They camped that night in an upper story of the Pequot National Bank
Building on Hampstead Street. Here, having cleared out the bats and
spiders, they made themselves an eerie secure from attack, and slept
long and soundly. Dawn found them at work among the overgrown ruins,
much as--three months before--they had labored in the Metropolitan
Tower and about it. Less, however, remained to salvage here. For the
smaller and lighter types of buildings had preserved far less of the
relics of civilization than had been left in the vast and solid
structures of New York.
In a few places, none the less, they still came upon the little piles
of the gray ash that marked where men and women had fallen and died;
but these occurred only in the most sheltered spots. Stern paid no
attention to them. His energies and his attention were now fixed on
the one task of getting skins, arms, ammunition and supplies. And
before nightfall, by a systematic looting of such shops as
remained--perhaps not above a score in all could even be entered--the
girl and he had gathered more than enough to last them on their way to
Boston. One find which pleased him immensely was a dozen sealed glass
jars of tobacco.
"As for a pipe," said he, "I can make that easily enough. What's more
I will!" More still, he did, that very evening, and the gloom was
redolent again of good smoke. Thereafter he slept as not for a long,
long time.
They spent the next day in fashioning new garments and sandals; in
putting to rights the two rifles Stern had chosen from the basement of
the State armory, and in making bandoliers to carry their supply of
cartridges. The possession of a knife once more, and of steel
wherewith readily to strike fire, delighted the man enormously. The
scissors they found in a hardware-shop, though rusty, enabled him to
trim his beard and hair. Beatrice hailed a warped hard-rubber comb
with joy.
But the great discovery still awaited them, the one supreme find which
in a moment changed every plan of travel, opened the world to them,
and at a single stroke increased their hopes ten thousandfold--the
discovery of the old Pauillac monoplane!
They came upon this machine, pregnant with such vast possibilities, in
a concrete hangar back of the Federal courthouse on Anderson Street.
The building attracted Stern's attention by its unusual state of
preservation. He burst in one of the rusted iron shutters and climbed
through the window to see what might be inside.
A moment later Beatrice heard a cry of astonishment and joy.
"Great Heavens!" the man exclaimed, appearing at the window. "Come in!
Come in--see what I've found!"
And he stretched out his hands to help her up and through the
aperture.
"What is it, boy? More arms? More--"
"An aeroplane! Good God, think o' that, will you?"
"An aeroplane? But it's all to pieces, of course, and--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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