lying
steel.

Leaping toward the zenith, a giant tongue of flame roared heavenward. So
intense the heat had now become, that the solid brick and concrete
walls, exposed to the direct verberation of the flame, began to crack
and crumble.

Gabriel ordered a general retreat of the attacking army. Victory was
won; and to stay near that gushing tornado of flame, with new explosions
bound to occur as the other oxygen tanks let go, must mean annihilation.

So the triumphant Army of the Proletaire fell back and back still
further, out into the wrecked and trampled Park, and all through the
city, where shattered buildings, many of them ablaze, and broken trees,
dead bodies, smashed ordnance and chaos absolute told something of the
story of that brief but terrible war.

Ringed round the perishing ruins of the Air Trust they stood, these
mute, thrilled thousands. Silence fell, now, as they watched the
roaring, ever-mounting flames that, whipped by the breeze, crashed
upward in long and cadenced tourbillions of white, of awful
incandescence.

And the river, ever-hurrying, always foaming on and downward to its
titanic plunge, sparkled with eerie lights in that vast glow. Its voice
of thunder seemed to chant the passing and the requiem of the Curse of
the World, Capitalism.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

DEATH IN THE PIT OF STEEL.

And Flint, now, what of him! And Waldron?

While the Air Trust plant was burning, crumbling, smashing down, what of
its masters, the masters of the world?

A sense of vast relief possessed them both, at first, as the steel door
clanged after them.

Now, for a time at least, they realized that they were safe, safe from
the People, safe from the awakened and triumphant Proletariat. Even now,
had they surrendered, they would have been spared; but nothing was
further from their thoughts than any treating with the despised and
hated enemy.

Foremost in the mind of each, now, was the thought that if they could
but stand siege, a day or so, the troops of the government--their
government and their troops, their own personal property--would
inevitably rescue them.

With this comforting belief, together they descended the long steel
staircase to the trap-door, passed through this, and climbed down the
metal ladder to the vast storage-vaults.

Here, everything was cool and quiet and well-lighted. Not yet had the
electric-generating plant been put out of action. Though all its workers
had either been d