"We'd best be getting back up the stairs again," said he. And so they
started.

"Are you going to leave that fire burning?" asked the girl, as they
passed the middle of the arcade.

"Yes. It can't do any harm. Nothing to catch here; only old metal and
cement. Besides, it would take too much time and labor to put it out."

Thus they abandoned the gruesome place and began the long, exhausting
climb.

It must have taken them an hour and a half at least to reach their
eerie. Both found their strength taxed to the utmost.

Before they were much more than halfway up, the ultimate drop of
alcohol had been burned.

The last few hundred feet had to be made by slow, laborious feeling,
aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered
through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some break in the walls.

At length, however--for all things have an end--breathless and spent,
they found their refuge. And soon after that, clad in their savage
robes, they supped.

Allan Stern, consulting engineer, and Beatrice Kendrick, stenographer,
now king and queen of the whole wide world domain (as they feared),
sat together by a little blaze of punky wood fragments that flickered