The three men looked each other in the eye. Swift forgot the girl. The
professor forgot the balloon. Mr. Statis Ticks had forgotten his wife
and seven children; but this was no unusual circumstance. The aeronaut,
having less awe to the cubic inch in his make-up than his companions,
was the first to speak.
"What does this gol-darned thing mean, anyhow?"
"Hush!" said Swift, recoiling.
But Mr. Statis Ticks bared his head before the extinct city.
"It means," said the student, solemnly, "the presumptuous impiety of man
and the vengeance of Almighty God! It means," he added, slowly,
"incalculable volts of uncontrollable electricity acting and acted upon
by nascent oxygen and hydrogen. It means that Russell, the greatest
producer of the electro-motor power on the continent, has been smitten
by its servant. It means that man has outstripped his knowledge of this
mysterious fluid, and has ignorantly converted through millions of
inadequate conductors and faultily insulated wires the terrible, the
unfathomed power of electricity into light and heat and force; that
Russell was gradually becoming a gigantic storage battery, charged and
surcharged, until the time when its electrostatic capacity had been
criminally abused, the negative forces of the heavens concentrated over
the obnoxious territory, and a discharge unparalleled in electrical
experiments restored nature's equilibrium, and consumed in one
unspeakable spark Russell and its blind inhabitants."
"My God! Can this happen to Boston?" cried the professor, trembling.
"Or New York?" asked Swift.
"Or to Chicago?" added the girl, faintly. She had revived and was
looking about her in a ghastly way. "My mother used to live there."
This truly feminine view of a scientific subject passed unnoticed.
Mr. Ticks stood with his uncovered head yet bent before the annihilated
city. He spread his two hands out, palms to the ground, with a gesture
of indescribable significance, and made no reply.
Black, vitreous masses of melted conglomerate spread before them. Where
had stood the city, the sloping plain offered no obstruction to the
view. Russell, to the last splinter of iron or of wood, to the last chip
of brick or stone, to the last bone of the last corpse, was fused into a
terrible warning to the world by the rebellion of its own electricity.
"I guess none of 'em knew what struck 'em!" The professor hazarded this
humane suggestion, feeling that the oppressive silence should be broken
somehow.
"The Kremmler chair was nothing to it," said Swift.
"You are right," answered Mr. Ticks, gravely. "That was the only boon.
So sudden and intense was the heat that men were ashes and the city was
molten before nerves could convey sensation to the brain. In the
fraction of a second, in the twinkling of a thought it was not, for God
took it."
The four breathed heavily. Again Mr. Ticks broke the silence. He laid
his hand paternally upon the young lady's shoulder.
"It is very fortunate, Miss Magnet, that you were the only thoroughly
insulated person in this whole territory. The wooden boat, the inverted
glasses saved you. You only had a normal amount of electricity in you.
You were a poor conductor, otherwise you would have evaporated through
the law of induction."
"I can't stand this any longer, or I'll be a fit candidate for an idiot
asylum!" blurted out the professor finally. "I am dying for a chaw."
He cast impatient glances at a trackless, desolated grade a mile away.
This grave of a great trunk line extended beyond their view.
The four had not stirred from where they had been dropped by the
balloon. To do so they would have had to pick their way cautiously.
Russell was like an extinct volcano. She was yet hot. But she did not
smoke, as one might have expected. There were no smouldering embers left
to produce smoke. Combustion had been instantaneous and complete.
But the travellers had no need to go sight-seeing. Everywhere was the
same blackened, cooling, ferruginous slag. To see one square yard was to
see the whole. The appalling thing about the effect was the cause.
Civilization, ever ready with revengeful thrusts, as if protesting
against the advance of science, had produced a new accident, a unique
disaster.
Swift made an automatic motion for his watch.
"I must go," he said; "I must get my despatch to the _Planet_ in time
for the evening edition. We will have a scoop on the whole world."
"I'm your man," said the professor. "We can foot it to the nearest
telegraph station in four hours."
"Ah, I forgot," said Swift. "That will lose me the four o'clock edition.
I'll have to hold the wire all night if I can get it. I'll wire such an
account as no other paper will ever get. There isn't a minute to lose!"
It was then that Mr. Statis Ticks, realizing, whether from calculation
or from sympathy, that Miss Magnet could make no such forced march, and
seeing that the girl only held herself together under the tension of the
great excitement, gallantly proposed to remain by her and join the rest
of the party that evening by the first team that could be chartered.
But the young lady unexpectedly refused the proposition. Her whole
nature shrank from spending another minute in that blasted spot. It was
therefore arranged, much to Mr. Ticks' disappointment (for he had hoped
to add to his copious stock of mental notes by further investigation on
the ground), that the girl should accompany them, as far as she was
able, down the railroad, away from the lost city.
After a drink of lake water they started off, Swift supporting Miss
Magnet on the one side and Mr. Ticks on the other, the professor
stalking ahead.
"Even the lake tastes of it," said Swift. "Ugh!"
"Pass a current of electricity through a tumbler of water and there will
be detected the same flavor, though not so strong," answered Mr. Ticks.
The party made two miles slowly. Despite all her Western courage and
energy, Insula Magnet tottered by the way. To divert her attention, Mr.
Ticks led her on to talk about the electrical wonders of the extinct
city. The girl enlarged in a sad way upon its many and its curious uses.
The baby carriages, she said, took their helpless occupants on an
unaided turn around a large oval track in the park. They went by storage
battery. One electrician could take the place of twenty nurses and
control the power. Once in a while a baby died suddenly. The doctors
invariably pronounced it a case of heart failure. Washing was now
entirely done by electrical apparatus, likewise ironing and cooking. The
great American problem of the "hired girl," Russell considered herself
to have solved.
An ingenious arrangement had been recently devised to have the
electricity supply the place of valet-de-chambre, but only a few had
used it. One or two thought it a hardship to be aroused from bed
whether one would or no, to be washed and summarily dressed by an
implacable power that performed its set tasks stolidly in spite of
anathemas and threats. Can a man abuse his electrical valet? Let him try
it if he dare.
The phonograph was in universal use. _The Phonograph Daily_ was a
rival--one cannot call it sheet, rather wax cylinder--just started, and
the din made by those loquacious instruments was worse than the chatter
of monkeys in the cocoanut groves of New Guinea.
Electric heaters warmed the rooms. Electric paper lighted them with a
suffused and generous glow. No one used stairs. Electric elevators did
all the arduous house-climbing. No one made calls any more, for it was
an easy matter to ring your acquaintance up and see her in her
drawing-room while you talked to her. Women made an elaborate toilet for
such interviews. It was soon expected that conversation would be
entirely dispensed with, for with a sensitive galvanoscope attached to
the brain at a certain point, that was to be patented, the minutest
current of thought could be registered upon a cylinder.
Authors would only need to fix their attention upon the plot; the
delicate instrument would record it indelibly for their hearers'
gratification.
The well-appointed electric coupe was always ready. There was no worry
about oats and spavin and glanders. Miss Magnet told of many other new
contrivances that electricity had now to perform. The development of
this power through the new dynamos made it possible for men in Russell
to dispense utterly with work. You went so far as to put five cents in
the slot at any one of a hundred street corners, and your shoes were
electrically polished to a patent leather shine. There was no more
night, for carbon and incandescent lamps had stabbed the night so that
any hovel was brighter than the average day. The girl stopped for breath
and sat down. She was exhausted. Swift cheered her tenderly. But Mr.
Ticks dryly remarked:
"_Better a city without electricity than electricity without a city!_"
The girl smiled at this heresy, and nodded her head emphatically in a
feeble way. She could hardly move.
It was at this stage that Mr. Ticks seemed overcome with uneasiness. He
got up and sat down again. He kicked the earth. He examined the charred
sleepers. He dug for the lost rails. Then he awoke from his occupation
with a sudden start as if rudely shaken from a dream. Swift was used to
his colleague's idiosyncrasies. Besides he did not now notice them. He
was otherwise occupied. But the professor could stand these performances
no longer, and with rude emphasis he burst forth:
"Dang it, man, if you've got anything on your darned mind, jerk it out,
if not--" Professor Ariel's manners had become decadent in proportion to
the time that had elapsed since he and the _High Tariff_ had parted
company.
"I--I--" interrupted Mr. Ticks, with a start. "The fact is, I cannot as
yet account for that deadly atmosphere that enveloped this section. What
was in it to kill? Its effect on me was unlike any other experience that
I can recall. It is my inconsolable regret that it is not classified in
my mind."
"Did you know," asked Miss Magnet, suddenly, "that a new land
improvement company was started this spring for raising four crops a
year? All the farms for twenty miles around were bought up. They spent
over a million dollars in laying wires in the ground throughout the
whole country, on the theory that these voltaic currents applied to
grain and fruit and vegetables would excite such crops to quicker
verdure and maturity. The company said that it was an experiment on a
grand scale; but they were much laughed at. I said it was a dangerous
scheme, and nearly lost my position in consequence. I have heard,
though, that it was a great success."
During this recital Mr. Ticks' eyes glistened with excitement.
"Ah!" he said, "I am under a thousand obligations to you, young lady. Of
course I could not conceive of such a thing, not knowing the facts. It
is all plain now. The first discharge, enormous and deadly as it was,
was not enough. This network of wires attracted the surplus electricity.
The soil must be of such a quality as to convert this territory into an
enormous secondary battery. The subsoil must have acted as a monstrous
insulator. I shall subject it to a minute analysis. Are we on the verge
of a new electrical discovery? Was this deadly phenomenon a hitherto
unknown property of the electrical fluid? For to walk within the dead
line was like walking into a saturated Leyden jar. Its effect must have
also been to devitalize the oxygen and nitrogen of the atmosphere. The
victim was electrified and suffocated to death at the same instant. At
last I understand the complexity of my astonishing symptoms. The
vibratory storm that we so narrowly escaped was not due to barometric
depression, but came as a responsive consequence of this surcharged
area. When that wire ladder was finally cut off and fell; when it
reached a certain position; when one end touched the negative, the other
the positive pole, then the current became completed and this gigantic
battery was discharged. Had we not been rising at the rate of a hundred
feet a second we should have been fused after the fashion of the
inhabitants of this ghastly territory. The discharge once having taken
place, this country is again free to man and beast."
"Gosh!" was all that the subdued professor could say.
And now the four travellers lifted up their eyes, and saw before them on
the horizon black moving, indistinct masses, as if brobdignagian locusts
were swarming up the track. Here were the hosts of careworn men,
plunging impatiently toward the lost city for the news that the
unaccountable and malignant power had hitherto denied them. The four
needed courage to meet this unrestrained and desperate mob. Who were
these in the van? What pallid faces, what haggard eyes, what piteous
gestures! Alas, they were the mourners of the dead! Love had wrestled
its way ahead of plunder, and grief had outrun greed. In the front ranks
were women wailing and panting desperately to keep pace with unmanned
men.
This woeful sight aroused Mr. Ticks. He raised his hands towards the
lost city after the manner of an inspired prophet, and there and then
uttered the following impassioned warning to humanity, which Swift took
down in shorthand in the borrowed notebook:
"Woe unto you that multiply currents you cannot control! Woe unto you
that net your country with the trap of sudden death! Woe unto you that
toss innocent men on broken wires; that surprise your victims in the
counting-house, the home, the street, with destructive bolts! Woe unto
you that undermine and overcast the land with a mysterious foe! Behold!
your dead shall rise in serried phalanx against you, and their mourners
shall rend you to pieces!"
The only burst of eloquence known to the biography of this prosaic man
subsided into apathetic silence. His hands dropped heavily at his sides.
He turned away from Russell and beheld its blackened site no more.
The throng was now upon them. Multitudes of wild faces asked questions
of the four. Who would answer these? Who could tell the terrible truth?
The professor paled and walked behind Swift. Mr. Ticks shrank at the
awful responsibility, and took refuge behind the professor. Swift halted
and trembled.
"Go," he said to the girl. "Go! Only a woman can."
And she went. She stepped out alone--a few paces, and stood quite still.
Instinctively the masses stopped before her. Eyes, sleepless with
weeping and waiting, riveted themselves upon eyes that were still
haunted with a portentous experience. The girl stretched out one hand in
mute appeal, and then burst into tears and sobbed:
"Don't! Don't look like that! Oh, you poor people! I am the only one!"
Awestruck and silently, men and women enveloped her and ministered unto
her. It was the advance guard of the Red Cross Society, led by Clara
Barton, that sheltered this derelict and messenger of woe.
Set upon by a thousand men, Mr. Ticks and the professor told what they
knew. Some cursed and doubted and pressed on. Some bowed their heads and
turned back. But Swift, who had recognized Dubbs driving two powerful
horses and unreeling two telegraph wires, one for the special use of
the Associated Press and the other for the _Planet_, accosted him, and
sent the most famous message known to the American newspaper world since
the close of the civil war.
It was a long message, and we can only give the more important
headlines:
Russell is no more!
Thirty thousand people killed by one unparalleled electric
discharge.
The gigantic spark fuses the whole city into one
indistinguishable molten slag.
Miraculous escape of one lady. The sole survivor.
Thrilling rescue by the _Planet_ reporters in a special
balloon.
The reporters complete the circuit and touch off an
over-charged storage battery with a circumference of one
hundred and fifty miles.
The territory that was impassable now open.
Fifty thousand people race toward the lost city.
Russell perished of her own electricity.
Civilization's new and formidable danger.
* * * * *
Three months later, on a secular evening, the upholstered pews of an
uptown church were filled with a fashionable audience. As the church
bells tolled eight the organ pealed forth the wedding march. It was
noticed with much comment that the vast audience-room was lighted with
gas, the new electric lights being dispensed with. The bride, Miss
Insula Magnet, had especially desired this.
When the solemn ceremony was ended, and when, amid the craning of necks,
the bride and groom were walking down the white-ribboned aisle, a
diversion happened that arrested the newly wedded couple. But this was
not construed into an ill-omen. A diminutive messenger boy, with a
super-experienced countenance, had met them half way to the vestibule,
and, with a saucy smile, held up an envelope to Mr. Swift's face.
"It's half an hour late. Wires burned out. Guess you'll read it now!"
Mr. Statis Ticks, who, although well and worthily married, officiated in
some unprecedented capacity as best man, gave Professor Ariel, one of
the ushers, an intelligent glance. The latter, being the happy possessor
of a new balloon (which he ingenuously called _Reciprocity_), supplied
to him by the always generous _Planet_, and fully elated by his present
position, answered with a broad wink. Mr. Swift, unconscious of the
thousands that were standing in their seats to look at him, and of the
general buzz of interest, tore open the colored envelope with
reportorial haste, and read as follows. It was cabled from his chief,
the proprietor of the _Planet_, now unavoidably detained in England:
"_Congratulations. Advance of one thousand a year. Report after
two months' bliss. God bless you!_"