might, and presently to fall into cannibalism, preying one upon another
between whiles, or waiting like their prototypes of the Spanish Main for
the stray spoils of any luckless argosy that might drift within grappling
distance.

Kent stayed partly because a local attorney for the railroad was as
necessary in Gaston the bereaved as in Gaston the strenuous; partly, also,
because he was a student of his kind, and the broken city gave him
laboratory opportunities for the study of human nature at its worst.

He marked the raising of the black flag as the Gaston castaways, getting
sorrily afloat one by one, cleared their decks for action. Some Bluebeard
admiral there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent,
standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk,
the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks,
sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent.

Afterward he was to learn that he had underrated the gifts of the former
mayor. For when the famine time was fully come, and there were no more
argosies drifting Gastonward for the bucaneers to sack and scuttle, it was
Jasper G. Bucks who called a conference of his fellow werwolves, set forth
his new cast for fortune, and brought the junto, the child of sheer
desperation fiercely at bay, into being.

It was in the autumn of that first cataclysmic year that Secretary Loring,
traveling from Boston to the State capital on a mission for the Western
Pacific, stopped over a train with Kent. After a rather dispiriting dinner
in the deserted Mid-Continent café, and some plowing of the field of
recollection in Kent's rooms in the Farquhar Building, they took the
deserted street in the golden twilight to walk to the railway station.