The early gray February twilight was closing in upon them when they left the lifted bridge. They had been there long, yet as they turned to go, Helen gave one backward look. There, spread away across the stricken plain, she saw for the last time the prostrate thing which yesterday had been the living city; and over it, like the winding linen of a shroud, lay the white ashes in the snow.

CHAPTER XXIV

On the top floor of the Salamander office in William Street a man stood silent before a map desk on which was laid an open map of the city of Boston. It was late in the afternoon, and the level rays of the declining sun came in redly at the window. The man standing at the desk did not notice them; he was looking stolidly from map to newspaper, from newspaper to map, as from the hysterical and conflicting accounts of the conflagration he tried to measure the extent of the calamity.

The morning papers had told but little, since they had gone to press when the fire was only a few hours old; and as the day was Sunday, and a holiday, there had been available only a few of the usual flock of evening sheets which begin to appear in New York shortly after breakfast. With one of these by his elbow, in the fading light of the late February day, F. Mills O'Connor stood, stonily and with hard eyes, gazing at ruin.

He was alone in the office, since the one other person who had been with him had, under instructions, departed. This was George McGee, the Salamander's map clerk for New England. There was no reason whatever why George should have visited William Street on a Sunday; nevertheless Mr. O'Connor, on arriving, had found him standing aimlessly and undecided in front of the door.

"What do you want here?" he had said to George, coldly.

"Nothing. That is, I came over from Brooklyn to see if any one wanted anything. I thought maybe somebody would be down, and they'd need some one to help take off the lines, sir."

"Well, I don't need any help. You can go," said the other.

"I didn't know. We've got a lot of business in that part of Boston, sir. I know where all the dailies are filed. You'll need me if you're going to go over the lines, sir."

O'Connor considered.

"Well, come up, then," he said ungraciously. "We'll have to walk up; there's no steam on."

It was then three o'clock. At not later than a quarter to four Mr.

O'Connor had definitely determined that unless the report of the conflagration's extent had been exaggerated beyond all human connection with the facts, the Salamander had sustained a loss in Boston which was considerably greater than its resources would permit it to pay. In other words, if the printed account were even remotely true, the Salamander was, as the phrase has it, insolvent. To put it even more shortly, the company was ruined. Facing this fact and its string of entailed consequences, the man most directly interested was silent so long that his youthful a.s.sistant became nervous.

"Pretty bad loss, ain't it?" he asked sympathetically.

O'Connor looked at him unseeingly. In his busy mind he was running through an imaginary calculation. It was somewhat as follows: Salamander's net liability in the section of Boston presumably destroyed, $600,000--Salamander's net surplus available for payment of losses, $400,000. Inevitably the problem ended: Salamander's impairment of capital, $200,000. And the fire was still burning.

Boston could be rebuilt, but could the Salamander?

He turned on the clerk beside him with the savage and melodramatic gesture of an irritated musical comedy star, and the boy recoiled before him.

"That's all. You can go home," he said curtly.

Two minutes later he was left alone in the silent office.

At the best of times there was in the nature of Mr. Edward Eggleston Murch not overmuch genuine urbanity. Urbanity of the surface he had, of course; he called on it at need in very much the same way that he called on his stenographer. But of true courtesy or consideration Mr.

Murch's makeup was singularly and flawlessly free. On the contrary he could, on occasion, summon to his face a congealment and to his eye a steely gleam which n.o.body admired but which all respected. Ordinarily this was either for his inferiors, or for those unfortunates who had come to cross purposes with him, or for those who had made blunders costly to him that his most glacial manner was reserved; but every one about the Salamander office knew of it, either by hearsay or by actual experience. Mr. O'Connor was removed from all danger of running counter to the Salamander's leading stockholder, so long as the company continued to make money. But what might now happen, Mr. O'Connor did not care to consider--and yet the topic engrossed his attention so deeply that darkness surprised him still adrift on the waters of this sea of doubt.

Not until the swift winter nightfall recalled him to himself did he remember the world around him; and when at last he groped his way down the long flights of dusky stairs to the street, his was the slow and inelastic step of a beaten man.

Mr. Murch had spent the holiday and the week-end at the country place of a fellow financier. To this retired spot news penetrated with decorum and conservatism. One was in no danger, at Holmdale, of acting on premature information, for all information which reached this sequestered Westchester chateau did so in the most leisurely and placid manner. For this very reason Mr. Murch shunned Holmdale and resorted to many a subterfuge to avoid the acceptance of divers invitations to sojourn beneath the medieval roof of its host, who happened to be a man whom even Mr. Murch hesitated to offend. In the present case, when on returning to New York early Monday morning he learned that one of the most terrible losses in fire insurance annals had occurred without his knowledge, it did not tend to sweeten his temper.

He did not go to his own office, but with a grim face started directly for the building of the Salamander. Once within its portals he immediately entered Mr. O'Connor's room. Mr. O'Connor was seated at his desk, with a pile of daily reports before him.

"How much do we lose in Boston?" the visitor demanded.

The President of the Salamander had been in the building during most of the past twenty-four hours, taking off the lines in the burned district on a special bordereau. Neither the Osgood office nor his special agent could be reached on the long distance telephone; and the newspaper accounts, even thus long after the fire, were still painfully vague and somewhat rhetorically hysterical. They talked much of the "devouring element," and the word "lurid" frequently occurred; but no reporter had been sufficiently practical to bound the burned district or to state specifically what buildings had or had not been spared.

Still, they told enough. To the meanest intelligence it was patent that a tremendous catastrophe had taken place, that most of the section from School Street south to the railroad was leveled, and virtually everything therein was totally destroyed--except the fireproof buildings, which were still standing, scorched and shaken, stripped clean of combustible contents, but not fatally damaged.

O'Connor had the list in his hand. In his heart now was the calm absence of feeling which marks the man who has abandoned hope.

"I should estimate our net liability in the burned district at about $700,000," he said unemotionally.

Mr. Murch leaned forward in his chair.

"And the net surplus of the company is--?" he asked menacingly.

"You know what it is. It's half a million, roughly."

"Well, will you tell me what in the devil you mean by putting this company in a position to lose more money than it has clear?"

O'Connor, beyond caring now, actually smiled.

"Fortunes of war, Mr. Murch. You wanted a leading position in Boston, if you'll remember. I gave it to you."

"I didn't want any such position as my present one," rejoined Mr.

Murch, in frigid tones.

"I didn't either, if you come to that," retorted O'Connor, promptly.

The financier's irritation was increased by this unexpectedly reckless att.i.tude on the part of the man who should, he felt, be abased in sackcloth before him. He regarded the other with surprise, through his indignation.

"You take this remarkably coolly, I should say," he remarked.

"There's no use in getting excited--the eggs are smashed now. But just the same," returned O'Connor, with a flash of spirit, "I'm just as sore about this as if I owned every dollar of Salamander stock there is on the books."

The mention of the unit of currency reminded his companion of something else.

"What do you suppose the market is doing?" he said.

"I haven't the slightest idea," replied the other.

Murch lifted the receiver from the telephone at his elbow.

"h.e.l.lo: give me Broad nine nine seven six. Is this At.w.a.ter and Jenkins? Give me Mr. At.w.a.ter--this is Mr. Murch speaking. That you, Billy? How's the market?"

He replaced the receiver with a snap.

"Everything off at the opening. Bad slump in Maryland Traction and P.

N. T."

"It ought to go off some more when the fire companies in general start liquidating. There will have to be a big unloading to raise the amount of cash necessary to pay those Boston losses. I suppose, though, the British companies will send the money across--they usually do, and that'll help a little. That's the worst of these fires--they hit you going and coming. Suppose we lose seven hundred thousand; well, before we get through we'll have to sell eight or nine hundred thousand dollars' worth of securities, at present prices, to pay it."

"How much cash have we on deposit?" Mr. Murch inquired.

O'Connor handed him the last weekly statement in silence. The fact that the other man had expressed no definite intention was to him encouraging. It might be that all was not over yet.