where the heads had appeared,
and the air was shaken by the explosion. In places the stone facing of
the building was torn away, exposing the iron construction beneath. The
next moment similar sheets of flame and smoke smote the front of the
building across the street opposite it. Between the explosions we could
hear the rattle of the automatic pistols and rifles. For several minutes
this mid-air battle continued, then died out. It was patent that our
comrades were in one building, that Mercenaries were in the other, and
that they were fighting across the street. But we could not tell
which was which--which building contained our comrades and which the
Mercenaries.

By this time the column on the street was almost on us. As the front of
it passed under the warring buildings, both went into action again--one
building dropping bombs into the street, being attacked from across the
street, and in return replying to that attack. Thus we learned which
building was held by our comrades, and they did good work, saving those
in the street from the bombs of the enemy.

Hartman gripped my arm and dragged me into a wide entrance.

"They're not our comrades," he shouted in my ear.

The inner doors to the entrance were locked and bolted. We could not
escape. The next moment the front of the column went by. It was not a
column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people
of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the
blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone
through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now
looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now
dynamic--a fascinating spectacle of dread. It surged past my vision in
concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growling, carnivorous, drunk with
whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust
for blood--men, women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious
intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all
the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and
great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had
sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness
and corruption, withered hags and death's-heads bearded like patriarchs,
festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted,
misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the
ho