The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction Megapack 01

by George Allan England

  Flint cringed, shuddering and stopped his ears. His partner, gloating over him, smoked faster now. A strange light shone in his eyes. His pulse beat faster than usual, and a certain extravagance of thought and speech had become manifest in him.

  He tried to compose himself, feeling that he must not push the cowardly Flint too far, but his ideas refused to flow in orderly sequence. Wonderingly he stared at his cigar, the tip of which was now glowing more brightly than before.

  And then, suddenly sniffing the air he understood. His eyes widened with horror absolute. He started forward, gasped and cried:

  “Flint! Flint! The oxygen is coming in!”

  Uncomprehending, the old man still stood there, mumbling to himself. His face was now tinged with unusual color, and his heart, too, was thumping strangely.

  “Oxygen!” shouted Waldron, shaking him by the shoulder. “It—it’s leaking in, here, somewhere! If we can’t stop it—we’re dead men!”

  “Eh? What?” stammered the Billionaire, staring at him with eyes of half-intoxicated fear. “What d’you mean, the oxygen? In—in here?”

  “In here!” cried “Tiger,” casting a wild and terrible gaze about him at the vast, empty trap of steel. “Can’t you smell it? That ozone smell? My God, we’re lost! We’re lost!”

  “You’re crazy!” retorted Flint, with vigor. “Nothing of the sort could happen!” His head was held high, now, and new life seemed surging through that spent and drug-wrecked body. “There’s no way those curs could have turned on any gas, here. You’re crazy, ha! ha! ha! Insane, eh? A good joke—capital joke, that! I must tell it at the Union League Club! ‘Tiger’ Waldron, suddenly insane, and—ha! ha! ha!”

  He burst into a long, shrill cacchination. Already his face was scarlet and his mind a whirl. Though neither man understood the reason, yet the fact remained that one of the last great explosions had ruptured a subterranean check-valve closing the six-inch pipe that was to feed the storage-tanks; and now a swift, huge stream of pure oxygen gas was rushing at tremendous velocity into the vast chamber of steel.

  Waldron, his heart leaping as though it would burst his ribs, raised a fist to strike down his insulter; then, with drunken indecision, joined in the maniacal laughter of the staggering old man.

  In their ears a strange, wild humming now became audible. Lights danced before their eyes; their senses reeled, and violent, extravagant ideas surged through their drunken brains.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!” rang Waldron’s crazy laughter, echoing the old man’s. All at once, his cigar broke into flame. Cursing, he hurled it away, staggering back against the ladder and stood there swaying, clutching it to hold himself from falling.

  There he stood, and stared at Flint, with eyes that started from his head, with panting breath and crimson face.

  The old man, in a sudden revulsion of terror, was now grovelling along the floor, by one of the massive walls, clawing at the steel with impotent hands and screaming mingled prayers and oaths. His ravings, horrible to hear, echoed through the great tank, now swiftly filling with gas.

  “Help! Help!” he screamed. “Save me—my God—save me—. Let me out, let me out! A million, if you let me out! A billion—the whole world! The world, ha! ha! ha! Damn it to Hell—the world, I say! I’ll give the world to be let out! It’s mine—I own it—all, all mine! Ha! Dogs! You would rise up against your master and your God, would you? But it’s no use—we’ll beat you yet—out! out!—the world—I own it! All this plant—this gas, all mine! My oxygen—ah! it chokes me! Help! Help!—Swine! I’ll scourge you yet—absolute power—the world—!”

  With one final spark of energy, panting, his heart flailing itself to death under the pitiless urge of the oxygen, old Flint sprang up, ran wildly, blindly straight across the steel floor, and, screaming blasphemies like a soul in Hell, dashed into the opposite wall.

  He recoiled, staggered, spun round and fell sprawling most horribly—stone dead.

  Waldron, at sight of this awful end, felt an uncontrollable terror sweep over his drunk and maddened senses. Though all his blood was leaping in his arteries, and his breath coming so fast it choked him, yet a moment’s seeming sanity possessed his reeling brain.

  “The door! The door, up there!” he screamed, with a wild, terrible curse.

  Then, turning toward the ladder, in spite of his fat and flabby muscles quivering in terrible spasms, he ran up the long steel structure with a supreme and ape-like agility.

  Fifty feet he made, seventy-five, ninety—

  But, all at once, something seemed to break in his overtaxed heart.

  A blackness swam before his dazzled eyes. His head fell back. Unnerved, his fingers lost their hold. And, whirling over and over in midair, he dropped like a plummet.

  By one wall lay Flint’s body. At the foot of the ladder, like a crushed sack of bones, sprawled the corpse of “Tiger” Waldron.

  And still the rushing oxygen, with which they two had hoped to dominate the world, poured through the six-inch main, far, far above—senseless matter, blindly avenging itself upon the rash and evil men who impiously had sought to cage and master it!

  CHAPTER XXXVIII.

  VISIONS.

  Thus perished Flint and Waldron, scourges of the earth. Thus they died, slain by the very force which they had planned would betray mankind and deliver it into their chains. Thus vanished, forever, the most sinister and cruel minds ever evolved upon this planet; the greatest menace the human race had ever known; the evil Masters of the World.

  And as they died, massed around their perished Air Trust plant, a throng of silent, earnest watchers stood, with faces illumined by the symbolic, sacrificial flames—a throng of emancipated workers, of toilers from whose bowed shoulders now forever had been lifted the frightful menace of a universal bondage.

  Explosion after explosion burst from the tortured Inferno of the vast plant. Buildings came crashing, reeling, thundering down; walls fell, amid vast, belching clouds of dust and smoke; a white, consuming sheet of flame crackled across the sinister and evil place; and in its wake glowed incandescent ruins.

  Then, in one final burst of thunderous tumult, the hugest tank of all, exploding with a roar like that of Doom itself, hurled belching flames on high.

  For many miles—in Buffalo, Rochester, Toronto and scores of cities on both sides of the Great Lakes—silent multitudes watched the glare against the midnight sky; and many wept for joy; and many prayed. All understood the meaning of that sight. The light upon the heavens seemed a signal and a beacon—a promise that the Old Times had passed away forever—a covenant of the New.

  And, as the final explosion shattered the Temple of Bondage to wreckage, flung it far into the rushing river and swept it over the leaping, thundering Falls, the news flashed on a thousand wires, to all cities and all lands; and though the mercenaries of the two dead world-masters still might struggle and might strive to beat the toilers back to slavery again, their days were numbered and their powers forever broken.

  Together in the doorway of the refuge at Port Colborne, Catherine stood with Gabriel, watching the beacon of liberty upon the heavens. The light, a halo round her eager face, showed his powerful figure and the smile of triumph in his eyes. His left arm, broken by the fall in the aeroplane, now rested in a sling. His right, protecting in its strength, was round the girl. And as her head found shelter and rest, at length, upon his shoulder, she, too, smiled; and her eyes seemed to see visions in the glory of the sky.

  “Visions!” said she, softly, as though voicing a universal thought. “Do you behold them, too?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes,” he answered, “and they are beautiful and sweet and pure!”

  “Visions that we now shall surely see?”

  “Shall surely see!” he echoed; and a little silence fell. Far off, they seemed to hear a vast and thousand-throated cheering, that the night-wind brought to them in long and heart-inspiring cadences.

  “Gabriel,” she said, at last.

&
nbsp; “Well?”

  “I wish he might have seen them, and have understood! In spite of all he did, and was, he was my father!”

  “Yes,” answered Gabriel, sensing her grief. “But would you have had him live through this? Live, with the whole world out of his grasp, again? Live, with all his plans wrecked and broken? Live on in this new time, where he could have comprehended nothing? Live on, in misery and rage and impotence?

  “Your father was an old man, Catherine. You know as well as I do—better, perhaps—the whole trend of his life’s thought and ambition. Even if he’d lived, he couldn’t have changed, now, at his age. It would have been an utter impossibility. Why say more?”

  Catherine made no reply; but in her very attitude of trust and confidence, Gabriel knew he read the comfort he had given her.

  Silence, a while. At last she spoke.

  “Visions!” she whispered. “Wonderful visions of the glad, new time! How do you see them, Gabriel?”

  “How do I see them?” His face seemed to glow with inspiration under the shining light in the far heavens. “I see them as the realization of a time, now really close at hand, when this old world of ours shall be, as it never yet has been, in truth civilized, emancipated, free. When the night of ignorance, kingcraft, priestcraft, servility and prejudice, bigotry and superstition shall be forever swept away by the dawn of intelligence and universal education, by scientific truth and light—by understanding and by fearlessness.

  “When Science shall no longer be ‘the mystery of a class,’ but shall become the heritage of all mankind. When, because much is known by all, nothing shall be dreaded by any. When all mankind shall be absolutely its own master, strong, and brave, and free!”

  “Like you, Gabriel!” the girl exclaimed, from her heart.

  “Don’t say that!” he disclaimed. “Don’t—”

  She put her hand over his mouth.

  “Shhhh!” she forbade him. “You mustn’t argue, now, because your arm’s just been set and we don’t want any fever. If my dreams include you, too, Gabriel, don’t try to tell me I’m mistaken—because I’m not, to begin with, and I know I’m not!”

  He laughed, and shook his head.

  “Do you realize,” said he, “that when it comes to bravery, and strength, and the splendid freedom of an emancipated soul, I must look to you for light and leading?”

  “Don’t!” she whispered. “Look only to the future—to the newer, better world now coming to birth! The time which is to know no poverty, no crime, no children’s blood wrung out for dividends!

  “The future when no longer Idleness can enslave Labor to its tasks. When every man who will, may labor freely, whether with hand or brain, and receive the full value of his toil, undiminished by any theft or purloining whatsoever!”

  “The future,” he continued, as she paused, “when crowns, titles, swords, rifles and dreadnaughts shall be known only by history. When the earth and the fulness thereof shall belong to all Earth’s people; and when its soil need be no longer fertilized with human blood, its crops no longer be brought forth watered by sweat and tears.

  “Such have been my visions and my dreams, Catherine—a few of them. Now they are coming true! And other dreams and other visions—dreams of you and visions of our life together—what of them?”

  “Why need you ask, Gabriel?” she answered, raising her lips to his.

  The sound of singing, a triumphal chorus of the accomplished Revolution, a vast and million-throated song, seemed wafted to them on the wings of night.

  And the pure stars, witnessing their love and troth, looked down upon them from the heavens where shone the fire-glow of the Great Emancipation.