Myra clutched his sleeve.  He turned to her a face of death, but she brought her wide eyes close to him.

“Joe!  Joe!”

“Myra,” he said, in a whisper, suddenly in that moment getting a sharp revelation of his changed life.  “I may never see you again.  I belong to those dead girls.”  He paused.  “Go home ... do that for me, anyway.”

He had passed beyond her; there was no opposing him.

“I’ll go,” she murmured.

Then, dizzily, she reeled back, and was lost in the crowd.

And then he set to work.  He was strangely calm now, numb, unfeeling.  There was nothing more to experience, and the overwrought brain refused any new emotions.  So stupendous was the catastrophe that it left him finally calm, ready, and eagerly awake.  He stepped gently through the crowd, searching, and found John Rann, the pressman.  John wept like a little boy when they met.

“Marty got out ... yes ... most of us did ... but Eddie Baker, Morty, and Sam Bender....  It was the cotton waste, Mr. Joe, and the cigarettes....”

Joe put his arm about the rough man.

“Never mind, Johnny ...  Go home to the kiddies....”

There was so little he could do.  He went to a few homes he knew, he went to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue.  At midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine.  There was still the insistent throbbing.  And then he thought of his mother and her fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue, and up the lamp-lit block.  Already newsboys were hoarsely shouting in the night, as they waved their papers—­a cry of the underworld palpitating through the hushed city:  “Wuxtra!  Wuxtra!  Great—­fire—­horror!  Sixty—­killed!  Wuxtra!”

The house was still open, lighted, awake.  People came into the hall as he entered, but he shunned them and started up the stairs.  One called after him.

“Your mother’s out, Mr. Joe.”

He turned.

“Out?  How long?”

“Since the fire started ...  She’s been back and forth several times ...”

He went on up, entered the neat, still front room, lit the gas beside the bureau mirror, and began to pace up and down.  His mother was searching for him; he might have known it; he should have remembered it.

And then he heard the uncanny shouting of the newsboys—­as if those dead girls had risen from their ashes and were running like flaming furies through the city streets, flinging handfuls of their fire into a million homes, shaking New York into a realization of its careless, guilty heart, crying for vengeance, stirring horror and anger and pity.  Who was the guilty one, if not he, the boss?