Chalender was not stubborn and dogged. He was elastic. Anybody could bend or turn him aside, but he always came again with the backlash of a steel rod or a whip. The failure in Tabelee’s case only confirmed his determination. He and his crew proceeded to level a street of buildings one by one. As if a vast invisible plough overturned them along its furrow, they rolled over and lay black. RoBards seeing how the trick was done was eager to carry on the good work. Chalender assigned to him a number of powder kegs and a wagon to carry them, and despatched him ahead. There was a kind of intoxication in this destruction. The fever was catching. RoBards had a high motive, but he became in spirit once more a boy on Hallowe’en. He had in his late youth joined the Callithumpian Band that made New Year’s Eve a carnival of mischief. He had taken a sign, “Coffin Warehouse,” and hung it on a doctor’s front gate. On the Fourth of July he had fired a flintlock from his father’s front stoop and blown the powdered scratch wig from the head of an old-fashioned neighbor sitting in his window. He had set off spitfire crackers and squibs under the bellies of sleepy horses. And now he was exultant in a private Evacuation Day festivity, kicking over buildings like a naughty young Pantagruel. A kind of grim laughter filled his soul as he heard the thud of some vast structure, built up by masons painfully month by month, and knocked down by him in one noisy moment. He so lost sight of his progress that he did not pause to see whose shops he wrecked. In one warehouse filled with Chinese importations he made his fuse of a bolt of silk strangely exquisite to his numbed fingers; he had long since discarded his soppy gloves. As he unreeled the bolt and stretched a royal path for the fire, the silk seemed to whisper in his fingers, bewailing its use for such a purpose. He wondered what the Celestial who spun it after the American pattern had planned it for—a lady’s dress, no doubt. Running back to the cellar he filled a cornucopia of Chinese paper with powder and returned along his path, sifting the black grains over the sulphur-hued fabric. As he proceeded sidewise, crab-fashion, up the stairs his shoulder struck somebody’s thighs. He saw beneath his gaze a pair of black slippers, little ones in India rubbers. His eyes rose with him, and widened to find at the top of the dress, a face of beauty in such wrath that he could hardly recognize it as his wife’s. “Patty!” he gasped, “what are you doing here, in the name of——” “What in the same name are you doing here?” she broke in, her voice a-croak with unwomanly ire. “Trying to save the city.” “What do you care about the city?” she sneered, so harsh a look in her eyes that he lost patience and commanded: “Get out of the way at once! I’m going to blow up this building.” She forgot her obedience and shamed him before strangers by retorting: “I’ll not budge! I’ve a better right than you in my father’s warehouse.”