plague began to
break out among the rest of us, and as fast as the symptoms appeared, we
sent the stricken ones to these segregated rooms. We compelled them to
walk there by themselves, so as to avoid laying hands on them. It was
heartrending. But still the plague raged among us, and room after
room was filled with the dead and dying. And so we who were yet clean
retreated to the next floor and to the next, before this sea of the
dead, that, room by room and floor by floor, inundated the building.

"The place became a charnel house, and in the middle of the night
the survivors fled forth, taking nothing with them except arms and
ammunition and a heavy store of tinned foods. We camped on the opposite
side of the campus from the prowlers, and, while some stood guard,
others of us volunteered to scout into the city in quest of horses,
motor cars, carts, and wagons, or anything that would carry our
provisions and enable us to emulate the banded workingmen I had seen
fighting their way out to the open country.

"I was one of these scouts; and Doctor Hoyle, remembering that his motor
car had been left behind in his home garage, told me to look for it. We
scouted in pairs, and Dombey, a young undergraduate, accompanied me. We
had to cross half a mile of the residence portion of the city to get
to Doctor Hoyle's home. Here the buildings stood apart, in the midst of
trees and grassy lawns, and here the fires had played freaks, burning
whole blocks, skipping blocks and often skipping a single house in a
block. And here, too, the prowlers were still at their work. We carried
our automatic pistols openly in our hands, and looked desperate enough,
forsooth, to keep them from attacking us. But at Doctor Hoyle's house
the thing happened. Untouched by fire, even as we came to it the smoke
of flames burst forth.

"The miscreant who had set fire to it staggered down the steps and out
along the driveway. Sticking out of his coat pockets were bottles of
whiskey, and he was very drunk. My first impulse was to shoot him, and
I have never ceased regretting that I did not. Staggering and maundering
to himself, with bloodshot eyes, and a raw and bleeding slash down one
side of his bewhiskered face, he was altogether the most nauseating
specimen of degradation and filth I had ever encountered. I did not
shoot him, and he leaned against a tree on the lawn to let us go by.
It was the most absolute, wanton act. Just as we were opposite him,
he