Swift was greatly moved. "Miss Magnet," he said gently, putting her head upon his shoulder. "I think you had better rest. You are tired out. This is different, you know. You needn't when you get safely down." The girl gave him a grateful glance and obeyed him quietly. "How did she escape?" soliloquized Mr. Ticks, loud enough to be overheard. "Oh, I don't know--don't ask me--unless it was that I was in a wooden boat. All the rest on the lake go by storage battery and are made of steel. Mine is the only old-fashioned boat, but I was always afraid. Everybody laughed at me, but I did what I do at home. I cut off the legs of a chair and fixed them in glass tumblers. I always sit in my office on glass tumblers. My bed rests on glass tumblers, too. It's a non-conductor, you know. I used to get shocked every day. Everybody got shocked in Russell, but they pretended not to mind it." "But, Miss Magnet, do you know what is the cause of Russell's fate? of this deadly atmosphere beneath us?" "N-no--unless--of course that can't be. I guess it's a visitation of Providence--but I don't know for what." The girl stopped, awed at the thoughts she had evoked. "A visitation of Providence!" repeated Mr. Ticks, slowly. "Yes, she is right. The sin of presumptuousness was visited upon that unhappy place." "Do you mean to say"--Swift started up. Somehow he had forgotten Russell, its mysterious fate, his mission, everything but the girl. He had awaked to his duty. "Do you mean to say that the whole thing is due to e--?" "Hold on! Look below!" interrupted the professor. They clung to the ropes and glued their gaze upon the sight so far beneath them. The storm had magically cleared away. The sunlight now pierced the whole landscape for the first time since the disaster. The lost city, in black, shapeless ruins, lay directly beneath them. "We will go down." The professor opened the safety-valve cautiously. "The devil has been chased away by the storm," he said emphatically. Indeed, the baleful vapor had gone. As they swiftly descended strange sights met their eyes. They could still see everything microscopically for a radius of twenty miles around. Black specks were rushing up the stricken railroad tracks, along the roads, hurrying to the city of doom. Linemen began to extend the wires; trackmen began laying new tracks. Fully fifty thousand impatient men were madly plunging these twenty miles from different points of the circumference, converging toward Russell. The dead line had become a mysterious thing of the past. The danger to life was over, and it became an unprecedented race to see who would get first upon the spot. "If this calm lasts, as I think it will, we will be on the ground two hours ahead of the crowd." Swift's eyes sparkled in reportorial ecstasy. There was no time now nor inclination for words. In ten minutes the _High Tariff_ was within a few hundred feet of the doomed city. Buzzards followed its descent curiously.