Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/351



ORNING—gray, dismal morning, came to find the green earth scarred with blackened ruin. The blue of the inlet was bordered on both sides with a wide band of mourning which told where Boland's mills and docks and packing houses and lumber piles had been. There remained intact only isolated public structures like the courthouse and jail, the city hall, the high school and the library. Of the business district what stood up among the crumbling walls most sturdily was a stout three-story affair, its exterior scorched and blackened, its interior gutted, its glassless windows like hollow sockets in a skull—and this was the most that remained of all John Boland's business structures.

It was at the edges of the town that the refugees, dumping their domestic wreckage around them, had stopped their panicky flight; and daylight made all their miseries plainer. Comfortless, breakfastless, they turned back, singly and in family parties, disconsolate yet curious, toward their ruins. Before glowing pits of ashes, with gaunt chimneys standing tombstone-like over the graves of homes, they stared dumb, wretched, self-convicted. Lawlessness had punished lawlessness. They had sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. But that was past. The question was—what should they do now?

That was what Salzberg himself was thinking. Leav-