"Why are they there?" she asked.
"To watch the vultures gathering for the feast. See! There goes one of them now—over there to the left."
Helen looked; skulking along in the shadow of a ruined wall was a shabby, rough-looking man who stole swiftly out of sight behind a pile of rubbish.
"One of the scavengers. They come almost automatically after every great disaster—fire, flood, battle, or pestilence. Ghouls, you understand, from heaven knows where. That man's great-grandfather probably robbed the dead grenadiers of the Legion of Honor at Waterloo."
"Thieves?" said the girl, in horror.
"Worse than thieves. Vandals, body-snatchers, murderers, if it came to that. The kind of man who'd cut the finger off a dying woman to get her wedding ring. Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, the militia are under orders to shoot them on sight, if caught in the act. But let's go a little farther on; I think we can get a better view from farther north."
"Wait," said his companion. "I am not ready to go—yet."
Smith heeded her voice, and for another unnoted interval they stood agaze upon their little eminence.
Far to the northward the scene of ruin stretched away. Almost as far as the eye could reach was only the shadow, the terrible and disfigured skeleton of what had been the city. Everywhere were smoldering piles with occasional tongues of sullen, orange flame and their myriad threads of smoke trailing upward in the still air like Indians' signal fires. Here was a brick building, apparently hardly touched or harmed, lifting its lonely height over its prostrate neighbors. Here a partly burned structure, gutted but still erect, stood like a grim, articulated skeleton, a gaunt scarecrow against the skyline. Everywhere were mounds and hollows, hills and valleys, so that the natural contour of the earth, unseen now these hundred years, once more appeared. And over it all, everywhere that the fire had wholly burned out, lay the heart-breaking beauty and whiteness of the snow, and of the ashes under the snow.
"How terribly white it is!" said Helen, in a low voice.