He ran, but the doctors refused to leave the work they had in hand, and the other men growled: "Everybody's got to take their turn." Crosson ran back to Irene with the news. Drury had just emerged from the merciful swoon of shock to the frenzies of his splintered bones, lacerated flesh and blistered skin, and the threat of his infernal environment. The last exquisite fiendishness was the sight of his sweetheart as witness to his agony, her face lighted up by the flames that were ravening toward him, her hands hungering toward him, just beyond the stretch of his one free arm. Crosson heard the lovers murmur to each other across that little abyss. He flung himself against the barriers like a madman. But his hands were futile against the tangle of joists and hot steel. Irene saw him working alone and asked him where the others were, and the doctors. "They wouldn't come!" Crosson groaned, ashamed of their ugly sense of justice. The girl's face took on a look of grim ferocity. She said to Crosson: "Your gun--where is it?" He pointed to where he had left it. It had fallen to the ground. She ran and seized it up, and holding it awkwardly but with menace, advanced on a doctor who toiled with sleeves rolled high, and face and beard and arms blotched with red grime. She thrust the muzzle into his chest and spoke hoarsely: "Doctor Lane, you come with me." "I'm busy here," he growled, pushing the gun aside, hardly knowing what it was. She jammed it against his heart again and cried, "Come with me or I'll kill you!" He followed her, wondering rather than fearing, and she swept a group of men with the weapon, and commanded, "You men come, too." She marched them to the spot where Drury was concealed, and pointed to him and snarled, "Get him out!" The men tested their strength here and there without promise of success. One group started a heap of wheels to slewing downward and Crosson shouted to them to stop. An inch more, and they would have buried Drury from sight or hope. One man wormed through somehow and caught Drury by the hand, but the first tug brought from him such a wail of anguish that the man fell back. He could not budge the body clamped with steel. He could only wrench it. So he came away. "There's nothing for me to do, Reny," the doctor faltered, and, choked with pity for her and her lover and the helplessness of mankind, he turned away, and she let him go. The gun fell to the ground. The other men left the place. One of them said that the wrecking-crew would be along with a derrick in a few hours. "A few hours!" Irene whimpered. She leaned against the lattice that kept her from the bridegroom and tried to tell him to be brave. But he had heard his sentence, and with his last hope went what little courage he had ever had. He began to plead and protest and weep. He gave voice to all the voices of pain, the myriad voices from every tormented particle of him.