The swift onrush of the fire drove the victors back.
"Out, comrades! Out of here!" shouted Gabriel, facing the attackers.
None too soon. Hardly had they beaten a retreat, back into the vast courtyard again, strewn with the dead, when a second oxygen tank exploded, overwhelming the laboratory building with tons of flying steel.
Leaping toward the zenith, a giant tongue of flame roared heavenward. So intense the heat had now become, that the solid brick and concrete walls, exposed to the direct verberation of the flame, began to crack and crumble.
Gabriel ordered a general retreat of the attacking army. Victory was won; and to stay near that gushing tornado of flame, with new explosions bound to occur as the other oxygen tanks let go, must mean annihilation.
So the triumphant Army of the Proletaire fell back and back still further, out into the wrecked and trampled Park, and all through the city, where shattered buildings, many of them ablaze, and broken trees, dead bodies, smashed ordnance and chaos absolute told something of the story of that brief but terrible war.
Ringed round the perishing ruins of the Air Trust they stood, these mute, thrilled thousands. Silence fell, now, as they watched the roaring, ever-mounting flames that, whipped by the breeze, crashed upward in long and cadenced tourbillions of white, of awful incandescence.
And the river, ever-hurrying, always foaming on and downward to its titanic plunge, sparkled with eerie lights in that vast glow. Its voice of thunder seemed to chant the passing and the requiem of the Curse of the World, Capitalism.