finger off a dying woman to get her wedding ring. Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, the militia are under orders to shoot them on sight, if caught in the act. But let's go a little farther on; I think we can get a better view from farther north."

"Wait," said his companion. "I am not ready to go—yet."

Smith heeded her voice, and for another unnoted interval they stood agaze upon their little eminence.

Far to the northward the scene of ruin stretched away. Almost as far as the eye could reach was only the shadow, the terrible and disfigured skeleton of what had been the city. Everywhere were smoldering piles with occasional tongues of sullen, orange flame and their myriad threads of smoke trailing upward in the still air like Indians' signal fires. Here was a brick building, apparently hardly touched or harmed, lifting its lonely height over its prostrate neighbors. Here a partly burned structure, gutted but still erect, stood like a grim, articulated skeleton, a gaunt scarecrow against the skyline. Everywhere were mounds and hollows, hills and valleys, so that the natural contour of the earth, unseen now these hundred years, once more appeared. And over it all, everywhere that the fire had wholly burned out, lay the heart-breaking beauty and whiteness of the snow, and of the ashes under the snow.

"How terribly white it is!" said Helen, in a low voice.

Smith only nodded. Feeling her mood, he left her to speak when she was ready, and presently she did so.

"Shall we go now?" she asked.

"Suppose we do. I want to show you, if I can—and to see myself—what is left of the shopping and hotel and theater district. There can't be much left."

They turned back in the way they had come, for Tremont Street above this point was no thoroughfare. By a somewhat circuitous route at last they reached the corner of the Common; and here, at the edge of the great throng of curious onlookers, they paused.

"There's where I didn't sleep last night," said Smith.

The Hotel Aquitaine, such as it was, stood gauntly staring at them from its dozens of empty windows. The building itself was intact, but every piece of inflammable material in its contents seemed to have been wiped out of existence as utterly as though made of tissue paper. With a little shudder Helen turned away, and they moved onward.

For all Smith's fire-line badge, they were not permitted to enter the patrolled district, and they could only join the throng which was circling about the outskirts. This was not a very inspiring nor even a very interesting thing, although the people for the most part were oddly silent, seeming to have been numbed by the extent of the disaster. Helen found before very long that she had seen enough.

"What a fearful crowd! I think I'd rather go where there aren't quite so many people," she told Smith.

"All right—wait until I see what happened to Jordan's store; then we'll go."

Five minutes later they were heading back southward in the direction of their bridge.

"It is beyond words, isn't it?" observed Smith. "There is nothing at all adequate that a man can say when he is confronted by such a thing as this, and almost nothing that he can do."

"Isn't there something, though?" the girl asked. "There must be hundreds of people homeless, without food or money or anything! Cannot we do anything to help them?"

"No doubt," said the man. "Individually we could scarcely be of much assistance; but I fancy that the local charity organizations or the Red Cross would see that any contribution went where it would do the most good."

Only a few minutes later they found where one of these institutions had opened temporary headquarters in an old church.

"Let us go in," said Miss Maitland.

As they entered they saw that the church was filled with refugees, come in to escape the cold. They were most of them sitting in groups, talking eagerly to one another. Some were lying asleep, stretched out full length on the pews. A woman was going about, serving hot coffee and soup and bread. The refugees ate hungrily, but on the faces of almost all of them rested the same dispirited look of dazed wonder. Apparently they were chiefly foreigners, the majority Italians, and it was evident that they had lost everything they had possessed. Helen stood watching them with a sad heart from the back of the church, and Smith, looking at her, saw that her eyes were full of tears. He laid his hand gently on her arm. "Please don't," he said gravely. But he understood.

"But it seems so unfair for them to have lost everything," the girl said. "They had so little to lose."

She turned her face to his.

"There is no answer to that," he said; "but we can help them a little."

To the woman in charge they gave what they could afford to give, and turned toward home. It was nearly four o'clock, and Mrs. Maitland might be growing anxious about their safety. They walked forward in a silence which neither wished to break.

It was soon broken, however, by a chance occurrence. They were passing by an open street on the edge of the burned district. Across the street, under a none too steady wall, a woman whose distress had evidently touched the good nature of the militiaman patrolling the other end of the block was hunting about among heaps of debris, searching for things which might perhaps have been spared by the flames. On top of the house wall was a battered stone coping, which, as Smith and Helen paused, gave a sudden lurch and seemed about to fall. The woman, her head bent, saw nothing; but Smith, with a startled exclamation, started quickly forward.

"Look out there!" he called sharply. "Come away from that wall!"

The woman, with her back turned, paid no attention to the warning—probably did not even hear him. The coping, poised on the wall's edge, swayed perilously. If it fell, there would be one less of the indigent and helpless for the relief committees to support. With a half angry exclamation Smith sprang forward.

On his sleeve he felt the quick pressure of a hand. At the same moment the crouching woman, having finished her search, or perhaps moved by an instinct of danger, walked slowly on, and out from under the wall. The coping did not fall.

Smith turned to find the girl's fingers closed tight upon his arm, and in her eyes something he had never seen before. She stood still a moment, and when at last she withdrew her hand, she spoke in a voice so low that he could barely catch the words.

"Why did you do that?"

"She didn't see the coping," he said, as naturally as he could.

"It might have fallen—on you!"

"Yes," he said; "I suppose it might. But you see, it didn't."

"It might have killed you," she said, still in a low voice.

Smith turned abruptly, and looked at her.

"How much would you have cared, Helen?" he asked.

Even at this moment the trammels of her ancestry were on her; she made no answer.

"How much would you have cared, dear?" he asked again, gently.

Then at last she raised her eyes, and met his fairly.

"More than anything—more than everything in the world," she said.

The early gray February twilight was closing in upon them when they left the lifted bridge. They had been there long, yet as they turned to go, Helen gave one backward look. There, spread away across the stricken plain, she saw for the last time the prostrate thing which yesterday had been the living city; and over it, like the winding linen of a shroud, lay the white ashes in the snow.



CHAPTER XXIV

On the top floor of the Salamander office in William Street a man stood silent before a map desk on which was laid an open map of the city of Boston. It was late in the afternoon, and the level rays of the declining sun came in redly at the window. The man standing at the desk did not notice them; he was looking stolidly from map to newspaper, from newspaper to map, as from the hysterical and conflicting accounts of the conflagration he tried to measure the extent of the calamity.

The morning papers had told but little, since they had gone to press when the fire was only a few hours old; and as the day was Sunday, and a holiday, there had been available only a few of the usual flock of evening sheets which begin to appear in New York shortly after breakfast. With one of these by his elbow, in the fading light of the late February day, F. Mills O'Connor stood, stonily and with hard eyes, gazing at ruin.

He was alone in the office, since the one other person who had been with him had, under instructions, departed. This was George McGee, the Salamander's map clerk for New England. There was no reason whatever why George should have visited William Street on a Sunday; nevertheless Mr. O'Connor, on arriving, had found him standing aimlessly and undecided in front of the door.

"What do you want here?" he had said to George, coldly.

"Nothing. That is, I came over from Brooklyn to see if any one wanted anything. I thought maybe somebody would be down, and they'd need some one to help take off the lines, sir."

"Well, I don't need any help. You can go," said the other.

"I didn't know. We've got a lot of business in that part of Boston, sir. I know where all the dailies are filed. You'll need me if you're going to go over the lines, sir."

O'Connor considered.

"Well, come up, then," he said ungraciously. "We'll have to walk up; there's no steam on."

It was then three o'clock. At not later than a quarter to four Mr. O'Connor had definitely determined that unless the report of the conflagration's extent had been exaggerated beyond all human connection with the facts, the Salamander had sustained a loss in Boston which was considerably greater than its resources would permit it to pay. In other words, if the printed account were even remotely true, the Salamander was, as the phrase has it, insolvent. To put it even more shortly, the company was ruined. Facing this fact and its string of entailed consequences, the man most directly interested was silent so long that his youthful assistant became nervous.

"Pretty bad loss, ain't it?" he asked sympathetically.

O'Connor looked at him unseeingly. In his busy mind he was running through an imaginary calculation. It was somewhat as follows: Salamander's net liability in the section of Boston presumably destroyed, $600,000—Salamander's net surplus available for payment of losses, $400,000. Inevitably the problem ended: Salamander's impairment of capital, $200,000. And the fire was still burning. Boston could be rebuilt, but could the Salamander?

He turned on the clerk beside him with the savage and melodramatic gesture of an irritated musical comedy star, and the boy recoiled before him.

"That's all. You can go home," he said curtly.

Two minutes later he was left alone in the silent office.

At the best of times there was in the nature of Mr. Edward Eggleston Murch not overmuch genuine urbanity. Urbanity of the surface he had, of course; he called on it at need in very much the same way that he called on his stenographer. But of true courtesy or consideration Mr. Murch's makeup was singularly and flawlessly free. On the contrary he could, on occasion, summon to his face a congealment and to his eye a steely gleam which nobody admired but which all respected. Ordinarily this was either for his inferiors, or for those unfortunates who had come to cross purposes with him, or for those who had made blunders costly to him that his most glacial manner was reserved; but every one about the Salamander office knew of it, either by hearsay or by actual experience. Mr. O'Connor was removed from all danger of running counter to the Salamander's leading stockholder, so long as the company continued to make money. But what might now happen, Mr. O'Connor did not care to consider—and yet the topic engrossed his attention so deeply that darkness surprised him still adrift on the waters of this sea of doubt.

Not until the swift winter nightfall recalled him to himself did he remember the world around him; and when at last he groped his way down the long flights of dusky stairs to the street, his was the slow and inelastic step of a beaten man.

Mr. Murch had spent the holiday and the week-end at the country place of a fellow financier. To this retired spot news penetrated with decorum and conservatism. One was in no danger, at Holmdale, of acting on premature information, for all information which reached this sequestered Westchester chateau did so in the most leisurely and placid manner. For this very reason Mr. Murch shunned Holmdale and resorted to many a subterfuge to avoid the acceptance of divers invitations to sojourn beneath the medieval roof of its host, who happened to be a man whom even Mr. Murch hesitated to offend. In the present case, when on returning to New York early Monday morning he learned that one of the most terrible losses in fire insurance annals had occurred without his knowledge, it did not tend to sweeten his temper.

He did not go to his own office, but with a grim face started directly for the building of the Salamander. Once within its portals he immediately entered Mr. O'Connor's room. Mr. O'Connor was seated at his desk, with a pile of daily reports before him.

"How much do we lose in Boston?" the visitor demanded.

The President of the Salamander had been in the building during most of the past twenty-four hours, taking off the lines in the burned district on a special bordereau. Neither the Osgood office nor his special agent could be reached on the long distance telephone; and the newspaper accounts, even thus long after the fire, were still painfully vague and somewhat rhetorically hysterical. They talked much of the "devouring element," and the word "lurid" frequently occurred; but no reporter had been sufficiently practical to bound the burned district or to state specifically what buildings had or had not been spared. Still, they told enough. To the meanest intelligence it was patent that a tremendous catastrophe had taken place, that most of the section from School Street south to the railroad was leveled, and virtually everything therein was totally destroyed—except the fireproof buildings, which were still standing, scorched and shaken, stripped clean of combustible contents, but not fatally damaged.

O'Connor had the list in his hand. In his heart now was the calm absence of feeling which marks the man who has abandoned hope.

"I should estimate our net liability in the burned district at about $700,000," he said unemotionally.

Mr. Murch leaned forward in his chair.

"And the net surplus of the company is—?" he asked menacingly.

"You know what it is. It's half a million, roughly."

"Well, will you tell me what in the devil you mean by putting this company in a position to lose more money than it has clear?"

O'Connor, beyond caring now, actually smiled.

"Fortunes of war, Mr. Murch. You wanted a leading position in Boston, if you'll remember. I gave it to you."

"I didn't want any such position as my present one," rejoined Mr. Murch, in frigid tones.

"I didn't either, if you come to that," retorted O'Connor, promptly.

The financier's irritation was increased by this unexpectedly reckless attitude on the part of the man who should, he felt, be abased in sackcloth before him. He regarded the other with surprise, through his indignation.

"You take this remarkably coolly, I should say," he remarked.

"There's no use in getting excited—the eggs are smashed now. But just the same," returned O'Connor, with a flash of spirit, "I'm just as sore about this as if I owned every dollar of Salamander stock there is on the books."

The mention of the unit of currency reminded his companion of something else.

"What do you suppose the market is doing?" he said.

"I haven't the slightest idea," replied the other.

Murch lifted the receiver from the telephone at his elbow.

"Hello: give me Broad nine nine seven six. Is this Atwater and Jenkins? Give me Mr. Atwater—this is Mr. Murch speaking. That you, Billy? How's the market?"

He replaced the receiver with a snap.

"Everything off at the opening. Bad slump in Maryland Traction and P. N. T."

"It ought to go off some more when the fire companies in general start liquidating. There will have to be a big unloading to raise the amount of cash necessary to pay those Boston losses. I suppose, though, the British companies will send the money across—they usually do, and that'll help a little. That's the worst of these fires—they hit you going and coming. Suppose we lose seven hundred thousand; well, before we get through we'll have to sell eight or nine hundred thousand dollars' worth of securities, at present prices, to pay it."

"How much cash have we on deposit?" Mr. Murch inquired.

O'Connor handed him the last weekly statement in silence. The fact that the other man had expressed no definite intention was to him encouraging. It might be that all was not over yet.

"Roughly, our surplus," commented the financier. "Now, how about our other assets? Stocks and miscellaneous securities, $1,500,000. Only it won't be a million and a half by the time we get rid of them. Probably a couple of hundred thousand less. Encouraging, isn't it? In other words, this fire is going to cost us $900,000 before we're through. And the present question is, how are we to get through?"

O'Connor looked him over with an appraising glance.

"Well, the Salamander has paid good dividends for years," he said. "Probably more than most companies would have thought it prudent to pay—they'd have put a larger amount into surplus to take care of such a smash as this. And I've made the company a better money-maker on the underwriting side than it's ever been before—you'll admit that, I think. There's no reason why we shouldn't go on. My suggestion would be to assess the stock."

He awaited the answer nervously, toying with a penholder, not daring to glance at the other man. He did not have to wait long.

"Not much!" said Mr. Murch, coldly. "I'm going to get out of this as fast as I can, and I'm going to stay out, you understand. No more fire insurance business for me. It's the only business I ever made a complete mess of. The Salamander would have done better if they had never issued a policy—if they had merely let me invest their money for them. Now the next question is, how to get out. You are an insurance man and supposed to be a competent one—possibly you can tell me how to set about it."

"Do you mean to liquidate the Salamander—close up the company?"

"Whatever one does to extricate himself from this kind of a hole. What's the usual method?"

"The usual method," replied O'Connor, his face somewhat flushed at the other man's tone, "is for the stockholders to authorize an assessment on their stock, and continue. That apparently does not appeal to you; and if I understand you correctly, you wish to terminate operations and wind up the company."

"Exactly so. You catch my meaning perfectly."

"There are two ways, then," the other said. "One is to let the risks in force expire, paying the losses as they occur; that will take about five years. The other, which is the usual way, is to pay some other company to assume the liability on all our outstanding policies—to reinsure us. We pay a lump sum, and the other company pays the losses as the risks expire, instead of our doing so."

"I see the idea. But what company would do that? And wouldn't it cost a small fortune to get any one to? And isn't this a bad time to approach any company with such a proposition?"

"No, I don't think so. Some company might be glad to get hold of a large amount of cash which it could use to pay its own Boston losses, and then it could pay the losses on our outstanding business, which would come along gradually for several years, out of its own normal profits in that time."

Mr. Murch looked at O'Connor with more respect.

"That sounds plausible. How much would it cost—in round numbers?"

"Our reinsurance reserve is about $1,500,000. I should think a company might be found to take it over for about two thirds of that sum. You see, we have a valuable agency plant and a good business, and although you want to get rid of it, it would be considered by most companies as well worth having. The company that took over our risks wouldn't let them expire; that company would hold on to them and secure them on renewal."

"How can this be arranged?" Mr. Murch inquired.

It was like cutting off his right hand to reply, O'Connor reflected, but he did so.

"Mr. Simeon Belknap usually manages such matters," he said. "Naturally he doesn't manage them for nothing; but he does the trick, and he's much the best man for it. He has probably engineered four fifths of the important reinsurance deals that have gone through in this country. No one has ever discovered why these things gravitate so unerringly to him—but they do. He will undoubtedly be pleased to find you a reinsurer for the Salamander."

He rose from his seat. It was perfectly evident that the game was over, and only the tumult and shouting remained to die away. But Mr. Murch was not entirely through.

"Suppose we ask Mr. Belknap to come and talk it over," he proposed.

O'Connor shook his head.

"Don't do it. It would hurt your market. If he were seen coming in here at this time, the whole Street would know we were in trouble and getting ready to quit. It would be better to make an appointment with him somewhere else."

"As you say," agreed Murch. "Please arrange one for us as soon as possible."

"All right," said the man whom this operation would leave bare of position and prestige alike. "I'll get him on the phone at once."

It was late that afternoon when a three-cornered interview took place in a down-town office somewhat outside the customary espionage of William Street. Most of the talking was done by Mr. Simeon Belknap, who talked crisply and to the point.

"The figures you have given me, Mr. Murch," he said, "indicate that the Salamander's capital is impaired to the probable extent of several hundred thousand dollars. I assume from your coming to me in this way, that you have decided that it is not worth while trying to put the company on its feet. Is that correct?"

"How much would it cost to keep going?" asked the financier, bluntly.

"I should think you would have to assess your stock one hundred and fifty dollars a share. Yes, it would take $750,000 to put the Salamander in a position to continue in business with proper resources."

"Eliminate that possibility from the discussion," said Mr. Murch, tersely; and O'Connor's last faint hope died.

"There remains, then, to find some company willing to take over your outstanding business. Your present reinsurance reserve is about $1,500,000. Your available assets over capital, including your real estate and everything, will bring approximately $1,800,000. Mr. O'Connor tells me you will pay in Boston about $700,000. This leaves you $1,100,000. For this sum, or perhaps a little less, you can probably reinsure all your business now in force, leaving you, let us say, with your capital stock intact and perhaps $100,000 over."

"In other words," said Mr. Murch, "we'll get for our liquidated stock about 120;—stock which sold last week at 210!"

"Precisely. If I can get you a reinsurer on the terms I mentioned. And I think you'll be getting out pretty well. You're impaired right now, you know."

Mr. Murch's financial vanity was touched.

"After all," he said, with an effort, "I probably averaged only 150 for mine. I've got pretty fair dividends on it for some time. That'll get me out pretty nearly even. Well, Mr. Belknap, if you can arrange to reinsure the Salamander on those terms, go ahead."

"The directors of the company—?" said Belknap, suggestively.

"I either own or control a majority of the stock," replied Mr. Murch.

There was no more to be said. The President and the majority stockholder of a corporation whose days were numbered walked back to the office with hardly a word spoken between them.

These were troublous times in William Street. The Salamander was not the only company which had been hard hit in Boston. Many of the smaller underwriting institutions were tottering very close to the wall. Already two failures were known; a dozen others were suspected. But in Boston, where the stricken city lay impatiently waiting, most of the companies already had men on the ground, adjusting and paying claims. The Boston insurance district had fortunately been left untouched, so that the local records were intact, making the work of the adjusters much simpler than it would otherwise have been.

Whence was the money to come—this golden flood which now began to pour from a hundred coffers into the empty pockets of the sufferers? The large companies, for the most part, were paying without discount or delay, and the line of claimants at the Boston offices and adjustment bureaus never ceased. In New York, in London, in Hartford, wherever insurance companies had their home offices, securities were being converted into cash to meet this tremendous demand. And the golden stream that flowed toward Boston knew no stop.

Of all the companies doing a general business in the East, the Guardian had come through least scathed, its withers unwrung. Thanks to the raiding of its Boston business by the Salamander, the Guardian's loss, which was confined wholly to three-year and five-year lines unexpired, would not much exceed, according to Smith's computation, $100,000, even if all its claims were adjusted as total.

Smith's first work on reaching the home office had been to compute the actual liability of the Guardian; his second was a similar calculation for a corporation in which he had no financial interest whatever. He was engaged in this task when Mr. Wintermuth entered the office.

"Ah, Richard," said his chief, "I'm glad to see you safe. An insurance man in a fire is like a duck in a pond; but I'm glad to see you here, just the same. A terrible calamity!—a really terrible calamity! How much did we get? Wagstaff estimated it at one hundred and forty thousand, but of course we can't tell how far the fire actually went."

"He was pretty close to my figures," said Smith, with a smile. "It was a terrible calamity, sir, but not so terrible as if the Guardian had a half a million loss—instead of $107,500 at the outside limit."

"Are those the figures you have there?" inquired the President, glancing at the list on his subordinate's desk.

"No. I sent that list with the daily reports to the loss department. This is another one—even more interesting on some accounts. This is a list of the lines we didn't get."

"Ah! You mean—?" said Mr. Wintermuth.

"These are the lines that we have lost since we went out of the Osgood office."

"Indeed! What is the total?" asked the other man, with interest.

"I haven't quite finished, but I should say it would come close to $350,000."

"Which I suppose the Salamander got. I don't like to rejoice in other men's misfortunes, Richard, but there is a certain element of justice in that," said the older man, gravely.

"What interests me is, how much more than that they got," Smith returned. "Don't forget that Cole is clever, but not the careful underwriter Mr. Osgood is, and that O'Connor was out to make a record for premium income. If the Salamander's loss up there is less than $600,000, I shall be surprised."

"Their surplus isn't as much as that, is it? That will impair them."

"On the first of January their surplus was a little less than half a million."

"Oh, well," Mr. Wintermuth returned, "I suppose they'll assess their stockholders. That man Murch will probably get up an underwriting syndicate to handle it."

"But suppose he doesn't. Suppose they decide to reinsure and quit. Murch has the reputation of being a bad loser," said Smith, slowly.

His chief looked at him.

"Let them reinsure, then. But how does that affect us?" he said.

"Why shouldn't we reinsure them?" said the Vice-President.

"What!" exclaimed Mr. Wintermuth. "What's that you say?"

"I say," returned Smith, "that the Salamander is far more likely to reinsure than to stand a heavy assessment. And we want that business of theirs. We have a little score to settle with the Salamander, sir."

"Yes, yes," admitted the President. "O'Connor has treated us very badly; still, it has worked out very fortunately for us. And at any rate," he added, "I do not believe in allowing personal animus to govern one's business acts or policy."

It was a sounding phrase, although not quite new.

"Neither do I," said Smith, promptly; "but this is more than an act of poetic justice. Of course there's a certain satisfaction in finding that one of the packages stolen from us contained a bomb which blew up the burglar—but how much more appropriate it would be if the same explosion hurled the rest of the stolen property into the hands of the original and rightful owners. And besides that, the Salamander business is well worth putting on our books—and there's a lot of it."

"Yes. Too much, in fact," said his chief. "Our resources are not sufficient to permit our taking on such a load."

"I admit that," replied the younger man. "We will have to increase our capital a half a million. And now's the time to get it. We can issue it at 200, which is rather less than the present stock is selling for, and the premium will take care of our surplus when we take on this new business. I believe our stockholders will back us up. While other companies are asking their stockholders for more money to pay their Boston losses, we are asking ours to put us in the first rank of underwriting institutions in the United States."

Mr. Wintermuth looked at the young man before him, a long, grave look.

"Richard," he said at last, "I am fond of you, and I suppose that having no son of my own to be proud of, I am proud of you, too. But sometimes you make me feel a hundred years old."

"You needn't," answered Smith, affectionately, "for you've taught me almost all I know. If I am a little more aggressive than I might be, perhaps you were too, at my age. The question is, what is to the best interest of the Guardian?"

"That is a question," said Mr. Wintermuth, "for the directors to decide."

"Of course," returned the other. "But I should be surprised if our directorate didn't take a broad and liberal view of it. Immediately following this conflagration, when so much insurance capital has been wiped out, there will be a need for more. We will need our share, for we're going to do a bigger business. Even if we don't take over the Salamander or some other company, we're going to swing a much heavier premium income this year than last."

"Well," said the President, "since you have brought up the question, I should fail in my duty to the company if I should let an opportunity for extending our business pass by without submitting the matter to the directors. If you find that the Salamander business is for sale, and they want us to make a bid for it, I will call a special meeting of the board and lay the facts before our friends."

It was not for some little time that there was any palpable result of the meeting, when secured, for neither Smith nor Mr. Simeon Belknap was a man to hurry a matter to the prejudice of his interests. Following his conference with O'Connor and Mr. Murch, Mr. Belknap spent parts of several days moving quietly and almost imperceptibly about on investigations of his own. It was not every company which had facilities for extending its premiums some three million dollars a year; and besides that, most of them were being kept so busy in Boston that they had no leisure to consider so large a proposition.

Both Smith and Mr. Wintermuth were by this time aware that Mr. Belknap was handling the Salamander's affairs, and the Vice-President kept on that gifted gentleman as close an espionage as he could contrive to keep. After observing him casually engage in conversation three prominent underwriting executives, any one of whom might be supposed to be in a position to take over the Salamander, Smith determined to take the bull by the horns. On the third day after the directors' meeting he took pains to meet Mr. Belknap and similarly to engage him in casual conversation.

When, a little later, they adjourned from the Club to Mr. Belknap's office, the matter was practically settled, subject to the ratification of the directorates of both companies.

The Boston conflagration was not quite two weeks a thing of the past when Mr. Belknap signified that he had succeeded in his task of securing on satisfactory terms a purchaser for the Salamander, and if the necessary executives of that company would be in Mr. Murch's office at two-thirty that afternoon, he would bring the contracts for signature.

Over the telephone Mr. Murch said: "All right. Bring them." To his secretary he said: "Ask Mr. O'Connor to be here at two-thirty this afternoon."

At two-thirty Mr. O'Connor appeared.

"Hello—glad to see you," said Mr. Murch, urbanely. Now that the matter was coming out with such a comparatively favorable color, he saw no reason to abandon the amenities. In the first flush of anger they had suffered somewhat, but that was all over.

"Good-day," returned O'Connor, shortly. He had been out on the Street for three days, trying to catch the scent of some foreign reinsurance company ignorant of his impending change, so that his fall might not seem too humiliatingly flat, when the news should be wired every agent of the Salamander to cease writing. He had met, however, with no success, so he cannot be blamed if his response to Mr. Murch was a trifle lacking in enthusiasm.

"You're prompt," proceeded that gentleman, ignoring his visitor's lack of cordiality. "I'm glad you're on time, for Mr. Belknap just telephoned that he was on his way here with the contracts and the representative of the company that's taking us over."

"Did he say what company it was?" inquired O'Connor, with the first gleam of interest he had shown.

"I don't believe I asked him. There seems to be a lot of secrecy about these deals, and I didn't care a hang, myself, anyway. He said it was a thoroughly responsible company, and our policyholders would be fully protected. They'll be here in a minute."

"I wonder what company it is," the other man said, reflectively, half to himself.

"You'll know in a moment, because, unless I'm wrong, the boy is bringing Belknap's card now."

The boy entered with the card in question.

"Ask them to come in," said Mr. Murch.

O'Connor stood looking out the window. His gaze wandered over the well-known roofs of the buildings along William Street, and a momentary pang shot through him to think that under those roofs to-morrow there would be no place for him, and that his venture was all to begin again. He no longer felt any sense of grievance, any animosity against Murch. He was merely wondering vaguely at Fate, and at this latest whim of hers. So deep was he in his reverie that he scarcely noticed the entrance of the expected callers until he heard a voice that recalled him to actualities.

"Mr. Murch, let me make you acquainted with Mr. Smith," Belknap was saying; and O'Connor turned sharply back from the window.

To Mr. Belknap's courteous greeting he gave little heed, but like a charmed canary before a cobra his look rested on the second man of the pair. This was a young man with level, gray eyes, who nodded slightly and cheerfully said:—

"How do you do, Mr. O'Connor."

No word said O'Connor; his eyes neither lowered nor turned aside their fascinated gaze. Each of the four men stood still, waiting for the little drama to end: a long minute.

"Here are the papers, Mr. Murch," said the intermediary, at last, turning to the financier.

"All right; let me look over them," said the other.

Five minutes later the Salamander had ceased to exist.



CHAPTER XXV

The March winds blustered over Boston, and the cold salt smell of the ocean was borne tempestuously in upon the shivering city. Chill and keen out of the northeast came the air that hinted not at all of spring, but urgently of winter. The people in the streets walked briskly, with no laggard steps; they were accustomed to this sort of untimely treatment from the New England climate, and they had no intention of being betrayed thereby into pondering over southern lands or sunny vineclad hillsides where summer always lingered. Boston might not be climatically Utopian, but there was at all events something virile, something manly and admirable about a sort of weather for which no other good word could be used.

Between the tall buildings in Kilby Street, where now for three weeks the current of the insurance world had been flowing with quickened, almost feverish pulse, the activity on this blustering day in middle March was undiminished. Of the hastily arranged adjustment offices which the magnitude of the conflagration had made necessary, nearly all had been given up, and the comparatively few uncompleted adjustments of losses were now being handled through the regular offices.

It had been a titanic task, that of adjusting fire losses extending in the aggregate to between one and two hundred millions of dollars—for there were some indications that the Boston property damage would reach the latter figure. But after three weeks of steady work, when the lines of claimants before the adjusters' doors had hardly slackened a moment, the worst was over. Three fourths of the claims had been settled; satisfactorily to all concerned by the larger and more responsible companies; on a basis of offered compromise by those institutions tottering on the brink of insolvency; dubiously, or with craven and flagrant unfairness by the stricken "wildcats," the irresponsible undergrounders of America and Europe. For every great fire unearths the fact that there are always companies who will gladly accept premiums,—often at surprisingly low rates,—although they are only mildly addicted to the payment of losses. And every conflagration also uncovers the fact that there are many penny-wise citizens who purchase this class of indemnity. A great fire cleans, as nothing else does, the fire insurance stage of all but the fittest.

From this calamity, the greatest which had ever visited the city, Boston had, after a timeless period of uncomprehending and demoralized helplessness, leaped anew into activity and life. From all over the country, almost from all over the world, the need of the stricken city was met by a magnificent and human response. A vast catastrophe becomes nearly worth while by virtue of the humanity it discovers. Food, clothing, money—all were donated with lavish hands, and aid was rushed to Boston by a hundred trains. In comparison with the area burned over, the number of people made homeless was not great; and in three weeks the city had somehow managed to drink up and absorb this surplus without leaving a sign.

Life had now begun to move more normally again; and already the city's gaze went forward toward what was to be, rather than backward at what had been. But in a certain Kilby Street office two men were talking, one of whom still looked somewhat gloomily back, while the other, with a smile of transcendent optimism, was engaged in the cosmic process of turning Boston's holocaust into a fiery but triumphant feather for his own cap.

"Has that draft come in yet, Benny?" he was demanding.

"Came this morning," answered Cole, a trifle sourly. "Here it is."

"Would you mind letting me have it? Thanks. This is the last one, isn't it? They're all here now?"

"Yes," said Cole, curtly; "this is the last."

"If you'll give me a large envelope, I'll take them with me, then," returned the first speaker. "With a golden touch like Midas of old will I go forth into the presence of my distinguished relation. Benny, you are a base soul with no instincts above the commercial. You do not appreciate the situation. We are rapidly approaching what is vulgarly termed the psychological moment. If you had any more feeling than a dying invertebrate, you would want to come along and witness the ceremony, which is entirely private and visitors admitted by card only."

"Thanks, but I don't care to," said Cole, shortly.

Since the change which came over the complexion of matters in his world, Cole was much less assured and less assertive than before. The receipt this morning of the Salamander's final and largest loss draft marked the last public connection between that company and the Osgood office. The Salamander had reinsured, and the news of its fall was abroad on the streets of Boston as in New York, the insurance talk of all the towns. O'Connor, temporarily at least, had disappeared, and no man knew what chasm had swallowed him up. So far as Osgood and Company were concerned, he and his company were both dead issues; and once more in the old office in the corner Mr. Osgood could be seen in his wonted place.

Immediately following the conflagration Mr. Osgood had quietly resumed his authority as active head of the firm; and the Guardian, having taken over the Salamander's unburned business, which was in reality its own, once more acknowledged as its Boston representatives Messrs. Silas Osgood and Company. Of course the separation rule of the Boston Board was still nominally in force; but with the legal decision pending there was no disposition on the part of any agency or of any company to force an action of any sort. In the face of a matter so great as the conflagration had been, the smaller things, the lesser animosities, were allowed to slip peacefully into forgotten limbo. In due time the separation rule, its chief protagonist discredited and gone none knew where, would be repealed, either under legal compulsion or without. When that day came, the Guardian would be back in the position it had always enjoyed until Mr. O'Connor played—and lost—his meteoric game.

In Mr. Cole's office, meanwhile, the small pile of checks and drafts was being counted over with scrupulous care by Mr. Wilkinson.

"They seem to be in order," he said. "Three hundred and fifty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents. Benny, a thought strikes me! Why should not an insurance broker get a commission on losses as well as premiums? It seems to me that that is a very reasonable idea—I wonder it has never occurred to anybody before."

"You get your commission when the line is rewritten, of course," Cole responded. "What more do you want?"

"Why, that's so; I hadn't thought of that. I presume that such an operation will be more or less lucrative—unless my sagacious though unwilling father-in-law executes his sometime threat."

"Oh, I don't believe even John M. Hurd would be such a jackal without benefit of clergy as to do that."

"Well, perhaps not. Do you think of anything else, Benny, before I depart?"

"Absolutely nothing. And for heaven's sake get out!—I'm busy, and you lend an atmosphere of inertia to the whole place."

"And yet," returned Mr. Wilkinson, suavely, rising, nevertheless,—"and yet this is, in the plebeian phrase of the world of trade, my busy day. To be sure I have other occasional days when I handle transactions that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; but I don't mind admitting to you that these usually take place in the last ineffable hour of slumber preceding the dawn. But to-day—to-day it is true! Benny, I will go to the length of buying you a drink, a short and frugal drink."

"At eleven A.M.? Not for me," responded Cole. "Run along."

"I go," rejoined the other, gracefully, and the door swung shut behind his debonaire retreat.

A few minutes later to the youth from South Framingham he spoke nonchalantly:—

"Mr. Hurd?"

The calm presumption of that rising inflection seemed to indicate the absence of all doubt as to whether Mr. Hurd would receive him. The South Framingham scion regarded him with bovine gaze.

"Yes, I guess he's in," he said dubiously.

"Then tell him, if you please, that Mr. Charles Wilkinson wishes to see him on a matter of important business." The sentence ended so incisively that South Framingham blinked. Any display of emotion more significant was not, perhaps, to be expected. The messenger and his message started vaguely toward the door of Mr. Hurd's private office, and for an awkward moment no sound came forth.

"He says to come in," said South Framingham, reappearing.

"With alacrity but dignity," said Charles to himself; and found himself in another moment in the presence of Mr. Hurd. The traction magnate did not rise. He laid the paper which he had been reading on the desk before him, and looked fixedly across it at the intruder.

"Good-morning, sir," said Mr. Wilkinson, cheerfully.

Mr. Hurd's response to this greeting could only be denominated a grunt, but his visitor had no desire to force an issue of cordiality, so, waiving the doubtful courtesy of this reply, he continued:—

"Mrs. Hurd is well, I trust?"

"Mrs. Hurd is quite well, thank you. Did you come here through any apprehension about her health?" inquired the gentleman at the desk, with some degree of asperity to be detected in his tone by one as well acquainted with him as was Charlie. "I understood from my clerk that you came on business."

"And so I did," said the unruffled Wilkinson, "although I always endeavor that business and courtesy shall not necessarily exclude one another."

The financier looked sharply at the young man; but he felt that he was scarcely in a position to take offense at such a commendable statement.

"My business," continued the visitor, "deals with one of the best single pieces of business you ever did for the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company."

"Is the loss finally closed up?" said Mr. Hurd, curtly.

His son-in-law stood dramatically before him; he slipped his left hand into the inner breast pocket where reposed the documents with which his coup was to be made.

"Mr. Hurd," he said impressively, "you permitted me to place the insurance on your trolley system because I convinced you that it ought to be insured. Do you recall what I said about the conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston? Well, I won't repeat it, but until I called it to your notice you had never given it serious consideration. And even after the schedule was placed, you said that another year you would not carry insurance. You may also recall that you withheld your consent to a certain marriage, which I proposed to contract with a member of your family, and which—"

"Stick to the matter in hand," suggested the traction magnate, tartly.

"I am doing so, because the point I want to make is this. On both these matters, if you'll pardon my saying so, you were equally wrong. You were afraid that as a son-in-law all my entries would be on the wrong side of your ledger. Well, I don't believe I'll overdraw my account with you for some little time, Mr. Hurd, for I hand you herewith—as we say to our stenographers—to the order of the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company, checks and drafts to the amount of three hundred and fifty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents, in payment of the loss on your Pemberton Street car barn and power house and a few minor items. Here they are, and, to use a colloquialism, I want to rub them in. Not to glorify my own acumen or to minimize yours,—you showed good judgment to insure your property,—but to prove to you that you made a mistake about me."

"A mistake?" said the other man.

"A colossal mistake. Your only objection to me as a son-in-law was on financial grounds. Show me, if you can, any young man you could have picked out as a husband for your daughter, who within a few months could have saved your company three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. No, Mr. Hurd, you've done me a very great injustice. And now, I'm going to ask two things of you."

"And what are they?" inquired Mr. Hurd.

"The first is your order for rewriting the schedule on the traction properties. We'll take up the second when we've finished that."

John M. Hurd gave a half hitch in his chair, and turned his face toward the window, the very casement out of which he had gazed on the day when the fate of Mr. Wilkinson's scheme was first decided. Thoughtfully he looked out and down the busy street. His visitor, by way of gently stimulating his reverie, laid the companies' loss drafts within an inch of his unmoving fingers. Unconsciously those fingers, which had through the long years acquired an inalienable tendency toward the acquisition of legal tender in whatever form proffered—those fingers slowly, almost automatically, but irrevocably, closed upon the little packet.

It seemed as though, from the contact, a soothing hint of balsam-laden pines, of comfort and satisfaction for the soul, must have proceeded from those oblong papers. Charlie, keenly watching, beheld the stony countenance in front of him, as if permeated by some ineffable warmth, stir and become human. The miracle of Galatea was worked in this face before the very gaze of him who had dispensed the beneficent influence. The grim lines around the mouth lost their inflexible rigor; and slowly, unwillingly, almost shamefacedly there stole into the hard old visage the hint, the wraith, the shadow of a smile.

Wise in his generation, Wilkinson left the work to the magic and sovereign forces now at play; he did not risk marring the alchemy by a single word. After a moment which seemed an hour he found himself once more confronted by the direct observation of his step-uncle.

"You can have your trolley schedule," said John M. Hurd. "You are certainly entitled to it. What else you want I dare say I can guess. . . . Suppose you bring Isabel up to Beacon Street this afternoon to take tea with her mother—and me."

If Mr. Wilkinson cut a pigeon wing in the outer office, it was only the scion of South Framingham whose amazement is recorded. John M. Hurd, still smiling faintly, sat reflectively eyeing the little pile of checks which his visitor had left, until at last he rang for his cashier.

"Endorse these and have them deposited immediately, Mr. Walsh," he said.

Meanwhile the telephone wires were buzzing under Mr. Wilkinson's energetic advertisement of the latest society note.

"Extry! Extry!" he announced to Isabel. "All about the reconciliation of trust magnate with beautiful though erring daughter! Extry! All about the soothing and emollient influence of a little packet of stamped paper! No, I've not gone suddenly insane, and I'll come home about four, for we are due for tea at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. John M. Hurd."

To Deerfield Street, also, the glad word presently went, to meet there the sincere congratulations of Miss Helen Maitland, who held the other end of the jubilant telephone.

"You'd better come, too, Helen. We'll stop for you. I really think it would be much smoother if you were along. And besides, Charlie says we ought to get father on record before a witness in case a conservative turn takes him again."

"I was rather expecting to have tea here," Miss Maitland confessed, after a moment's hesitancy. "Yes, Mr. Smith said he would probably come. Very well—I will bring him along, if you'd really like to have him, with great pleasure. You'll call for us, Isabel? Au revoir, then."

It was shortly after five o'clock when the Hurds' butler opened the front door to admit a company of four. These intruders, waiting no bidding and ignoring altogether the fact that one of their number had been forbidden the house, made their cheerful way, headed by Mrs. Wilkinson, into the drawing room, there to greet with effusive welcome a stern-faced, elderly lady, who met them with a broad smile, but who almost instantly, to her own infinite surprise and discomfiture, burst into tears. These rapidly abated, when there was heard a sound in the hall, a sound which the quick ears of Mr. Wilkinson distinguished at once.

"The lion comes!" he murmured in Isabel's ear; and an involuntary hush descended upon the company. Thud, thud, thud—the firm steps approached; the arras was drawn back by a deliberate hand; and into the drawing room, his manner as easy and composed as ever, came Mr. Hurd. Two steps he made inside the room, then stopped. His glance instantly comprehended the little company, and just for a moment the old, cold light shot into his eye. But it was only for a moment.

"My dear Isabel, I am very glad to see you home again."

The greeting which the financier would have extended to his other guests was lost forever in the impulsive rush which landed Mrs. Wilkinson in her father's arms. Any regret which may have lingered was banished in the shock of this impact; and it was a resigned parent who emerged from this embrace to resume his corner in the reunited world.

It remained for his son-in-law to pronounce the valedictory over the vanishing fragments of the family breach.

"Mr. Hurd, ever since the day you flung in my astounded face my character and attainments, depicted in simple but effective words of one syllable, I have felt that there was not only force, but a good deal of truth, in your pungent observations. As I remember telling you at the time, had I appreciated the disgraceful facts as you summed them up, I could only in justice to Isabel have joined my efforts to your own in endeavoring to prevent so fatal an alliance. But it was too late. And now that the thing is done, the child of Mr. Hurd, having inherited some of that gentleman's fixity of purpose and tenacity of idea, is still of the opinion—Isabel, even if I am wrong, please do not contradict me—that she needs the stimulus of my desultory presence to keep her en rapport with life. Isabel has come to find strangely piquant the sensation of uncertainty as to the approaching meal. She has come to feel that certainty in such a matter is a species of bourgeoisie. At all events we are now Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson; and however deeply we regret the lack of enthusiasm in that connection of my esteemed father-in-law, I can only suggest to him that, although probably no one in the world has as poor an opinion of me as he has, if he keeps that opinion to himself there is no reason why the world in general should ever learn the truth. Certainly it shall be my life work to prevent it; and maybe when in the years to come I am passing the plate in some far suburban tabernacle of worship, all will be forgotten. Helen, may I trouble you to hand me those sandwiches?"

Mr. Hurd emitted a dry chuckle.

"For the honor of the family, Charlie, I'll never tell," he said.

It was dark when at last Miss Maitland, under the escort of Smith, started homeward toward Deerfield Street. And even then, not so directly homeward lay their course as the hour might have warranted. By an impulse which neither resisted, their footsteps turned southeastward toward the place where they had first viewed the land of the fire's reaping. On the steel bridge over the railroad tracks they found themselves at last.

"We didn't really intend to come here, did we?" asked the girl, with a smile.

"Somebody must have intended it," argued her companion; "although I confess that my part in it seemed entirely a passive one. Still, it is a good place to come, excepting for the cinders which fly into one's eyes—as one did then."

Northward, under the pale light of the stars, the barren acres stretched away till they reached the point where the builded city recommenced. The wind, fallen to a breeze, brought still a faint hint of smoke out of the ground, as though in insistent reminiscence of the fire's breath. On the edge of this zone gleamed the city's lights, and Smith was vaguely reminded of the lights on the Jersey shore as he could see them from his window.

"Do you remember the night you showed me the lights of New York?" asked Helen, softly.

"I shall never stop remembering it," he answered. "Some day, when I get to be so valuable or valueless that I can be spared from the Guardian, we will go and see the lights of all the other cities of the world. Shall we?"

"There will be none like yours—like ours."

"As there are no lights for me like those within your eyes."

"But I thought we were going to Robbinsville!" said the girl, "to see a harness shop."

"We will go there, too," he answered. "Oh, life will be all too short for you and me!"

It was some time later when the little bridge was left once more to the cinders and to itself. Behind the backs of the two who walked slowly homeward, the plain, which once had been a city, lay gray-black in its ashes beneath the black and gold of the cloud-flecked sky.

THE END