with gas.
"Help! Help!" he screamed. "Save me--my God--save me--. Let me out, let
me out! A million, if you let me out! A billion--_the whole world_! The
world, ha! ha! ha! Damn it to Hell--the world, I say! I'll give the
world to be let out! It's mine--I own it--_all, all mine!_ Ha! Dogs! You
would rise up against your master and your God, would you? But it's no
use--we'll beat you yet--out! _out_!--the world--I own it! All this
plant--this gas, all mine! My oxygen--ah! it chokes me! _Help!
Help!_--Swine! I'll scourge you yet--_absolute power_--_the world_--!"

With one final spark of energy, panting, his heart flailing itself to
death under the pitiless urge of the oxygen, old Flint sprang up, ran
wildly, blindly straight across the steel floor, and, screaming
blasphemies like a soul in Hell, dashed into the opposite wall.

He recoiled, staggered, spun round and fell sprawling most
horribly--stone dead.

Waldron, at sight of this awful end, felt an uncontrollable terror sweep
over his drunk and maddened senses. Though all his blood was leaping in
his arteries, and his breath coming so fast it choked him, yet a
moment's seeming sanity possessed his reeling brain.

"The door! The door, up there!" he screamed, with a wild, terrible
curse.

Then, turning toward the ladder, in spite of his fat and flabby muscles
quivering in terrible spasms, he ran up the long steel structure with a
supreme and ape-like agility.

Fifty feet he made, seventy-five, ninety--

But, all at once, something seemed to break in his overtaxed heart.

A blackness swam before his dazzled eyes. His head fell back. Unnerved,
his fingers lost their hold. And, whirling over and over in midair, he
dropped like a plummet.

By one wall lay Flint's body. At the foot of the ladder, like a crushed
sack of bones, sprawled the corpse of "Tiger" Waldron.

And still the rushing oxygen, with which they two had hoped to dominate
the world, poured through the six-inch main, far, far above--senseless
matter, blindly avenging itself upon the rash and evil men who impiously
had sought to cage and master it!




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

VISIONS.


Thus perished Flint and Waldron, scourges of the earth. Thus they died,
slain by the very force which they had planned would betray mankind and
deliver it into their chains. Thus vanished, forever, the most sinister
and cruel minds ever evolved upon this planet; the greatest menace the
human race had ever known; the evil Masters of the World.

And as they died, massed around their perished Air Trust plant, a throng
of silent, earnest watchers stood, with faces illumined by the symbolic,
sacrificial flames--a throng of emancipated workers, of toilers from
whose bowed shoulders now forever had been lifted the frightful menace
of a universal bondage.

Explosion after explosion burst from the tortured Inferno of the vast
plant. Buildings came crashing, reeling, thundering down; walls fell,
amid vast, belching clouds of dust and smoke; a white, consuming sheet
of flame crackled across the sinister and evil place; and in its wake
glowed incandescent ruins.

Then, in one final burst of thunderous tumult, the hugest tank of all,
exploding with a roar like that of Doom itself, hurled belching flames
on high.

For many miles--in Buffalo, Rochester, Toronto and scores of cities on
both sides of the Great Lakes--silent multitudes watched the glare
against the midnight sky; and many wept for joy; and many prayed. All
understood the meaning of that sight. The light upon the heavens seemed
a signal and a beacon--a promise that the Old Times had passed away
forever--a covenant of the New.

And, as the final explosion shattered the Temple of Bondage to wreckage,
flung it far into the rushing river and swept it over the leaping,
thundering Falls, the news flashed on a thousand wires, to all cities
and all lands; and though the mercenaries of the two dead world-masters
still might struggle and might strive to beat the toilers back to
slavery again, their days were numbered and their powers forever broken.

Together in the doorway of the refuge at Port Colborne, Catherine stood
with Gabriel, watching the beacon of liberty upon the heavens. The
light, a halo round her eager face, showed his powerful figure and the
smile of triumph in his eyes. His left arm, broken by the fall in the
aeroplane, now rested in a sling. His right, protecting in its strength,
was round the girl. And as her head found shelter and rest, at length,
upon his shoulder, she, too, smiled; and her eyes seemed to see visions
in the glory of the sky.

"Visions!" said she, softly, as though voicing a universal thought. "Do
you behold them, too?"

He nodded.

"Yes," he answered, "and they are beautiful and sweet and pure!"

"Visions that we now shall surely see?"

"Shall surely see!" he echoed; and a little silence fell. Far off, they
seemed to hear a vast and thousand-throated cheering, that the
night-wind brought to them in long and heart-inspiring cadences.

"Gabriel," she said, at last.

"Well?"

"I wish _he_ might have seen them, and have understood! In spite of all
he did, and was, he was my father!"

"Yes," answered Gabriel, sensing her grief. "But would you have had him
live through this? Live, with the whole world out of his grasp, again?
Live, with all his plans wrecked and broken? Live on in this new time,
where he could have comprehended nothing? Live on, in misery and rage
and impotence?

"Your father was an old man, Catherine. You know as well as I
do--better, perhaps--the whole trend of his life's thought and ambition.
Even if he'd lived, he couldn't have changed, now, at his age. It would
have been an utter impossibility. Why say more?"

Catherine made no reply; but in her very attitude of trust and
confidence, Gabriel knew he read the comfort he had given her.

Silence, a while. At last she spoke.

"Visions!" she whispered. "Wonderful visions of the glad, new time! How
do you see them, Gabriel?"

"How do I see them?" His face seemed to glow with inspiration under the
shining light in the far heavens. "I see them as the realization of a
time, now really close at hand, when this old world of ours shall be, as
it never yet has been, in truth civilized, emancipated, free. When the
night of ignorance, kingcraft, priestcraft, servility and prejudice,
bigotry and superstition shall be forever swept away by the dawn of
intelligence and universal education, by scientific truth and light--by
understanding and by fearlessness.

"When Science shall no longer be 'the mystery of a class,' but shall
become the heritage of all mankind. When, because much is known by all,
nothing shall be dreaded by any. When all mankind shall be absolutely
its own master, strong, and brave, and free!"

"Like you, Gabriel!" the girl exclaimed, from her heart.

"Don't say that!" he disclaimed. "Don't--"

She put her hand over his mouth.

"Shhhh!" she forbade him. "You mustn't argue, now, because your arm's
just been set and we don't want any fever. If my dreams include you,
too, Gabriel, don't try to tell me I'm mistaken--because I'm not, to
begin with, and I _know_ I'm not!"

He laughed, and shook his head.

"Do you realize," said he, "that when it comes to bravery, and strength,
and the splendid freedom of an emancipated soul, I must look to _you_
for light and leading?"

"Don't!" she whispered. "Look only to the future--to the newer, better
world now coming to birth! The time which is to know no poverty, no
crime, no children's blood wrung out for dividends!

"The future when no longer Idleness can enslave Labor to its tasks. When
every man who will, may labor freely, whether with hand or brain, and
receive the full value of his toil, undiminished by any theft or
purloining whatsoever!"

"The future," he continued, as she paused, "when crowns, titles, swords,
rifles and dreadnaughts shall be known only by history. When the earth
and the fulness thereof shall belong to all Earth's people; and when its
soil need be no longer fertilized with human blood, its crops no longer
be brought forth watered by sweat and tears.

"Such have been my visions and my dreams, Catherine--a few of them. Now
they are coming true! And other dreams and other visions--dreams of you
and visions of our life together--what of them?"

"Why need you ask, Gabriel?" she answered, raising her lips to his.

The sound of singing, a triumphal chorus of the accomplished Revolution,
a vast and million-throated song, seemed wafted to them on the wings of
night.

And the pure stars, witnessing their love and troth, looked down upon
them from the heavens where shone the fire-glow of the Great
Emancipation.


THE END.



[Transcriber's note: In the following paragraph, I corrected the second
"Flint" to "Waldron":

"Very likely," answered Flint, who had now at last entirely recovered
his sang-froid. "But in that event, our work would be at a standstill.
No, Flint, we mustn't oppose this fellow. Better let the check go
through, if he has nerve enough to fill it out and cash it. He won't
dare gouge very deep; and no matter what he takes, it won't be a drop in
the ocean, compared to the golden flood now almost within our grasp!"]