But the peculiar interest of that scene did not die out with the fall of the building: on the contrary, it was at that moment that it began to assume proportions more easily recognized. For mingled with the crash of the fall there seemed to be the sharp, shrill, terrible scream of a human voice in agony; and the very instant after that scream was repeated, so distinctly that it drove the blood from the cheeks of both the soldiers at the gate.
"My God! did you hear that?" said Crawford.
"Didn't I!" answered Webster. "I wish I _hadn't_! Jack, do you know, there must have been somebody in the house after all, burning to death; and that scream, when the building fell, was the wind-up of a life!"
"It must have been so, and we have been standing here, doing nothing, when aid might have been given!" said Crawford, in self-reproach, and forgetting how little a man with one arm can do in the way of carrying out people from a burning building. "Yet no--stop! No, Bob, that scream was not the last of the person's life, for didn't you notice, we heard it _twice_, and the last time after the house had fallen in? After that house fell, no one inside of it ever screamed, and so--"
"And so," said Webster, interrupting, "there is somebody, _not_ in the house, who screamed? That is what you mean, and by Jupiter, Jack, you are right!"
"Now we _must_ look the other side of the house," said Crawford. "Some poor creature, badly burned, may have crawled out from the flames and be lying there in agony."
So there might have been, truly! And what a strange riddle is human nature, even on that other side--mercy! We but a little while ago considered the ease with which a man born with the warmest aspirations for human good, might become eager for the destruction of life, when that life belonged to a foeman: let the opposite spectacle be considered, of a man who had just been plunging into the thick of a hand-to-hand fight, estimating human heads as of no more value than cocoa-nuts, and human lives as something to be taken without a shudder or a pang of compunction,--a few minutes afterwards speaking of a "poor creature" whose life might be threatened by fire, and speaking of that "poor creature" with all the tenderness of a mother or a lover! And is this inconsistent? No--it is consistent to the last degree. The brave man is the pitiful man; and while he may consider a hecatomb necessary for a cause, he regards one life sacrificed unnecessarily, as _murder_. "Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm, is all unfit to live!" says one of the old poet-philosophers. And are worms therefore never to be trodden upon? Not so, by any means! The adverbial adjective "needlessly" explains the broad distinction. Not one worm, even the creeping, crawling and disgusting caterpillar, for cruelty or even for neglect: millions of worms, whether caterpillar or human worm of the dust, for a sacred cause and a great duty!