The Project Gutenberg eBook, White Ashes, by Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden
C. Noble

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Title: White Ashes

Author: Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

Release Date: January 7, 2007 [eBook #20308]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE ASHES***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

WHITE ASHES

by

KENNEDY-NOBLE

[Transcriber's note: Full names--Sidney R. Kennedy, Alden C. Noble.]

New York
The MacMillan Company
1912
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1912,
by The MacMillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1912.

TO

NATALIE STANTON KENNEDY

THIS BOOK

IS INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHORS

SIDNEY R. KENNEDY

ALDEN C. NOBLE

WHITE ASHES

CHAPTER I

On the top floor of one of the lesser office buildings in the insurance
district of lower New York, a man stood silent before a map desk on
which was laid an opened map of the burned city. No other man was in
the office, for this was on a Sunday; but it would not have mattered to
the man at the map had the big room presented its usual busy
appearance. All that went on about him would have passed his notice;
he only gazed stolidly from the map to the newspaper with flaring
headlines, and from newspaper back to map, trying to gauge the measure
of his calamity.

The morning papers had been able to print nothing save the bare facts
that the fire had started near a large hotel, had spread with appalling
rapidity to the adjacent buildings, and getting beyond the control of
the fire department was sweeping southward under a wind of thirty miles
an hour. The afternoon extras, however, gave fuller--and
graver--details. The central business section of the city was entirely
in ruins, and the conflagration had as yet shown no sign of a stay.

Sunday though it was, in many of the greater insurance offices on
William Street the executives had gathered and were endeavoring to
calculate the effect of this catastrophe on their assets.

But in the office on the top floor, where the man stood alone, there
was no longer any doubt. Whether the fire was checked or whether it
swept onward m