"Everywhere that roots can hold at all, Mother Nature has set up her flags again. Hark! What's that?" A moment they listened intently. Up to them, from very far, rose a wailing cry, tremulous, long-drawn, formidable. "Oh! Then there _are_ people, after all?" faltered the girl, grasping Stern's arm. He laughed. "No, hardly!" answered he. "I see you don't know the wolf-cry. I didn't till I heard it in the Hudson Bay country, last winter--that is, last winter, plus X. Not very pleasant, is it?" "Wolves! Then--there are--" "Why not? Probably all sorts of game on the island now. Why shouldn't there be? All in Mother Nature's stock-in-trade, you know. "But come, come, don't let that worry you. We're safe, for the present. Time enough to consider hunting later. Let's creep around here to the other side of the tower, and see what we can see." Silently she acquiesced. Together they reached the southern part of the platform, making their way as far as the jumbled rocks of the fallen railing would permit. Very carefully they progressed, fearful every moment lest the support break beneath them and hurl them down along the sloping side of the pinnacle to death. "Look!" bade Stern, pointing. "That very long green line there used to be Broadway. Quite a respectable Forest of Arden now, isn't it?" He swept his hand far outward. "See those steel cages, those tiny, far-off ones with daylight shining through? You know them--the Park Row, the Singer, the Woolworth and all the rest. And the bridges, look at those!" She shivered at the desolate sight. Of the Brooklyn Bridge only the towers were visible. The watchers, two isolated castaways on their island in the sea of uttermost desolation, beheld a dragging mass of wreckage that drooped from these towers on either shore, down to the sparkling flood. The other bridges, newer and stronger far, still remained standing. But even from that distance Stern could quite plainly see, without the telescope, that the Williamsburg Bridge had "buckled" downward and that the farther span of the Blackwell's Island Bridge was in ruinous disrepair. "How horrible, how ghastly is all this waste and ruin!" thought the engineer. "Yet, even in their overthrow, how wonderful are the works of man!" A vast wonder seized him as he stood there gazing; a fierce desire to rehabilitate all this wreckage, to set it right, to start the wheels of the world-machinery running once more. At the thought of his own powerlessness a bitter smile curled his lips. Beatrice seemed to share something of his wonder. "Can it be possible," whispered she, "that you and--and I--are really like Macaulay's lone watcher of the world-wreck on London Bridge?" "That we are actually seeing the thing so often dreamed of by prophets and poets? That 'All this mighty heart is lying still,' at last--forever? The heart of the world, never to beat again?" He made no answer, save to shake his head; but fast his thoughts were running.