Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/18

 or a car-float tug could be heard growl ing and whimpering for room, as it wrangled over its right-of-way. Everything moved slowly through the muffled streets. Carriages crept across the sepulchral quietness with a strange and uncouth reverence, like tourists through a catacomb. Surface cars, crawling funereally forward, felt their way with gong-strokes, as blind men feel their way with stick-taps. An occasional taxicab, swinging tentatively out of a side-street, slewed and skidded in the greasy mud. Lonely drivers watched from their seats, watched like sea captains from bridge-ends when ice has invaded their sea lanes.

Under the gas-lamps, dulled to a reddish yellow, passed a thin scattering of pedestrians. A touch of desolation clung about each figure that groped its way through the short-vistaed street, as though the thoroughfare it trod were a lonely and the figure itself the last man that walked a ruined world. It was the worst fog that New York had known for years; the city lay under it like a mummy swathed in grey.

Yet the gloom seemed to crown it with a new wonder, to endow it with a new dignity. That all too shallow tongue of land that is lipped by the East and North rivers took on strange and undreamt-of distances. It lay engulfed in twilight mysteries, enriched with unlooked-for