heels on their trucks had made a bower of steel
about the bridegroom. The flames from the stove and from the oil-lamps
were blooming like hell-flowers everywhere. And the wind that fanned the
blazes was blowing clouds of scalding steam from the crumpled boilers of
the two engines.

Crosson ran to Irene's side. She was trying to clamber through a trellis
of iron and splintered wood. She was stretching her hand out to Drury,
where he lay unconscious, deep in the clutter. Crosson dragged her away
from a flame that swung toward her. She struck his hand aside and thrust
her body into the danger again.

Crosson, finding no water, began to shovel loose earth on the blaze with
a sharp plank from the side of a car. Finding that she could not reach
her lover, Irene turned and begged Crosson to run for help and for the
doctors.

He ran, but the doctors refused to leave the work they had in hand, and
the other men growled:

"Everybody's got to take their turn."

Crosson ran back to Irene with the news. Drury had just emerged from the
merciful swoon of shock to the frenzies of his splintered bones,
lacerated flesh and blistered skin, and the threat of his infernal
environment.

The last exquisite fiendishness was the sight of his sweetheart as
witness to his agony, her face lighted up by the flames that were
ravening toward him, her hands hungering toward him, just beyond the
stretch of his one free arm.

Crosson heard the lovers murmur to each other across that little abyss.
He flung himself against the barriers like a madman. But his hands were
futile against the tangle of joists and hot steel.

Irene saw him working alone and asked him where the others were, and the
doctors.

"They wouldn't come!" Crosson groaned, ashamed of their ugly sense of
justice.

The girl's face took on a look of grim ferocity. She said to Crosson:

"Your gun--where is it?"

He pointed to where he had left it. It had fallen to the ground.

She ran and seized it up, and holding it awkwardly but with menace,
advanced on a doctor who toiled with sleeves rolled high, and face and
beard and arms blotched with red grime.

She thrust the muzzle into his chest and spoke hoarsely:

"Doctor Lane, you come with me."

"I'm busy here," he growled, pushing the gun aside, hardly knowing what
it was.

She jammed it against his heart again and cried, "Come with me or I'll
kill you!"

He followed her, wondering rather than fearing, and she swept a