Then a strong hand grasped her and drew her out into the blessed air, and she felt herself being carried down, down, safely, wondering, as she went, if the vine was roasted yet, or if it still smirked greenly outside this holocaust; wished she had strength to shake a mocking finger at it; and then she knew no more.

For three long hours Courtland and Pat worked side by side, bringing out the living, searching for the dead and dying, carrying them to an improvised hospital in an old warehouse in the next block.  Grim and soiled and gray, with singed hair, blistered hands and faces, and sickened hearts, they toiled on.

To Courtland the experience was like walking with God and being shown the way he might have gone, and how he had been saved.  If he had accepted Ramsey Thomas’s proposition he would have been a sharer in the sin that caused this catastrophe.  He would have been a murderer, almost as much responsible for that charred body lying at his feet, for all those dead and dying, as if he had owned the place.

The whited sepulcher lay a heap of blackened ruins.  Only one small corner rose, of blackened marble, to which clung a fragment of brave green to show what had been but a few short hours before.  The morning’s sun would see it, too, withered and black like the rest.  The model factory was gone!  But the money that had built it, the money that it had made, was still in existence to build it over again, a perpetual blind to the lawmakers who might have otherwise put a stop to its abuses!  It would undoubtedly be built again, more whited, more sepulchral than before.

As he looked upon the ruin a great resolve came to him.  He would give his life to fight the power that was setting its heel upon humanity and putting a price upon its blood.  He would devote all his powers to the uplifting of people who had been downtrodden and oppressed in the simple act of earning their daily bread!

Ramsey Thomas, happening to be in a near-by city, and answering a summons by telegraph, arrived at the scene in an automobile as Courtland stood there, grimed and tattered from his fight with death.

Ramsey Thomas, baffled, angry, distressed, wriggled out of his car to the sidewalk and faced Courtland, curiously conspicuous and recognizable with all his disarray.  Courtland towered above the great man with righteous wrath in his eyes.  Ramsey Thomas cringed and looked embarrassed.  He had come to look over the ground to see how much trouble they were going to have getting the insurance, and he hadn’t expected to be met by a giant Nemesis with blackened face and singed eyebrows.

“Oh, why—­I,” he began, nervously.  “It’s Mr. Courtland, isn’t it?  They tell me you’ve been very helpful during the fire!  I’m sure we’re much obliged.  We’ll not forget this, I assure you—­”

“Mr. Thomas,” broke in Courtland, in a clear, decisive voice, “you wanted to know a year ago why I wouldn’t accept your proposition, and you couldn’t understand my reason for refusing.  There it is!”