Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/337

 He had done what he came there to do. There was a sudden move on his part, a flattening against the shingles, then an alert lifting of his head.

"Goo'-by," he blurted and was gone before Henry could even say: "Thanks, you well-meaning old scout."

The conflagration raged on—raged wider and more fiercely. The people of Edgewater watched for hours with grim satisfaction while John Boland's possessions burned to ashes. Yet every tide that floods must also ebb. Eventually, bodies wearied and spirits commenced to sag, the dramatic gorgeousness of the scene somehow to pale.

By midnight the destroying mob had become a thin line stretched for two miles along the blazing waterfront, a line which showed a tendency to break and knot in haggard, worn-out groups, no longer potential, resolved by the lassitude of exhaustion and the subsidence of emotions into mere spectators. The spectacle, so long inspiring, began instead to seem awesome. Men gazed solemn-eyed at red clouds glowing where they had worked at desk or bench, some of them for all of their adult lives. There was some recurrence of hysteria—women weeping quietly who had wept violently some hours before. A hue of thought began to tinge the minds of gazers, misgivings to arise. The people of Edgewater were beginning to reflect—to regret even, to wonder if—if all had been as lost as it seemed before the mad impulse to destroy had come to them.

Even nature experienced a revulsion, for, while the citizens of Edgewater were thus doubting themselves, there came a change of the wind—an ominous change. The watchers on the roofs across the inlet noted it