Darkness and Dawn (11 page)

In he staggered, all but spent. Panting for breath, wild-eyed, his
coal-blackened arms stretching out from the whiteness of the
bear-skin, he made a singular picture.

"It's going!" he exclaimed. "I've got current—it's good for a while,
anyhow. Now—now for the test!"

For a moment he leaned heavily against the concrete bench to which the
apparatus was clamped. Already the day had drawn close to its end. The
glow of evening had begun to fade a trifle, along the distant skyline;
and beyond the Palisades a dull purple pall was settling down.

By the dim light that filtered through the doorway, Beatrice looked at
his deep-lined, bearded face, now reeking with sweat and grimed with
dust and coal. An ugly face—but not to her. For through that mask she
read the dominance, the driving force, the courage of this versatile,
unconquerable man.

"Well," suddenly laughed Stern, with a strange accent in his voice,
"well then, here goes for the operator in the Eiffel Tower, eh?"

Again he glanced keenly, in the failing light, at the apparatus there
before him.

"She'll do, I guess," judged he, slipping on the rusted head-receiver.
He laid his hand upon the key and tried a few tentative dots and
dashes.

Breathless, the girl watched, daring no longer to question him. In the
dielectric, the green sparks and spurts of living flame began to
crackle and to hiss like living spirits of an unknown power.

Stern, feeling again harnessed to his touch the life-force of the
world that once had been, exulted with a wild emotion. Yet,
science-worshiper that he was, something of reverent awe tinged the
keen triumph. A strange gleam dwelt within his eyes; and through his
lips the breath came quick as he flung his very being into this
supreme experiment.

He reached for the ondometer. Carefully, slowly, he "tuned up" the
wave-lengths; up, up to five thousand metres, then back again; he ran
the whole gamut of the wireless scale.

Out, ever out into the thickening gloom, across the void and vacancy
of the dead world, he flung his lightnings in a wild appeal. His face
grew hard and eager.

"Anything? Any answer?" asked Beatrice, laying a hand upon his
shoulder—a hand that trembled.

He shook his head in negation. Again he switched the roaring current
on; again he hurled out into ether his cry of warning and distress,
of hope, of invitation—the last lone call of man to man—of the
last New Yorker to any other human being who, by the merest chance,
might possibly hear him in the wreck of other cities, other lands.
"S. O. S.!" crackled the green flame. "S. O. S.!
S. O. S.!
—"

Thus came night, fully, as they waited, as they called and listened;
as, together there in that tiny structure on the roof of the
tremendous ruin, they swept the heavens and the earth with their wild
call—in vain.

Half an hour passed and still the engineer, grim as death, whirled the
chained lightnings out and away.

"Nothing yet?" cried Beatrice at last, unable to keep silence any
longer. "Are you quite sure you can't—"

The question was not finished.

For suddenly, far down below them, as though buried in the entrails of
the earth, shuddered a stifled, booming roar.

Through every rotten beam and fiber the vast wreck of the building
vibrated. Some wall or other, somewhere, crumbled and went crashing
down with a long, deep droning thunder that ended in a sliding
diminuendo of noise.

"The boiler!" shouted Stern.

Off he flung the head-piece. He leaped up; he seized the girl.

Out of the place he dragged her. She screamed as a huge weight from
high aloft on the tower smashed bellowing through the roof, and with a
shower of stones ripped its way down through the rubbish of the floors
below, as easily as a bullet would pierce a newspaper.

The crash sent them recoiling. The whole roof shook and trembled like
honey-combed ice in a spring thaw.

Down below, something rumbled, jarred, and came to rest.

Both of them expected nothing but that the entire structure would
collapse like a card-house and shatter down in ruins that would be
their death.

But though it swayed and quivered, as in the grasp of an earthquake,
it held.

Stern circled Beatrice with his arm.

"Courage, now! Steady now,
steady!
" cried he.

The grinding, the booming of down-hurled stones and walls died away;
the echoes ceased. A wind-whipped cloud of steam and smoke burst up,
fanlike, beyond the edge of the roof. It bellied away, dim in the
night, upon the stiff northerly breeze.

"Fire?" ventured the girl.

"No! Nothing to burn. But come, come; let's get out o' this anyhow.
There's nothing doing, any more. All through! Too much risk staying up
here, now."

Silent and dejected, they made their cautious way over the shaken
roof. They walked with the greatest circumspection, to avoid falling
through some new hole or freshly opened crevasse.

To Stern, especially, this accident was bitter. After nearly a
fortnight's exhausting toil, the miserable fiasco was maddening.

"Look!" suddenly exclaimed the engineer, pointing. A vast, gaping
canyon of blackness opened at their very feet—a yawning gash forty
feet long and ten or twelve broad, with roughly jagged edges, leading
down into unfathomed depths below.

Stern gazed at it, puzzled, a moment, then peered up into the darkness
above.

"H-m!" said he. "One of the half-ton hands of the big clock up there
has just taken a drop, that's all. One drop too much, I call it. Now
if we—or our rooms—had just happened to be underneath? Some
excitement, eh?"

They circled the opening and approached the tower wall. Stern picked
up the rough ladder, which had been shaken down from its place, and
once more set it to the window through which they were to enter.

But even as Beatrice put her foot on the first rung, she started with
a cry. Stern felt the grip of her trembling hand on his arm.

"What is it?" exclaimed he.

"Look!
Look!
"

Immobile with astonishment and fear, she stood pointing out and away,
to westward, toward the Hudson.

Stern's eyes followed her hand.

He tried to cry out, but only stammered some broken, unintelligible
thing.

There, very far away and very small, yet clearly visible in swarms
upon the inky-black expanse of waters, a hundred, a thousand little
points of light were moving.

Stern and Beatrice stood there a few seconds at the foot of the
ladder, speechless, utterly at a loss for any words to voice the
turmoil of confused thoughts awakened by this inexplicable apparition.

But all at once the girl, with a wordless cry, sank on her knees
beside the vast looming bulk of the tower. She covered her face with
both hands, and through her fingers the tears of joy began to flow.

"Saved—oh, we're saved!" cried she. "There
are
people—and they're
coming for us!"

Stern glanced down at her, an inscrutable expression on his face,
which had grown hard and set and ugly. His lips moved, as though he
were saying something to himself; but no sound escaped them.

Then, quite suddenly, he laughed a mirthless laugh. To him vividly
flashed back the memory of the flint spear-head and the gnawed
leg-bone, cracked open so the marrow could be sucked out, all gashed
with savage tooth-marks.

A certain creepy sensation began to develop along his spine. He felt a
prickling on the nape of his neck, as the hair stirred there.
Instinctively he reached for his revolver.

"So, then," he sneered at himself, "we're up against it, after all?
And all my calculations about the world being swept clear, were so
much punk? Well, well, this
is
interesting! Oh, I see it coming, all
right—good and plenty—and soon!"

But the girl interrupted his ugly thoughts as he stood there straining
his eyes out into the dark.

"How splendid! How glorious!" cried she. "Only to think that we're
going to see people again! Can you imagine it?"

"Hardly."

"Why, what's the matter? You—speak as though you weren't—
saved!
"

"I didn't mean to. It's—just surprise, I guess."

"Come! Let's signal them with a fire from the tower top.
I'll
help
carry wood. Let's hurry down and run and meet them!"

Highly excited, the girl had got to her feet again, and now, clutched
the engineer's arm in burning eagerness.

"Let's go! Go—at once! This minute!"

But he restrained her.

"You don't really think that would be quite prudent, do you?" asked
he. "Not just yet?"

"Why not?"

"Why, can't you see? We—that is, there is no way to tell—"

"But they're coming to save us, can't you see? Somehow, somewhere,
they must have caught that signal! And shall we wait, and perhaps let
them lose us, after all?"

"Certainly not. But first we—why, we ought to make quite sure, you
understand. Sure that they—they're really civilized, you know."

"But they
must
be, to have read the wireless!"

"Oh, you're counting on that, are you? Well, that's a big assumption.
It won't do. No, we've got to go slow in this game. Got to wait. Wait,
and see. Easy does it!"

He tried to speak boldly and with nonchalance, but the girl's keen ear
detected at least a little of the emotion that was troubling him. She
kept a moment's silence, while the quivering lights drew on and on,
steadily, slowly, like a host of fireflies on the bosom of the night.

"Why don't you get the telescope, and see?" she asked, at length.

"No use. It isn't a night-glass. Couldn't see a thing."

"But anyhow, those lights mean
men
, don't they?"

"Naturally. But until we know what kind, we're better off right where
we are. I'm willing to welcome the coming guest, all right, if he's
peaceful. Otherwise, it's powder and ball, hot water, stones and
things for him!"

The girl stared a moment at the engineer, while this new idea took
root within her brain.

"You—you don't mean," she faltered at last, "that these may
be—
savages!
"

He started at the word. "What makes you think that?" he parried,
striving to spare her all needless alarm.

She pondered a moment, while the fire-dots, like a shoal of swimming
stars, drew slowly nearer, nearer the Manhattan shore.

"Tell me,
are
they savages?"

"How do I know?"

"It's easy enough to see you've got an opinion about it. You
think
they're savages, don't you?"

"I think it's very possible."

"And if so—what then?"

"What then? Why, in case they aren't mighty nice and kind, there'll be
a hot time in the old town, that's all. And somebody'll get hurt. It
won't be
us!
"

Beatrice asked no more, for a minute or two, but the engineer felt her
fingers tighten on his arm.

"I'm with you, till the end!" she whispered.

Another pregnant silence, while the nightwind stirred her hair and
wafted the warm feminine perfume of her to his nostrils. Stern took a
long, deep breath. A sort of dizziness crept over him, as from a glass
of wine on an empty stomach. The Call of Woman strove to master him,
but he repelled it. And, watching the creeping lights, he spoke; spoke
to himself as much as to the girl; spoke, lest he think too much.

"There's a chance, a mere possibility," said he, "that those boats,
canoes, coracles or whatever they may be, belong to white people, far
descendants of the few suppositions survivors of the cataclysm.
There's some slight chance that these people may be civilized, or
partly so.

"Why they're coming across the Hudson, at this time o' night, with
what object and to what place, we can't even guess. All we can do is
wait, and watch and—be ready for anything."

"For anything!" she echoed. "You've seen me shoot! You know!"

He took her hand, and pressed it. And silence fell again, as the long
vigil started, there in the shadow of the tower, on the roof.

For some quarter of an hour, neither spoke. Then at last, said Stern:

"See, now! The lights seem to be winking out. The canoes must have
come close in toward the shore of the island. They're being masked
behind the trees. The people—whoever they are—will be landing
directly now!"

"And then?"

"Wait and see!"

They resigned themselves to patience. The girl's breath came quickly,
as she watched. Even the engineer felt his heart throb with
accelerated haste.

Now, far in the east, dim over the flat and dreary ruins of Long
Island, the sky began to silver, through a thin veil of cirrus cloud.
A pallid moon was rising. Far below, a breeze stirred the tree-fronds
in Madison Forest. A bat staggered drunkenly about the tower, then
reeled away into the gloom; and, high aloft, an owl uttered its
melancholy plaint.

Beatrice shuddered.

"They'll be here pretty soon!" whispered she. "Hadn't we better go
down, and get our guns? In case—"

"Time enough," he answered. "Wait a while."

"Hark! What's that?" she exclaimed suddenly, holding her breath.

Off to northward, dull, muffled, all but inaudible, they both heard a
rhythmic pulsing, strangely barbaric.

"Heavens!" ejaculated Stern. "War-drums! Tom-toms, as I live!"

"Tom-toms? So they
are
savages?" exclaimed the girl, taking a quick
breath. "But—what
then?
"

"Don't just know, yet. It's a fact, though; they're certainly savages.
Two tribes, one with torches, one with drums. Two different kinds, I
guess. And they're coming in here to parley or fight or something.
Regular powwow on hand. Trouble ahead, whichever side wins!"