“Cut it!” gibed Waldron, spitting with very disgust.  “If your time’s come, Flint, you’ll die, cathedrals or no cathedrals.  Your Sunday schools won’t save you any more than my investments will—­which have largely been wine, women and song.  As a matter of fact, if it comes to starvation, if we aren’t rescued and taken out from under the red-hot wreckage that’s on top of us, I’ll outlive you!  I can exist on my surplus adipose tissue, for a while; but you—­you’re nothing but skin and bone.  You’ll starve far quicker than I will, old man.”

“Don’t!  Don’t!” implored the shaking wretch, covering his eyes with both trembling hands.

“Moral, you oughtn’t to have been a dope-fiend, all these years,” continued Waldron, cuttingly, determined that now, once for all, his despised partner should hear the truth.  “How you’ve lived so long, as it is, I don’t understand.  When I tried to marry Kate, and failed, I reckoned you’d pass over in almost no time—­and, by the way, that’s why I was so insistent.  But you’ve disappointed me, Flint.  Disappointed me sorely.  You still live.  It won’t be long, however.  Down here, you know, you simply can’t get any dope.  In a little while you’ll begin to suffer the torments of Hell.  You’ll die of starvation and drug ‘yen,’ Flint, and you’ll die mad, mad, mad!  Understand me!  Mad, for morphine!  And I, I shall watch you, and exult!”

Flint cringed, shuddering and stopped his ears.  His partner, gloating over him, smoked faster now.  A strange light shone in his eyes.  His pulse beat faster than usual, and a certain extravagance of thought and speech had become manifest in him.

He tried to compose himself, feeling that he must not push the cowardly Flint too far, but his ideas refused to flow in orderly sequence.  Wonderingly he stared at his cigar, the tip of which was now glowing more brightly than before.

And then, suddenly sniffing the air he understood.  His eyes widened with horror absolute.  He started forward, gasped and cried: 

“Flint!  Flint!  The oxygen is coming in!”

Uncomprehending, the old man still stood there, mumbling to himself.  His face was now tinged with unusual color, and his heart, too, was thumping strangely.

“Oxygen!” shouted Waldron, shaking him by the shoulder.  “It—­it’s leaking in, here, somewhere!  If we can’t stop it—­we’re dead men!”

“Eh? What?” stammered the Billionaire, staring at him with eyes of half-intoxicated fear.  “What d’you mean, the oxygen?  In—­in here?”

“In here!” cried “Tiger,” casting a wild and terrible gaze about him at the vast, empty trap of steel.  “Can’t you smell it?  That ozone smell?  My God, we’re lost!  We’re lost!”

“You’re crazy!” retorted Flint, with vigor.  “Nothing of the sort could happen!” His head was held high, now, and new life seemed surging through that spent and drug-wrecked body.  “There’s no way those curs could have turned on any gas, here.  You’re crazy, ha! ha! ha!  Insane, eh?  A good joke—­capital joke, that!  I must tell it at the Union League Club!  ‘Tiger’ Waldron, suddenly insane, and—­ha! ha! ha!”