He had listened to the report of the fire brigade’s captain, and his doubtless correct theory that the desperate marauder had dropped his bombs almost simultaneously, one explosive and the other incendiary. The latter had caught the homestead fair and had caused the instant and terrific conflagration. Yet he had hoped. . . . He tried to hope still. The men would soon return from the cesspool and begin to shovel away the debris from the writing-table by the wall. To get his brain into complete working order had been a matter of time. The shock of the explosion, his wound, his enormous physical and mental effort on the memorable Wednesday, his puzzled amazement, the cataclysmic revelation of the war, his anxiety for Quong Ho, had knocked him out for a couple of days. When he recovered and regained mental grip of things, the only things he could grip at first were the staggering history of the war and the progress of Quong Ho. The two absorbing interests battened down fears that vaguely began to rise from deep recesses of his mind. But strength regained, Quong Ho out of immediate peril of death and the war a thing envisaged, practically understood, accepted, the fears burst their hatches and crowded round him, haunting and tormenting. And now he stared through the doorway of his house, with sinking heart, scarcely daring to hope that those fears should prove unrealized. He glanced round. The men were spending inordinate time in the disposal of the carrion. Again he entered and stood in the midst of the rubbish. Only one section of bookcase remained, crazily askew. He had noted it on the Wednesday. He clambered gingerly towards it. The first slanting, half-charred, half-drenched book, whose title he made out was _Queechy_. By the author of _The Wide, Wide World_. Next to it was _Flowering Shrubs of Great Britain_, the date of which he knew to be eighteen-fifty-four. His heart sank. Only the refuse of his famous deal with the second-hand bookseller remained. Just that little bit of section. The rest of his library was there—down there in the molten quagmire. At last the men came, shovels on shoulder. He pointed out the place where his long table used to stand and bade them dig. He had brought, too, a shovel for himself, and he dug with them, violently, pantingly, distractedly, heaving the shovelfuls over his shoulders, wallowing in the filth regardless of Pillivant’s expensive clothes; soon an object of dripping sweat and squalor, distinguishable only from his co-workers by his begrimed and bandaged head. The men began to pant and relax. He overheard as in a dream one of them saying, in a grumbling tone, something about beer. The sun beat fiercely down on the roofless site. He said: “Dig like hell. Dig all day. I’ll stand you a couple of gallons apiece when you get home. If you’re thirsty now, there’s heaps of water.”