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Presently it curled as it became-red-hot, and roaring flames sprang aloft through the reopened hole. A child screamed for its mother—the mother lying dead beneath the blazing pile—then the glowing iron buckled, twisted, and fell with a crash, sending a fountain of sparks into the sky—fiery escorts of young souls torn from a world which has been a paradise for them.

Horror walked abroad in this terrible dawn. It laid its paralysing hand upon Harley’s heart as the car, forced to a halt by a traffic block, drew up beside an improvised ambulance in a suburban street.

Several men were engaged in carrying bandaged and moaning bodies from the wide porch of a private residence and placing them on oddly-assorted mattresses spread upon the floor of the ambulance which, in normal times, was a furniture van. They carried their burdens with excessive care, for these were the badly injured who must be rushed to hospital in Waipukurau or Palmerston North.

Eight, Harley counted mechanically; five men and three youths, or women. He could not be certain about the latter, for two had their heads concealed in bandages, brown-stained and horrible, while the other’s refined, waxen features might have belonged to either sex.

Harley shuddered and closed his eyes. He opened them again as a man spoke close beside the car.

The speaker, one of the volunteer stretcher-bearers, was fastening the tail-board of the ambulance as silently as he could.

“That’s the lot, Harry. The doctor says to go easy round the bends, but you can hit it up on the straights. He says to tell you to be careful of the woman we’ve just put aboard. If she should roll on her side, she won’t last the distance.”

“Right, I’ll watch it,” replied the ambulance-driver in a subdued tone. “They tell me they’ve dug out Jerry Wade,” he added. “Got him about half-an-hour ago.”