suddenly drew a pistol and shot Dombey through the head. The next
instant I shot him. But it was too late. Dombey expired without a groan,
immediately. I doubt if he even knew what had happened to him.

"Leaving the two corpses, I hurried on past the burning house to the
garage, and there found Doctor Hoyle's motor car. The tanks were filled
with gasoline, and it was ready for use. And it was in this car that I
threaded the streets of the ruined city and came back to the survivors
on the campus. The other scouts returned, but none had been so
fortunate. Professor Fairmead had found a Shetland pony, but the poor
creature, tied in a stable and abandoned for days, was so weak from want
of food and water that it could carry no burden at all. Some of the men
were for turning it loose, but I insisted that we should lead it along
with us, so that, if we got out of food, we would have it to eat.

"There were forty-seven of us when we started, many being women and
children. The President of the Faculty, an old man to begin with, and
now hopelessly broken by the awful happenings of the past week, rode
in the motor car with several young children and the aged mother of
Professor Fairmead. Wathope, a young professor of English, who had a
grievous bullet-wound in his leg, drove the car. The rest of us walked,
Professor Fairmead leading the pony.

"It was what should have been a bright summer day, but the smoke from
the burning world filled the sky, through which the sun shone murkily,
a dull and lifeless orb, blood-red and ominous. But we had grown
accustomed to that blood-red sun. With the smoke it was different. It
bit into our nostrils and eyes, and there was not one of us whose eyes
were not bloodshot. We directed our course to the southeast through the
endless miles of suburban residences, travelling along where the first
swells of low hills rose from the flat of the central city. It was by
this way, only, that we could expect to gain the country.

"Our progress was painfully slow. The women and children could not walk
fast. They did not dream of walking, my grandsons, in the way all people
walk to-day. In truth, none of us knew how to walk. It was not until
after the plague that I learned really to walk. So it was that the pace
of the slowest was the pace of all, for we dared not separate on account
of the prowlers. There were not so many now of these human beasts of
prey. The plague had already well diminished their numbers