ce of death, but she
brought her wide eyes close to him.

"Joe! Joe!"

"Myra," he said, in a whisper, suddenly in that moment getting a sharp
revelation of his changed life. "I may never see you again. I belong to
those dead girls." He paused. "Go home ... do that for me, anyway."

He had passed beyond her; there was no opposing him.

"I'll go," she murmured.

Then, dizzily, she reeled back, and was lost in the crowd.

And then he set to work. He was strangely calm now, numb, unfeeling.
There was nothing more to experience, and the overwrought brain refused
any new emotions. So stupendous was the catastrophe that it left him
finally calm, ready, and eagerly awake. He stepped gently through the
crowd, searching, and found John Rann, the pressman. John wept like a
little boy when they met.

"Marty got out ... yes ... most of us did ... but Eddie Baker, Morty,
and Sam Bender.... It was the cotton waste, Mr. Joe, and the
cigarettes...."

Joe put his arm about the rough man.

"Never mind, Johnny ... Go home to the kiddies...."

There was so little he could do. He went to a few homes he knew, he went
to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue. At
midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered
only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was
still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her
fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue,
and up the lamp-lit block. Already newsboys were hoarsely shouting in
the night, as they waved their papers--a cry of the underworld
palpitating through the hushed city: "Wuxtra! Wuxtra!
Great--fire--horror! Sixty--killed! Wuxtra!"

The house was still open, lighted, awake. People came into the hall as
he entered, but he shunned them and started up the stairs. One called
after him.

"Your mother's out, Mr. Joe."

He turned.

"Out? How long?"

"Since the fire started ... She's been back and forth several times ..."

He went on up, entered the neat, still front room, lit the gas beside
the bureau mirror, and began to pace up and down. His mother was
searching for him; he might have known it; he should have remembered it.

And then he heard the uncanny shouting of the newsboys--as if those dead
girls had risen from their ashes and were running like flaming furies
through the city streets, flinging handfuls of their fire into a million
homes, shaking New York