DEADLY PERIL
Pages on pages would not tell the full details of the following
week--the talks they had, the snaring and shooting of small game, the
fishing, the cleaning out of the bungalow, and the beginnings of some
order in the estate, the rapid healing of Stern's arm, and all the
multifarious little events of their new beginnings of life there by
the river-bank.
But there are other matters of more import than such homely things; so
now we come to the time when Stern felt the pressing imperative of a
return to the tower. For he lacked tools in every way; he needed them
to build furniture, doors, shutters; to clear away the brush and make
the place orderly, rational and beautiful; to start work on his
projected laboratory and power-plant; for a thousand purposes.
He wanted his binoculars, his shotgun and rifles, and much ammunition,
as well as a boat-load of canned supplies and other goods.
Instruments, above all, he had to have.
So, though Beatrice still, with womanly conservatism, preferred to let
well enough alone for the present, and stay away from the scene of
such ghastly deeds as had taken place on the last day of the invasion
by the Horde, Stern eventually convinced and overargued her; and on
what he calculated to be the 16th day of June, 2912--the tenth day
since the fight--they set sail for Manhattan. A favoring northerly
breeze, joined with a clear sky and sunshine of unusual brilliancy,
made the excursion a gala time for both. As they put their supplies of
fish, squirrel-meat and breadfruit aboard the banca and shoved the
rude craft off the sand, both she and he felt like children on an
outing.
Allan's arm was now so well that he permitted himself the luxury of a
morning plunge. The invigoration of this was still upon him as, with a
song, he raised the clumsy skin sail upon the rough-hewn mast.
Beatrice curled down in her tiger-skin at the stern, took one of the
paddles, and made ready to steer. He settled himself beside her, the
thongs of his sail in his hand. Thus happy in comradeship, they sailed
away to southward, down the blue wonder of the river, flanked by
headlands, wooded heights, crags, cliffs and Palisades, now all alike
deserted.
Noon found them opposite the fluted columns of gray granite that once
had borne aloft the suburbs of Englewood. Stern recognized the
conformation of the place; but though he looked hard, could find no
trace of the Interstate Park road that once had led from top to bottom
of the Palisades, nor any remnant of the millionaires' palaces along
the heights there.
"Stone and brick have long since vanished as structures," he
commented. "Only steel and concrete have stood the gaff of uncounted
years! Where all that fashion, wealth and beauty once would have
scorned to notice us, girl, now what's left? Hear the cry of that
gull? The barking of that fox? See that green flicker over the
pinnacle? Some new, bright bird, never dreamed of in this country! And
even with the naked eye I can make out the palms and the lianas
tangled over the verge of what must once have been magnificent
gardens!"
He pointed at the heights.
"Once," said he, "I was consulted by a sausage-king named Breitkopf,
who wanted to sink an elevator-shaft from the top to the bottom of
this very cliff, so he could reach his hundred-thousand-dollar launch
in ease. Breitkopf didn't like my price; he insulted me in several
rather unpleasant ways. The cliff is still here, I see. So am I. But
Breitkopf is--elsewhere."
He laughed, and swept the river with a glance.
"Steer over to the eastward, will you?" he asked. "We'll go in through
Spuyten Duyvil and the Harlem. That'll bring us much nearer the tower
than by landing on the west shore of Manhattan."
Two hours later they had run past the broken arches of Fordham,
Washington, and High Bridges, and following the river--on both banks
of which a few scattered ruins showed through the massed foliage--were
drawing toward Randall's and Ward's islands and Hell Gate.
Wind and tide still favored them. In safety they passed the ugly
shoals and ledges. Here Stern took the paddle, while Beatrice went to
the bow and left all to his directing hand.
By three o'clock in the afternoon they were drawing past Blackwell's
Island. The Queensboro Bridge still 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.