strophe without convulsion,--a devastation voiceless,
passionless, and supine.

The boat had slowed up before what seemed to be a collection of
disarranged houses with the current flowing between lines that indicated
the existence of thoroughfares and streets. Many of the lighter wooden
buildings were huddled together on the street corners with their gables
to the flow; some appeared as if they had fallen on their knees, and
others lay complacently on their sides, like the houses of a child's
toy village. An elevator still lifted itself above the other warehouses;
from the centre of an enormous square pond, once the plaza, still arose
a "Liberty pole," or flagstaff, which now supported a swinging lantern,
and in the distance appeared the glittering dome of some public
building. Grant recognized the scene at once. It was all that was left
of the invincible youth of Tasajara!

As this was an objective point of the scheme of survey and relief for
the district, the boat was made fast to the second story of one of the
warehouses. It was now used as a general store and depot, and bore a
singular resemblance in its interior to Harcourt's grocery at Sidon.
This suggestion was the more fatefully indicated by the fact that half
a dozen men were seated around a stove in the centre, more or less
given up to a kind of philosophical and lazy enjoyment of their enforced
idleness. And when to this was added the more surprising coincidence
that the party consisted of Billings, Peters, and Wingate,--former
residents of Sidon and first citizens of Tasajara,--the resemblance was
complete.

They were ruined,--but they accepted their common fate with a certain
Indian stoicism and Western sense of humor that for the time lifted
them above the vulgar complacency of their former fortunes. There was a
deep-seated, if coarse and irreverent resignation in their philosophy.
At the beginning of the calamity it had been roughly formulated by
Billings in the statement that "it wasn't anybody's fault; there was
nobody to kill, and what couldn't be reached by a Vigilance Committee
there was no use resolootin' over." When the Reverend Doctor Pilsbury
had suggested an appeal to a Higher Power, Peters had replied, good
humoredly, that "a Creator who could fool around with them in that style
was above being interfered with by prayer." At first the calamity had
been a thing to fight against; then it became a practical joke, the
sting of which was lost in