The Last New Yorkers | Page 8

roaring resistlessly.
High overhead drifted a few rosy clouds, part of that changeless nature
which alone did not repel or mystify these two beleaguered waifs, these
chance survivors, this man, this woman, left alone together by the hand
of fate.
They were dazed, fascinated by the splendor of that sunset over a world
devoid of human life, for the moment giving up all efforts to judge or
understand.
Stern and his mate peered closer, down at the interwoven jungles of
Union Square, the leafy frond-masses that marked the one-time course
of Twenty-Third Street, the forest in Madison Square, and the truncated
column of the tower where no longer Diana turned her huntress bow to
every varying breeze.
They heard their own hearts beat. The intake of their breath sounded
strangely loud. Above them, on a broken cornice, some resting
swallows twittered.
All at once the girl spoke.
"See the Flatiron Building over there!" said she. "What a hideous
wreck!"
From Stern she took the telescope, adjusted it, and gazed minutely at

the shattered pile of stone and metal.
Blotched as with leprosy stood the walls, whence many hundreds of
blocks had fallen into Broadway forming a vast moraine that for some
distance choked that thoroughfare.
In numberless places the steel frame peered through. The whole roof
had caved in, crushing down the upper stories, of which only a few
sparse upstanding metal beams remained.
The girl's gaze was directed at a certain spot which she knew well.
"Oh, I can even see--into some of the offices on the eighteenth floor!"
cried she. "There, look?" And she pointed. "That one near the front! I--I
used to know--"
She broke short off. In her trembling hands the telescope sank. Stern
saw that she was very pale.
"Take me down!" she whispered. "I can't stand it any longer--I can't,
possibly! The sight of that wrecked office! Let's go down where I can't
see that!"
Gently, as though she had been a frightened child, Stern led her round
the platform to the doorway, then down the crumbling stairs and so to
the wreckage and dust-strewn confusion of what had been his office.
And there, his hand upon her shoulder, he bade her still be of good
courage.
"Listen now, Beatrice," said he. "Let's try to reason this thing out
together, let's try to solve this problem like two intelligent human
beings.
"Just what's happened, we don't know; we can't know yet a while, till I
investigate. We don't even know what year this is.
"Don't know whether anybody else is still alive, anywhere in the world.
But we can find out--after we've made provision for the immediate

present and formed some rational plan of life.
"If all the rest are gone, swept away, wiped out clean like figures on a
slate, then why we should have happened to survive whatever it was
that struck the earth, is still a riddle far beyond our comprehension."
He raised her face to his, noble despite all its grotesque disfigurements;
he looked into her eyes as though to read the very soul of her, to judge
whether she could share this fight, could brave this coming struggle.
"All these things may yet be answered. Once I get the proper data for
this series of phenomena, I can find the solution, never fear!
"Some vast world-duty may be ours, far greater, infinitely more vital
than anything that either of us has ever dreamed. It's not our place, now,
to mourn or fear! Rather it is to read this mystery, to meet it and to
conquer!"
Through her tears the girl smiled up at him, trustingly, confidingly.
And in the last declining rays of the sun that glinted through the
window-pane, her eyes were very beautiful.

CHAPTER V
EXPLORATION
Came now the evening, as they sat and talked together, talked long and
earnestly, there within that ruined place. Too eager for some knowledge
of the truth, they, to feel hunger or to think of their lack of clothing.
Chairs they had none, nor even so much as a broom to clean the floor
with. But Stern, first-off, had wrenched a marble slab from the
stairway.
And with this plank of stone still strong enough to serve, he had
scraped all one corner of the office floor free of rubbish. This gave

them a preliminary camping-place wherein to take their bearings and
discuss what must be done.
"So then," the engineer was saying as the dusk grew deeper, "so then,
we'll apparently have to make this building our headquarters for a
while.
"As nearly as I can figure, this is about what must have happened.
Some sudden, deadly, numbing plague or cataclysm must have struck
the earth, long, long ago.
"It may have been an almost instantaneous onset of some new and
highly