The Air Trust Part 45

"Oh, yes, I did, though," he retorted. "It's quite possible, you know.

In case our government--yours, if you prefer--can't get troops through, here, or a big general revolution sweeps things, inside a day or two, we're done. We'll starve and stifle, here, sure as shooting!"

"No, no, no! Not that, not _that_!" whimpered Flint, shuddering. "I can't die, yet. I--I'm not ready for it! There's all that missionary work of mine not yet done, and my huge international Sunday School League to perfect; and there's the tremendous ten-million-dollar Cathedral of Saint Luke the Pious that I'm having built on Riverside Drive, and there's--"

"Cut it!" gibed Waldron, spitting with very disgust. "If your time's come, Flint, you'll die, cathedrals or no cathedrals. Your Sunday schools won't save you any more than my investments will--which have largely been wine, women and song. As a matter of fact, if it comes to starvation, if we aren't rescued and taken out from under the red-hot wreckage that's on top of us, I'll outlive _you_! I can exist on my surplus adipose tissue, for a while; but you--_you're_ nothing but skin and bone. You'll starve far quicker than I will, old man."

"Don't! Don't!" implored the shaking wretch, covering his eyes with both trembling hands.

"Moral, you oughtn't to have been a dope-fiend, all these years,"

continued Waldron, cuttingly, determined that now, once for all, his despised partner should hear the truth. "How you've lived so long, as it is, I don't understand. When I tried to marry Kate, and failed, I reckoned you'd pa.s.s over in almost no time--and, by the way, that's why I was so insistent. But you've disappointed me, Flint. Disappointed me sorely. You still live. It won't be long, however. Down here, you know, you simply can't get any dope. In a little while you'll begin to suffer the torments of h.e.l.l. You'll die of starvation and drug 'yen,' Flint, and you'll die mad, mad, _mad_! Understand me! Mad, for morphine! And I, I shall watch you, and exult!"

Flint cringed, shuddering and stopped his ears. His partner, gloating over him, smoked faster now. A strange light shone in his eyes. His pulse beat faster than usual, and a certain extravagance of thought and speech had become manifest in him.

He tried to compose himself, feeling that he must not push the cowardly Flint too far, but his ideas refused to flow in orderly sequence.

Wonderingly he stared at his cigar, the tip of which was now glowing more brightly than before.

And then, suddenly sniffing the air he understood. His eyes widened with horror absolute. He started forward, gasped and cried:

"_Flint! Flint! The oxygen is coming in!_"

Uncomprehending, the old man still stood there, mumbling to himself. His face was now tinged with unusual color, and his heart, too, was thumping strangely.

"_Oxygen_!" shouted Waldron, shaking him by the shoulder. "It--it's leaking in, here, somewhere! If we can't stop it--_we're dead men_!"

"Eh? _What_?" stammered the Billionaire, staring at him with eyes of half-intoxicated fear. "What d'you mean, the oxygen? In--in here?"

"_In here_!" cried "Tiger," casting a wild and terrible gaze about him at the vast, empty trap of steel. "Can't you smell it? That ozone smell? My G.o.d, we're lost! We're lost!"

"You're crazy!" retorted Flint, with vigor. "Nothing of the sort could happen!" His head was held high, now, and new life seemed surging through that spent and drug-wrecked body. "There's no way those curs could have turned on any gas, here. You're crazy, ha! ha! ha! Insane, eh? A good joke--capital joke, that! I must tell it at the Union League Club! 'Tiger' Waldron, suddenly insane, and--ha! ha! ha!"

He burst into a long, shrill cacchination. Already his face was scarlet and his mind a whirl. Though neither man understood the reason, yet the fact remained that one of the last great explosions had ruptured a subterranean check-valve closing the six-inch pipe that was to feed the storage-tanks; and now a swift, huge stream of pure oxygen gas was rus.h.i.+ng at tremendous velocity into the vast chamber of steel.

Waldron, his heart leaping as though it would burst his ribs, raised a fist to strike down his insulter; then, with drunken indecision, joined in the maniacal laughter of the staggering old man.

In their ears a strange, wild humming now became audible. Lights danced before their eyes; their senses reeled, and violent, extravagant ideas surged through their drunken brains.

"_Ha! Ha! Ha!_" rang Waldron's crazy laughter, echoing the old man's.

All at once, his cigar broke into flame. Cursing, he hurled it away, staggering back against the ladder and stood there swaying, clutching it to hold himself from falling.

There he stood, and stared at Flint, with eyes that started from his head, with panting breath and crimson face.

The old man, in a sudden revulsion of terror, was now grovelling along the floor, by one of the ma.s.sive walls, clawing at the steel with impotent hands and screaming mingled prayers and oaths. His ravings, horrible to hear, echoed through the great tank, now swiftly filling with gas.

"Help! Help!" he screamed. "Save me--my G.o.d--save me--. Let me out, let me out! A million, if you let me out! A billion--_the whole world_! The world, ha! ha! ha! d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l--the world, I say! I'll give the world to be let out! It's mine--I own it--_all, all mine!_ Ha! Dogs! You would rise up against your master and your G.o.d, would you? But it's no use--we'll beat you yet--out! _out_!--the world--I own it! All this plant--this gas, all mine! My oxygen--ah! it chokes me! _Help!

Help!_--Swine! I'll scourge you yet--_absolute power_--_the world_--!"

With one final spark of energy, panting, his heart flailing itself to death under the pitiless urge of the oxygen, old Flint sprang up, ran wildly, blindly straight across the steel floor, and, screaming blasphemies like a soul in h.e.l.l, dashed into the opposite wall.

He recoiled, staggered, spun round and fell sprawling most horribly--stone dead.

Waldron, at sight of this awful end, felt an uncontrollable terror sweep over his drunk and maddened senses. Though all his blood was leaping in his arteries, and his breath coming so fast it choked him, yet a moment's seeming sanity possessed his reeling brain.

"The door! The door, up there!" he screamed, with a wild, terrible curse.

Then, turning toward the ladder, in spite of his fat and flabby muscles quivering in terrible spasms, he ran up the long steel structure with a supreme and ape-like agility.

Fifty feet he made, seventy-five, ninety--

But, all at once, something seemed to break in his overtaxed heart.

A blackness swam before his dazzled eyes. His head fell back. Unnerved, his fingers lost their hold. And, whirling over and over in midair, he dropped like a plummet.

By one wall lay Flint's body. At the foot of the ladder, like a crushed sack of bones, sprawled the corpse of "Tiger" Waldron.

And still the rus.h.i.+ng oxygen, with which they two had hoped to dominate the world, poured through the six-inch main, far, far above--senseless matter, blindly avenging itself upon the rash and evil men who impiously had sought to cage and master it!

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

VISIONS.

Thus perished Flint and Waldron, scourges of the earth. Thus they died, slain by the very force which they had planned would betray mankind and deliver it into their chains. Thus vanished, forever, the most sinister and cruel minds ever evolved upon this planet; the greatest menace the human race had ever known; the evil Masters of the World.

And as they died, ma.s.sed around their perished Air Trust plant, a throng of silent, earnest watchers stood, with faces illumined by the symbolic, sacrificial flames--a throng of emanc.i.p.ated workers, of toilers from whose bowed shoulders now forever had been lifted the frightful menace of a universal bondage.

Explosion after explosion burst from the tortured Inferno of the vast plant. Buildings came cras.h.i.+ng, reeling, thundering down; walls fell, amid vast, belching clouds of dust and smoke; a white, consuming sheet of flame crackled across the sinister and evil place; and in its wake glowed incandescent ruins.

Then, in one final burst of thunderous tumult, the hugest tank of all, exploding with a roar like that of Doom itself, hurled belching flames on high.

For many miles--in Buffalo, Rochester, Toronto and scores of cities on both sides of the Great Lakes--silent mult.i.tudes watched the glare against the midnight sky; and many wept for joy; and many prayed. All understood the meaning of that sight. The light upon the heavens seemed a signal and a beacon--a promise that the Old Times had pa.s.sed away forever--a covenant of the New.

And, as the final explosion shattered the Temple of Bondage to wreckage, flung it far into the rus.h.i.+ng river and swept it over the leaping, thundering Falls, the news flashed on a thousand wires, to all cities and all lands; and though the mercenaries of the two dead world-masters still might struggle and might strive to beat the toilers back to slavery again, their days were numbered and their powers forever broken.

Together in the doorway of the refuge at Port Colborne, Catherine stood with Gabriel, watching the beacon of liberty upon the heavens. The light, a halo round her eager face, showed his powerful figure and the smile of triumph in his eyes. His left arm, broken by the fall in the aeroplane, now rested in a sling. His right, protecting in its strength, was round the girl. And as her head found shelter and rest, at length, upon his shoulder, she, too, smiled; and her eyes seemed to see visions in the glory of the sky.

"Visions!" said she, softly, as though voicing a universal thought. "Do you behold them, too?"

He nodded.

"Yes," he answered, "and they are beautiful and sweet and pure!"

"Visions that we now shall surely see?"

"Shall surely see!" he echoed; and a little silence fell. Far off, they seemed to hear a vast and thousand-throated cheering, that the night-wind brought to them in long and heart-inspiring cadences.

"Gabriel," she said, at last.