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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Scarlet Plague
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Illustrator: Gordon Grant
+
+Release Date: June 29, 2007 [EBook #21970]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SCARLET PLAGUE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCARLET PLAGUE
+
+By Jack London
+
+
+Illustrated By Gordon Grant
+
+1915
+
+
+
+
+THE SCARLET PLAGUE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad.
+But no train had run upon it for many years. The forest on either side
+swelled up the slopes of the embankment and crested across it in a green
+wave of trees and bushes. The trail was as narrow as a man's body, and
+was no more than a wild-animal runway. Occasionally, a piece of rusty
+iron, showing through the forest-mould, advertised that the rail and the
+ties still remained. In one place, a ten-inch tree, bursting through at
+a connection, had lifted the end of a rail clearly into view. The tie
+had evidently followed the rail, held to it by the spike long enough
+for its bed to be filled with gravel and rotten leaves, so that now the
+crumbling, rotten timber thrust itself up at a curious slant. Old as the
+road was, it was manifest that it had been of the mono-rail type.
+
+An old man and a boy travelled along this runway. They moved slowly, for
+the old man was very old, a touch of palsy made his movements tremulous,
+and he leaned heavily upon his staff. A rude skull-cap of goat-skin
+protected his head from the sun. From beneath this fell a scant fringe
+of stained and dirty-white hair. A visor, ingeniously made from a large
+leaf, shielded his eyes, and from under this he peered at the way of
+his feet on the trail. His beard, which should have been snow-white
+but which showed the same weather-wear and camp-stain as his hair,
+fell nearly to his waist in a great tangled mass. About his chest and
+shoulders hung a single, mangy garment of goat-skin. His arms and legs,
+withered and skinny, betokened extreme age, as well as did their sunburn
+and scars and scratches betoken long years of exposure to the elements.
+
+The boy, who led the way, checking the eagerness of his muscles to
+the slow progress of the elder, likewise wore a single garment--a
+ragged-edged piece of bear-skin, with a hole in the middle through which
+he had thrust his head. He could not have been more than twelve years
+old. Tucked coquettishly over one ear was the freshly severed tail of a
+pig. In one hand he carried a medium-sized bow and an arrow.
+
+On his back was a quiverful of arrows. From a sheath hanging about his
+neck on a thong, projected the battered handle of a hunting knife. He
+was as brown as a berry, and walked softly, with almost a catlike tread.
+In marked contrast with his sunburned skin were his eyes--blue, deep
+blue, but keen and sharp as a pair of gimlets. They seemed to bore into
+aft about him in a way that was habitual. As he went along he smelled
+things, as well, his distended, quivering nostrils carrying to his brain
+an endless series of messages from the outside world. Also, his hearing
+was acute, and had been so trained that it operated automatically.
+Without conscious effort, he heard all the slight sounds in the apparent
+quiet--heard, and differentiated, and classified these sounds--whether
+they were of the wind rustling the leaves, of the humming of bees and
+gnats, of the distant rumble of the sea that drifted to him only in
+lulls, or of the gopher, just under his foot, shoving a pouchful of
+earth into the entrance of his hole.
+
+Suddenly he became alertly tense. Sound, sight, and odor had given him
+a simultaneous warning. His hand went back to the old man, touching
+him, and the pair stood still. Ahead, at one side of the top of the
+embankment, arose a crackling sound, and the boy's gaze was fixed on the
+tops of the agitated bushes. Then a large bear, a grizzly, crashed into
+view, and likewise stopped abruptly, at sight of the humans. He did not
+like them, and growled querulously. Slowly the boy fitted the arrow to
+the bow, and slowly he pulled the bowstring taut. But he never removed
+his eyes from the bear.
+
+[Illustration: Slowly he pulled the bowstring taut 020]
+
+The old man peered from under his green leaf at the danger, and stood as
+quietly as the boy. For a few seconds this mutual scrutinizing went
+on; then, the bear betraying a growing irritability, the boy, with a
+movement of his head, indicated that the old man must step aside from
+the trail and go down the embankment. The boy followed, going backward,
+still holding the bow taut and ready. They waited till a crashing among
+the bushes from the opposite side of the embankment told them the bear
+had gone on. The boy grinned as he led back to the trail.
+
+"A big un, Granser," he chuckled.
+
+The old man shook his head.
+
+"They get thicker every day," he complained in a thin, undependable
+falsetto. "Who'd have thought I'd live to see the time when a man would
+be afraid of his life on the way to the Cliff House. When I was a boy,
+Edwin, men and women and little babies used to come out here from San
+Francisco by tens of thousands on a nice day. And there weren't any
+bears then. No, sir. They used to pay money to look at them in cages,
+they were that rare."
+
+"What is money, Granser?"
+
+Before the old man could answer, the boy recollected and triumphantly
+shoved his hand into a pouch under his bear-skin and pulled forth a
+battered and tarnished silver dollar. The old man's eyes glistened, as
+he held the coin close to them.
+
+"I can't see," he muttered. "You look and see if you can make out the
+date, Edwin."
+
+The boy laughed.
+
+"You're a great Granser," he cried delightedly, "always making believe
+them little marks mean something."
+
+The old man manifested an accustomed chagrin as he brought the coin back
+again close to his own eyes.
+
+"2012," he shrilled, and then fell to cackling grotesquely. "That was
+the year Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States
+by the Board of Magnates. It must have been one of the last coins
+minted, for the Scarlet Death came in 2013. Lord! Lord!--think of it!
+Sixty years ago, and I am the only person alive to-day that lived in
+those times. Where did you find it, Edwin?"
+
+The boy, who had been regarding him with the tolerant curiousness one
+accords to the prattlings of the feeble-minded, answered promptly.
+
+"I got it off of Hoo-Hoo. He found it when we was herdin' goats down
+near San Jose last spring. Hoo-Hoo said it was _money_. Ain't you
+hungry, Granser?"
+
+The ancient caught his staff in a tighter grip and urged along the
+trail, his old eyes shining greedily.
+
+"I hope Hare-Lip 's found a crab... or two," he mumbled. "They're good
+eating, crabs, mighty good eating when you've no more teeth and you've
+got grandsons that love their old grandsire and make a point of catching
+crabs for him. When I was a boy--"
+
+But Edwin, suddenly stopped by what he saw, was drawing the bowstring
+on a fitted arrow. He had paused on the brink of a crevasse in the
+embankment. An ancient culvert had here washed out, and the stream, no
+longer confined, had cut a passage through the fill. On the opposite
+side, the end of a rail projected and overhung. It showed rustily
+through the creeping vines which overran it. Beyond, crouching by a
+bush, a rabbit looked across at him in trembling hesitancy. Fully fifty
+feet was the distance, but the arrow flashed true; and the transfixed
+rabbit, crying out in sudden fright and hurt, struggled painfully away
+into the brush. The boy himself was a flash of brown skin and flying fur
+as he bounded down the steep wall of the gap and up the other side.
+His lean muscles were springs of steel that released into graceful
+and efficient action. A hundred feet beyond, in a tangle of bushes,
+he overtook the wounded creature, knocked its head on a convenient
+tree-trunk, and turned it over to Granser to carry.
+
+[Illustration: Rabbit is good, very good 026]
+
+"Rabbit is good, very good," the ancient quavered, "but when it comes to
+a toothsome delicacy I prefer crab. When I was a boy--"
+
+"Why do you say so much that ain't got no sense?" Edwin impatiently
+interrupted the other's threatened garrulousness.
+
+The boy did not exactly utter these words, but something that remotely
+resembled them and that was more guttural and explosive and economical
+of qualifying phrases. His speech showed distant kinship with that of
+the old man, and the latter's speech was approximately an English that
+had gone through a bath of corrupt usage.
+
+"What I want to know," Edwin continued, "is why you call crab 'toothsome
+delicacy'? Crab is crab, ain't it? No one I never heard calls it such
+funny things."
+
+The old man sighed but did not answer, and they moved on in silence.
+The surf grew suddenly louder, as they emerged from the forest upon a
+stretch of sand dunes bordering the sea. A few goats were browsing among
+the sandy hillocks, and a skin-clad boy, aided by a wolfish-looking
+dog that was only faintly reminiscent of a collie, was watching them.
+Mingled with the roar of the surf was a continuous, deep-throated
+barking or bellowing, which came from a cluster of jagged rocks a
+hundred yards out from shore. Here huge sea-lions hauled themselves
+up to lie in the sun or battle with one another. In the immediate
+foreground arose the smoke of a fire, tended by a third savage-looking
+boy. Crouched near him were several wolfish dogs similar to the one that
+guarded the goats.
+
+The old man accelerated his pace, sniffing eagerly as he neared the
+fire.
+
+"Mussels!" he muttered ecstatically. "Mussels! And ain't that a crab,
+Hoo-Hoo? Ain't that a crab? My, my, you boys are good to your old
+grandsire."
+
+Hoo-Hoo, who was apparently of the same age as Edwin, grinned.
+
+"All you want, Granser. I got four."
+
+The old man's palsied eagerness was pitiful. Sitting down in the sand as
+quickly as his stiff limbs would let him, he poked a large rock-mussel
+from out of the coals. The heat had forced its shells apart, and
+the meat, salmon-colored, was thoroughly cooked. Between thumb and
+forefinger, in trembling haste, he caught the morsel and carried it
+to his mouth. But it was too hot, and the next moment was violently
+ejected. The old man spluttered with the pain, and tears ran out of his
+eyes and down his cheeks.
+
+The boys were true savages, possessing only the cruel humor of the
+savage. To them the incident was excruciatingly funny, and they burst
+into loud laughter. Hoo-Hoo danced up and down, while Edwin rolled
+gleefully on the ground. The boy with the goats came running to join in
+the fun.
+
+"Set 'em to cool, Edwin, set 'em to cool," the old man besought, in the
+midst of his grief, making no attempt to wipe away the tears that
+still flowed from his eyes. "And cool a crab, Edwin, too. You know your
+grandsire likes crabs."
+
+From the coals arose a great sizzling, which proceeded from the many
+mussels bursting open their shells and exuding their moisture. They were
+large shellfish, running from three to six inches in length. The boys
+raked them out with sticks and placed them on a large piece of driftwood
+to cool.
+
+"When I was a boy, we did not laugh at our elders; we respected them."
+
+The boys took no notice, and Granser continued to babble an incoherent
+flow of complaint and censure. But this time he was more careful, and
+did not burn his mouth. All began to eat, using nothing but their hands
+and making loud mouth-noises and lip-smackings. The third boy, who was
+called Hare-Lip, slyly deposited a pinch of sand on a mussel the ancient
+was carrying to his mouth; and when the grit of it bit into the old
+fellow's mucous membrane and gums, the laughter was again uproarious. He
+was unaware that a joke had been played on him, and spluttered and spat
+until Edwin, relenting, gave him a gourd of fresh water with which to
+wash out his mouth.
+
+"Where's them crabs, Hoo-Hoo?" Edwin demanded. "Granser's set upon
+having a snack."
+
+Again Granser's eyes burned with greediness as a large crab was handed
+to him. It was a shell with legs and all complete, but the meat had long
+since departed. With shaky fingers and babblings of anticipation, the
+old man broke off a leg and found it filled with emptiness.
+
+"The crabs, Hoo-Hoo?" he wailed. "The crabs?"
+
+"I was fooling Granser. They ain't no crabs! I never found one."
+
+The boys were overwhelmed with delight at sight of the tears of senile
+disappointment that dribbled down the old man's cheeks. Then, unnoticed,
+Hoo-Hoo replaced the empty shell with a fresh-cooked crab. Already
+dismembered, from the cracked legs the white meat sent forth a small
+cloud of savory steam. This attracted the old man's nostrils, and he
+looked down in amazement.
+
+[Illustration: This attracted the old man's nostrils 033]
+
+The change of his mood to one of joy was immediate. He snuffled and
+muttered and mumbled, making almost a croon of delight, as he began
+to eat. Of this the boys took little notice, for it was an accustomed
+spectacle. Nor did they notice his occasional exclamations and
+utterances of phrases which meant nothing to them, as, for instance,
+when he smacked his lips and champed his gums while muttering:
+"Mayonnaise! Just think--mayonnaise! And it's sixty years since the last
+was ever made! Two generations and never a smell of it! Why, in those
+days it was served in every restaurant with crab."
+
+When he could eat no more, the old man sighed, wiped his hands on his
+naked legs, and gazed out over the sea. With the content of a full
+stomach, he waxed reminiscent.
+
+"To think of it! I've seen this beach alive with men, women, and
+children on a pleasant Sunday. And there weren't any bears to eat them
+up, either. And right up there on the cliff was a big restaurant where
+you could get anything you wanted to eat. Four million people lived in
+San Francisco then. And now, in the whole city and county there aren't
+forty all told. And out there on the sea were ships and ships always to
+be seen, going in for the Golden Gate or coming out. And airships in the
+air--dirigibles and flying machines. They could travel two hundred miles
+an hour. The mail contracts with the New York and San Francisco Limited
+demanded that for the minimum. There was a chap, a Frenchman, I forget
+his name, who succeeded in making three hundred; but the thing was
+risky, too risky for conservative persons. But he was on the right clew,
+and he would have managed it if it hadn't been for the Great Plague.
+When I was a boy, there were men alive who remembered the coming of the
+first aeroplanes, and now I have lived to see the last of them, and that
+sixty years ago."
+
+The old man babbled on, unheeded by the boys, who were long accustomed
+to his garrulousness, and whose vocabularies, besides, lacked the
+greater portion of the words he used. It was noticeable that in these
+rambling soliloquies his English seemed to recrudesce into better
+construction and phraseology. But when he talked directly with the boys
+it lapsed, largely, into their own uncouth and simpler forms.
+
+"But there weren't many crabs in those days," the old man wandered on.
+"They were fished out, and they were great delicacies. The open season
+was only a month long, too. And now crabs are accessible the whole year
+around. Think of it--catching all the crabs you want, any time you want,
+in the surf of the Cliff House beach!"
+
+A sudden commotion among the goats brought the boys to their feet. The
+dogs about the fire rushed to join their snarling fellow who guarded the
+goats, while the goats themselves stampeded in the direction of their
+human protectors. A half dozen forms, lean and gray, glided about on the
+sand hillocks and faced the bristling dogs. Edwin arched an arrow that
+fell short. But Hare-Lip, with a sling such as David carried into battle
+against Goliath, hurled a stone through the air that whistled from the
+speed of its flight. It fell squarely among the wolves and caused them
+to slink away toward the dark depths of the eucalyptus forest.
+
+[Illustration: With a sling such as David carried 036]
+
+The boys laughed and lay down again in the sand, while Granser sighed
+ponderously. He had eaten too much, and, with hands clasped on his
+paunch, the fingers interlaced, he resumed his maunderings.
+
+"'The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently
+a quotation. "That's it--foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the
+planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals,
+destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation.
+And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again,
+sweeping his handiwork away--the weeds and the forest inundated his
+fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are
+wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where
+four million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam to-day,
+and the savage progeny of our loins, with prehistoric weapons, defend
+themselves against the fanged despoilers. Think of it! And all because
+of the Scarlet Death--"
+
+The adjective had caught Hare-Lip's ear.
+
+"He's always saying that," he said to Edwin. "What is _scarlet?_"
+
+"'The scarlet of the maples can shake me like the cry of bugles going
+by,'" the old man quoted.
+
+"It's red," Edwin answered the question. "And you don't know it because
+you come from the Chauffeur Tribe. They never did know nothing, none of
+them. Scarlet is red--I know that."
+
+"Red is red, ain't it?" Hare-Lip grumbled. "Then what's the good of
+gettin' cocky and calling it scarlet?"
+
+"Granser, what for do you always say so much what nobody knows?" he
+asked. "Scarlet ain't anything, but red is red. Why don't you say red,
+then?"
+
+"Red is not the right word," was the reply. "The plague was scarlet.
+The whole face and body turned scarlet in an hour's time. Don't I
+know? Didn't I see enough of it? And I am telling you it was scarlet
+because--well, because it _was_ scarlet. There is no other word for it."
+
+"Red is good enough for me," Hare-Lip muttered obstinately. "My dad
+calls red red, and he ought to know. He says everybody died of the Red
+Death."
+
+"Your dad is a common fellow, descended from a common fellow," Granser
+retorted heatedly. "Don't I know the beginnings of the Chauffeurs? Your
+grandsire was a chauffeur, a servant, and without education. He worked
+for other persons. But your grandmother was of good stock, only the
+children did not take after her. Don't I remember when I first met them,
+catching fish at Lake Temescal?"
+
+"What is _education?_" Edwin asked.
+
+"Calling red scarlet," Hare-Lip sneered, then returned to the attack on
+Granser. "My dad told me, an' he got it from his dad afore he croaked,
+that your wife was a Santa Rosan, an' that she was sure no account. He
+said she was a _hash-slinger_ before the Red Death, though I don't know
+what a _hash-slinger_ is. You can tell me, Edwin."
+
+But Edwin shook his head in token of ignorance.
+
+"It is true, she was a waitress," Granser acknowledged. "But she was a
+good woman, and your mother was her daughter. Women were very scarce in
+the days after the Plague. She was the only wife I could find, even if
+she was a _hash-slinger_, as your father calls it. But it is not nice to
+talk about our progenitors that way."
+
+"Dad says that the wife of the first Chauffeur was a _lady_--"
+
+"What's a _lady?_" Hoo-Hoo demanded.
+
+"A _lady_ 's a Chauffeur squaw," was the quick reply of Hare-Lip.
+
+"The first Chauffeur was Bill, a common fellow, as I said before," the
+old man expounded; "but his wife was a lady, a great lady. Before the
+Scarlet Death she was the wife of Van Worden. He was President of the
+Board of Industrial Magnates, and was one of the dozen men who
+ruled America. He was worth one billion, eight hundred millions of
+dollars--coins like you have there in your pouch, Edwin. And then came
+the Scarlet Death, and his wife became the wife of Bill, the first
+Chauffeur. He used to beat her, too. I have seen it myself."
+
+Hoo-Hoo, lying on his stomach and idly digging his toes in the sand,
+cried out and investigated, first, his toe-nail, and next, the small
+hole he had dug. The other two boys joined him, excavating the sand
+rapidly with their hands till there lay three skeletons exposed. Two
+were of adults, the third being that of a part-grown child. The old man
+trudged along on the ground and peered at the find.
+
+"Plague victims," he announced. "That's the way they died everywhere
+in the last days. This must have been a family, running away from the
+contagion and perishing here on the Cliff House beach. They--what are
+you doing, Edwin?"
+
+This question was asked in sudden dismay, as Edwin, using the back of
+his hunting knife, began to knock out the teeth from the jaws of one of
+the skulls.
+
+"Going to string 'em," was the response.
+
+The three boys were now hard at it; and quite a knocking and hammering
+arose, in which Granser babbled on unnoticed.
+
+"You are true savages. Already has begun the custom of wearing human
+teeth. In another generation you will be perforating your noses and
+ears and wearing ornaments of bone and shell. I know. The human race
+is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night
+ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization. When we
+increase and feel the lack of room, we will proceed to kill one another.
+And then I suppose you will wear human scalp-locks at your waist, as
+well--as you, Edwin, who are the gentlest of my grandsons, have already
+begun with that vile pigtail. Throw it away, Edwin, boy; throw it away."
+
+"What a gabble the old geezer makes," Hare-Lip remarked, when, the teeth
+all extracted, they began an attempt at equal division.
+
+They were very quick and abrupt in their actions, and their speech, in
+moments of hot discussion over the allotment of the choicer teeth, was
+truly a gabble. They spoke in monosyllables and short jerky sentences
+that was more a gibberish than a language. And yet, through it ran hints
+of grammatical construction, and appeared vestiges of the conjugation
+of some superior culture. Even the speech of Granser was so corrupt that
+were it put down literally it would be almost so much nonsense to the
+reader. This, however, was when he talked with the boys.
+
+When he got into the full swing of babbling to himself, it slowly purged
+itself into pure English. The sentences grew longer and were enunciated
+with a rhythm and ease that was reminiscent of the lecture platform.
+
+"Tell us about the Red Death, Granser," Hare-Lip demanded, when the
+teeth affair had been satisfactorily concluded.
+
+"The Scarlet Death," Edwin corrected.
+
+"An' don't work all that funny lingo on us," Hare-Lip went on. "Talk
+sensible, Granser, like a Santa Rosan ought to talk. Other Santa Rosans
+don't talk like you."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE old man showed pleasure in being thus called upon. He cleared his
+throat and began.
+
+"Twenty or thirty years ago my story was in great demand. But in these
+days nobody seems interested--"
+
+"There you go!" Hare-Lip cried hotly. "Cut out the funny stuff and talk
+sensible. What's _interested?_ You talk like a baby that don't know
+how."
+
+"Let him alone," Edwin urged, "or he'll get mad and won't talk at all.
+Skip the funny places. We'll catch on to some of what he tells us."
+
+"Let her go, Granser," Hoo-Hoo encouraged; for the old man was already
+maundering about the disrespect for elders and the reversion to cruelty
+of all humans that fell from high culture to primitive conditions.
+
+The tale began.
+
+"There were very many people in the world in those days. San Francisco
+alone held four millions--"
+
+"What is millions?" Edwin interrupted.
+
+Granser looked at him kindly.
+
+"I know you cannot count beyond ten, so I will tell you. Hold up your
+two hands. On both of them you have altogether ten fingers and thumbs.
+Very well. I now take this grain of sand--you hold it, Hoo-Hoo." He
+dropped the grain of sand into the lad's palm and went on. "Now that
+grain of sand stands for the ten fingers of Edwin. I add another grain.
+That's ten more fingers. And I add another, and another, and another,
+until I have added as many grains as Edwin has fingers and thumbs. That
+makes what I call one hundred. Remember that word--one hundred. Now I
+put this pebble in Hare-Lip's hand. It stands for ten grains of sand, or
+ten tens of fingers, or one hundred fingers. I put in ten pebbles. They
+stand for a thousand fingers. I take a mussel-shell, and it stands for
+ten pebbles, or one hundred grains of sand, or one thousand fingers...."
+And so on, laboriously, and with much reiteration, he strove to build
+up in their minds a crude conception of numbers. As the quantities
+increased, he had the boys holding different magnitudes in each of
+their hands. For still higher sums, he laid the symbols on the log of
+driftwood; and for symbols he was hard put, being compelled to use the
+teeth from the skulls for millions, and the crab-shells for billions.
+It was here that he stopped, for the boys were showing signs of becoming
+tired.
+
+"There were four million people in San Francisco--four teeth."
+
+The boys' eyes ranged along from the teeth and from hand to hand, down
+through the pebbles and sand-grains to Edwin's fingers. And back again
+they ranged along the ascending series in the effort to grasp such
+inconceivable numbers.
+
+"That was a lot of folks, Granser," Edwin at last hazarded.
+
+"Like sand on the beach here, like sand on the beach, each grain of sand
+a man, or woman, or child. Yes, my boy, all those people lived right
+here in San Francisco. And at one time or another all those people
+came out on this very beach--more people than there are grains of sand.
+More--more--more. And San Francisco was a noble city. And across the
+bay--where we camped last year, even more people lived, clear from Point
+Richmond, on the level ground and on the hills, all the way around to
+San Leandro--one great city of seven million people.--Seven teeth...
+there, that's it, seven millions."
+
+Again the boys' eyes ranged up and down from Edwin's fingers to the
+teeth on the log.
+
+"The world was full of people. The census of 2010 gave eight billions
+for the whole world--eight crab-shells, yes, eight billions. It was not
+like to-day. Mankind knew a great deal more about getting food. And the
+more food there was, the more people there were. In the year 1800, there
+were one hundred and seventy millions in Europe alone. One hundred years
+later--a grain of sand, Hoo-Hoo--one hundred years later, at 1900, there
+were five hundred millions in Europe--five grains of sand, Hoo-Hoo, and
+this one tooth. This shows how easy was the getting of food, and how men
+increased. And in the year 2000 there were fifteen hundred millions
+in Europe. And it was the same all over the rest of the world. Eight
+crab-shells there, yes, eight billion people were alive on the earth
+when the Scarlet Death began.
+
+"I was a young man when the Plague came--twenty-seven years old; and I
+lived on the other side of San Francisco Bay, in Berkeley. You remember
+those great stone houses, Edwin, when we came down the hills from Contra
+Costa? That was where I lived, in those stone houses. I was a professor
+of English literature."
+
+[Illustration: I was a professor of English literature 054]
+
+Much of this was over the heads of the boys, but they strove to
+comprehend dimly this tale of the past.
+
+"What was them stone houses for?" Hare-Lip queried.
+
+"You remember when your dad taught you to swim?" The boy nodded.
+"Well, in the University of California--that is the name we had for
+the houses--we taught young men and women how to think, just as I have
+taught you now, by sand and pebbles and shells, to know how many people
+lived in those days. There was very much to teach. The young men and
+women we taught were called students. We had large rooms in which we
+taught. I talked to them, forty or fifty at a time, just as I am talking
+to you now. I told them about the books other men had written before
+their time, and even, sometimes, in their time--"
+
+"Was that all you did?--just talk, talk, talk?" Hoo-Hoo demanded. "Who
+hunted your meat for you? and milked the goats? and caught the fish?"
+
+"A sensible question, Hoo-Hoo, a sensible question. As I have told you,
+in those days food-getting was easy. We were very wise. A few men got
+the food for many men. The other men did other things. As you say, I
+talked. I talked all the time, and for this food was given me--much
+food, fine food, beautiful food, food that I have not tasted in sixty
+years and shall never taste again. I sometimes think the most wonderful
+achievement of our tremendous civilization was food--its inconceivable
+abundance, its infinite variety, its marvellous delicacy. O my
+grandsons, life was life in those days, when we had such wonderful
+things to eat."
+
+This was beyond the boys, and they let it slip by, words and thoughts,
+as a mere senile wandering in the narrative.
+
+"Our food-getters were called _freemen_. This was a joke. We of the
+ruling classes owned all the land, all the machines, everything. These
+food-getters were our slaves. We took almost all the food they got, and
+left them a little so that they might eat, and work, and get us more
+food--"
+
+"I'd have gone into the forest and got food for myself," Hare-Lip
+announced; "and if any man tried to take it away from me, I'd have
+killed him."
+
+The old man laughed.
+
+"Did I not tell you that we of the ruling class owned all the land, all
+the forest, everything? Any food-getter who would not get food for us,
+him we punished or compelled to starve to death. And very few did that.
+They preferred to get food for us, and make clothes for us, and prepare
+and administer to us a thousand--a mussel-shell, Hoo-Hoo--a thousand
+satisfactions and delights. And I was Professor Smith in those
+days--Professor James Howard Smith. And my lecture courses were very
+popular--that is, very many of the young men and women liked to hear me
+talk about the books other men had written.
+
+"And I was very happy, and I had beautiful things to eat. And my hands
+were soft, because I did no work with them, and my body was clean
+all over and dressed in the softest garments--
+
+"He surveyed his mangy goat-skin with disgust.
+
+"We did not wear such things in those days. Even the slaves had better
+garments. And we were most clean. We washed our faces and hands often
+every day. You boys never wash unless you fall into the water or go
+swimming."
+
+"Neither do you Granzer," Hoo-Hoo retorted.
+
+"I know, I know, I am a filthy old man, but times have changed. Nobody
+washes these days, there are no conveniences. It is sixty years since I
+have seen a piece of soap.
+
+[Illustration: Sixty years since I have seen a piece of soap. 059]
+
+"You do not know what soap is, and I shall not tell you, for I am telling
+the story of the Scarlet Death. You know what sickness is. We called
+it a disease. Very many of the diseases came from what we called germs.
+Remember that word--germs. A germ is a very small thing. It is like a
+woodtick, such as you find on the dogs in the spring of the year when
+they run in the forest. Only the germ is very small. It is so small that
+you cannot see it--"
+
+Hoo-Hoo began to laugh.
+
+"You're a queer un, Granser, talking about things you can't see. If you
+can't see 'em, how do you know they are? That's what I want to know. How
+do you know anything you can't see?"
+
+"A good question, a very good question, Hoo-Hoo. But we did see--some of
+them. We had what we called microscopes and ultramicroscopes, and we put
+them to our eyes and looked through them, so that we saw things larger
+than they really were, and many things we could not see without the
+microscopes at all. Our best ultramicroscopes could make a germ look
+forty thousand times larger. A mussel-shell is a thousand fingers like
+Edwin's. Take forty mussel-shells, and by as many times larger was the
+germ when we looked at it through a microscope. And after that, we
+had other ways, by using what we called moving pictures, of making the
+forty-thousand-times germ many, many thousand times larger still. And
+thus we saw all these things which our eyes of themselves could not see.
+Take a grain of sand. Break it into ten pieces. Take one piece and break
+it into ten. Break one of those pieces into ten, and one of those into
+ten, and one of those into ten, and one of those into ten, and do it all
+day, and maybe, by sunset, you will have a piece as small as one of the
+germs." The boys were openly incredulous. Hare-Lip sniffed and sneered
+and Hoo-Hoo snickered, until Edwin nudged them to be silent.
+
+"The woodtick sucks the blood of the dog, but the germ, being so very
+small, goes right into the blood of the body, and there it has
+many children. In those days there would be as many as a billion--a
+crab-shell, please--as many as that crab-shell in one man's body. We
+called germs micro-organisms. When a few million, or a billion, of them
+were in a man, in all the blood of a man, he was sick. These germs were
+a disease. There were many different kinds of them--more different kinds
+than there are grains of sand on this beach. We knew only a few of the
+kinds. The micro-organic world was an invisible world, a world we could
+not see, and we knew very little about it. Yet we did know something.
+There was the _bacillus anthracis_; there was the _micrococcus_; there
+was the _Bacterium termo_, and the _Bacterium lactis_--that's what
+turns the goat milk sour even to this day, Hare-Lip; and there were
+_Schizomycetes_ without end. And there were many others...."
+
+Here the old man launched into a disquisition on germs and their
+natures, using words and phrases of such extraordinary length and
+meaninglessness, that the boys grinned at one another and looked out
+over the deserted ocean till they forgot the old man was babbling on.
+
+"But the Scarlet Death, Granser," Edwin at last suggested.
+
+Granser recollected himself, and with a start tore himself away from the
+rostrum of the lecture-hall, where, to another world audience, he
+had been expounding the latest theory, sixty years gone, of germs and
+germ-diseases.
+
+"Yes, yes, Edwin; I had forgotten. Sometimes the memory of the past is
+very strong upon me, and I forget that I am a dirty old man, clad in
+goat-skin, wandering with my savage grandsons who are goatherds in
+the primeval wilderness. 'The fleeting systems lapse like foam,' and so
+lapsed our glorious, colossal civilization. I am Granser, a tired old
+man. I belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans. I married into that tribe.
+My sons and daughters married into the Chauffeurs, the Sacramen-tos, and
+the Palo-Altos. You, Hare-Lip, are of the Chauffeurs. You, Edwin, are
+of the Sacramentos. And you, Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos. Your tribe
+takes its name from a town that was near the seat of another great
+institution of learning. It was called Stanford University. Yes, I
+remember now. It is perfectly clear. I was telling you of the Scarlet
+Death. Where was I in my story?"
+
+"You was telling about germs, the things you can't see but which make
+men sick," Edwin prompted.
+
+"Yes, that's where I was. A man did not notice at first when only a few
+of these germs got into his body. But each germ broke in half and became
+two germs, and they kept doing this very rapidly so that in a short time
+there were many millions of them in the body. Then the man was sick. He
+had a disease, and the disease was named after the kind of a germ that
+was in him. It might be measles, it might be influenza, it might be
+yellow fever; it might be any of thousands and thousands of kinds of
+diseases.
+
+"Now this is the strange thing about these germs. There were always new
+ones coming to live in men's bodies. Long and long and long ago, when
+there were only a few men in the world, there were few diseases. But
+as men increased and lived closely together in great cities and
+civilizations, new diseases arose, new kinds of germs entered their
+bodies. Thus were countless millions and billions of human beings
+killed. And the more thickly men packed together, the more terrible were
+the new diseases that came to be. Long before my time, in the middle
+ages, there was the Black Plague that swept across Europe. It swept
+across Europe many times. There was tuberculosis, that entered into men
+wherever they were thickly packed. A hundred years before my time there
+was the bubonic plague. And in Africa was the sleeping sickness. The
+bacteriologists fought all these sicknesses and destroyed them, just as
+you boys fight the wolves away from your goats, or squash the mosquitoes
+that light on you. The bacteriologists--"
+
+"But, Granser, what is a what-you-call-it?" Edwin interrupted.
+
+"You, Edwin, are a goatherd. Your task is to watch the goats. You know a
+great deal about goats. A bacteriologist watches germs. That's his
+task, and he knows a great deal about them. So, as I was saying, the
+bacteriologists fought with the germs and destroyed them--sometimes.
+There was leprosy, a horrible disease. A hundred years before I was
+born, the bacteriologists discovered the germ of leprosy. They knew all
+about it. They made pictures of it. I have seen those pictures. But
+they never found a way to kill it. But in 1984, there was the Pantoblast
+Plague, a disease that broke out in a country called Brazil and that
+killed millions of people. But the bacteriologists found it out, and
+found the way to kill it, so that the Pantoblast Plague went no farther.
+They made what they called a serum, which they put into a man's body and
+which killed the pantoblast germs without killing the man. And in 1910,
+there was Pellagra, and also the hookworm. These were easily killed
+by the bacteriologists. But in 1947 there arose a new disease that had
+never been seen before. It got into the bodies of babies of only ten
+months old or less, and it made them unable to move their hands and
+feet, or to eat, or anything; and the bacteriologists were eleven years
+in discovering how to kill that particular germ and save the babies.
+
+"In spite of all these diseases, and of all the new ones that continued
+to arise, there were more and more men in the world. This was because it
+was easy to get food. The easier it was to get food, the more men
+there were; the more men there were, the more thickly were they packed
+together on the earth; and the more thickly they were packed, the more
+new kinds of germs became diseases. There were warnings. Soldervetzsky,
+as early as 1929, told the bacteriologists that they had no guaranty
+against some new disease, a thousand times more deadly than any they
+knew, arising and killing by the hundreds of millions and even by the
+billion. You see, the micro-organic world remained a mystery to the end.
+They knew there was such a world, and that from time to time armies of
+new germs emerged from it to kill men.
+
+"And that was all they knew about it. For all they knew, in that
+invisible micro-organic world there might be as many different kinds of
+germs as there are grains of sand on this beach. And also, in that same
+invisible world it might well be that new kinds of germs came to be.
+It might be there that life originated--the 'abysmal fecundity,'
+Soldervetzsky called it, applying the words of other men who had written
+before him...."
+
+It was at this point that Hare-Lip rose to his feet, an expression of
+huge contempt on his face.
+
+[Illustration: Granser, you make me sick with your gabble 071]
+
+"Granser," he announced, "you make me sick with your gabble. Why don't
+you tell about the Red Death? If you ain't going to, say so, an' we'll
+start back for camp."
+
+The old man looked at him and silently began to cry. The weak tears of
+age rolled down his cheeks and all the feebleness of his eighty-seven
+years showed in his grief-stricken countenance.
+
+"Sit down," Edwin counselled soothingly. "Granser's all right. He's just
+gettin' to the Scarlet Death, ain't you, Granser? He's just goin' to
+tell us about it right now. Sit down, Hare-Lip. Go ahead, Granser."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE old man wiped the tears away on his grimy knuckles and took up the
+tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened as he got the
+swing of the narrative.
+
+"It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came. I was twenty-seven
+years old, and well do I remember it. Wireless despatches--"
+
+Hare-Lip spat loudly his disgust, and Granser hastened to make amends.
+
+"We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thousands of
+miles. And the word came of a strange disease that had broken out in
+New York. There were seventeen millions of people living then in that
+noblest city of America. Nobody thought anything about the news. It was
+only a small thing. There had been only a few deaths. It seemed, though,
+that they had died very quickly, and that one of the first signs of
+the disease was the turning red of the face and all the body. Within
+twenty-four hours came the report of the first case in Chicago. And on
+the same day, it was made public that London, the greatest city in the
+world, next to Chicago, had been secretly fighting the plague for two
+weeks and censoring the news despatches--that is, not permitting the
+word to go forth to the rest of the world that London had the plague.
+
+"It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else, were
+not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to
+overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the
+past. But the trouble was the astonishing quickness with which this germ
+destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any
+human body it entered. No one ever recovered. There was the old Asiatic
+cholera, when you might eat dinner with a well man in the evening, and
+the next morning, if you got up early enough, you would see him being
+hauled by your window in the death-cart. But this new plague was quicker
+than that--much quicker.
+
+[Illustration: But this new plague was quicker 078]
+
+"From the moment of the first signs of it, a man would be dead in an
+hour. Some lasted for several hours. Many died within ten or fifteen
+minutes of the appearance of the first signs.
+
+"The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to increase.
+Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the face and
+body. Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and heart-beat,
+and the first they knew was when the scarlet rash came out. Usually,
+they had convulsions at the time of the appearance of the rash. But
+these convulsions did not last long and were not very severe. If one
+lived through them, he became perfectly quiet, and only did he feel a
+numbness swiftly creeping up his body from the feet. The heels became
+numb first, then the legs, and hips, and when the numbness reached
+as high as his heart he died. They did not rave or sleep. Their minds
+always remained cool and calm up to the moment their heart numbed and
+stopped. And another strange thing was the rapidity of decomposition. No
+sooner was a person dead than the body seemed to fall to pieces, to
+fly apart, to melt away even as you looked at it. That was one of the
+reasons the plague spread so rapidly. All the billions of germs in a
+corpse were so immediately released.
+
+"And it was because of all this that the bacteriologists had so little
+chance in fighting the germs. They were killed in their laboratories
+even as they studied the germ of the Scarlet Death. They were heroes.
+As fast as they perished, others stepped forth and took their places.
+It was in London that they first isolated it. The news was telegraphed
+everywhere. Trask was the name of the man who succeeded in this, but
+within thirty hours he was dead. Then came the struggle in all the
+laboratories to find something that would kill the plague germs. All
+drugs failed. You see, the problem was to get a drug, or serum, that
+would kill the germs in the body and not kill the body. They tried to
+fight it with other germs, to put into the body of a sick man germs that
+were the enemies of the plague germs--"
+
+"And you can't see these germ-things, Granser," Hare-Lip objected, "and
+here you gabble, gabble, gabble about them as if they was anything,
+when they're nothing at all. Anything you can't see, ain't, that's what.
+Fighting things that ain't with things that ain't! They must have
+been all fools in them days. That's why they croaked. I ain't goin' to
+believe in such rot, I tell you that."
+
+Granser promptly began to weep, while Edwin hotly took up his defence.
+
+"Look here, Hare-Lip, you believe in lots of things you can't see."
+
+Hare-Lip shook his head.
+
+"You believe in dead men walking about. You never seen one dead man walk
+about."
+
+"I tell you I seen 'em, last winter, when I was wolf-hunting with dad."
+
+"Well, you always spit when you cross running water," Edwin challenged.
+
+"That's to keep off bad luck," was Hare-Lip's defence.
+
+"You believe in bad luck?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+"An' you ain't never seen bad luck," Edwin concluded triumphantly.
+"You're just as bad as Granser and his germs. You believe in what you
+don't see. Go on, Granser."
+
+Hare-Lip, crushed by this metaphysical defeat, remained silent, and
+the old man went on. Often and often, though this narrative must not be
+clogged by the details, was Granser's tale interrupted while the boys
+squabbled among themselves. Also, among themselves they kept up a
+constant, low-voiced exchange of explanation and conjecture, as they
+strove to follow the old man into his unknown and vanished world.
+
+"The Scarlet Death broke out in San Francisco. The first death came on
+a Monday morning. By Thursday they were dying like flies in Oakland
+and San Francisco. They died everywhere--in their beds, at their
+work, walking along the street. It was on Tuesday that I saw my first
+death--Miss Collbran, one of my students, sitting right there before my
+eyes, in my lecture-room. I noticed her face while I was talking. It had
+suddenly turned scarlet. I ceased speaking and could only look at her,
+for the first fear of the plague was already on all of us and we knew
+that it had come. The young women screamed and ran out of the room. So
+did the young men run out, all but two. Miss Collbran's convulsions were
+very mild and lasted less than a minute. One of the young men fetched
+her a glass of water. She drank only a little of it, and cried out:
+
+"'My feet! All sensation has left them.'
+
+"After a minute she said, 'I have no feet. I am unaware that I have any
+feet. And my knees are cold. I can scarcely feel that I have knees.'
+
+"She lay on the floor, a bundle of notebooks under her head. And we
+could do nothing. The coldness and the numbness crept up past her hips
+to her heart, and when it reached her heart she was dead. In fifteen
+minutes, by the clock--I timed it--she was dead, there, in my own
+classroom, dead. And she was a very beautiful, strong, healthy young
+woman. And from the first sign of the plague to her death only fifteen
+minutes elapsed. That will show you how swift was the Scarlet Death.
+
+"Yet in those few minutes I remained with the dying woman in my
+classroom, the alarm had spread over the university; and the students,
+by thousands, all of them, had deserted the lecture-room and
+laboratories. When I emerged, on my way to make report to the President
+of the Faculty, I found the university deserted. Across the campus were
+several stragglers hurrying for their homes. Two of them were running.
+
+"President Hoag, I found in his office, all alone, looking very old and
+very gray, with a multitude of wrinkles in his face that I had never
+seen before. At the sight of me, he pulled himself to his feet and
+tottered away to the inner office, banging the door after him and
+locking it. You see, he knew I had been exposed, and he was afraid.
+He shouted to me through the door to go away. I shall never forget
+my feelings as I walked down the silent corridors and out across that
+deserted campus. I was not afraid. I had been exposed, and I looked
+upon myself as already dead. It was not that, but a feeling of awful
+depression that impressed me. Everything had stopped. It was like the
+end of the world to me--my world. I had been born within sight and sound
+of the university. It had been my predestined career. My father had been
+a professor there before me, and his father before him. For a century
+and a half had this university, like a splendid machine, been running
+steadily on. And now, in an instant, it had stopped. It was like seeing
+the sacred flame die down on some thrice-sacred altar. I was shocked,
+unutterably shocked.
+
+"When I arrived home, my housekeeper screamed as I entered, and fled
+away. And when I rang, I found the housemaid had likewise fled. I
+investigated. In the kitchen I found the cook on the point of departure.
+But she screamed, too, and in her haste dropped a suitcase of her
+personal belongings and ran out of the house and across the grounds,
+still screaming. I can hear her scream to this day. You see, we did not
+act in this way when ordinary diseases smote us. We were always calm
+over such things, and sent for the doctors and nurses who knew just
+what to do. But this was different. It struck so suddenly, and killed so
+swiftly, and never missed a stroke. When the scarlet rash appeared on a
+person's face, that person was marked by death. There was never a known
+case of a recovery.
+
+"I was alone in my big house. As I have told you often before, in those
+days we could talk with one another over wires or through the air. The
+telephone bell rang, and I found my brother talking to me. He told me
+that he was not coming home for fear of catching the plague from me, and
+that he had taken our two sisters to stop at Professor Bacon's home. He
+advised me to remain where I was, and wait to find out whether or not I
+had caught the plague.
+
+[Illustration: The telephone bell rang 088]
+
+"To all of this I agreed, staying in my house and for the first time in
+my life attempting to cook. And the plague did not come out on me. By
+means of the telephone I could talk with whomsoever I pleased and get
+the news. Also, there were the newspapers, and I ordered all of them to
+be thrown up to my door so that I could know what was happening with the
+rest of the world.
+
+"New York City and Chicago were in chaos. And what happened with them
+was happening in all the large cities. A third of the New York police
+were dead. Their chief was also dead, likewise the mayor. All law and
+order had ceased. The bodies were lying in the streets un-buried. All
+railroads and vessels carrying food and such things into the great
+city had ceased runnings and mobs of the hungry poor were pillaging
+the stores and warehouses. Murder and robbery and drunkenness were
+everywhere. Already the people had fled from the city by millions--at
+first the rich, in their private motor-cars and dirigibles, and then the
+great mass of the population, on foot, carrying the plague with them,
+themselves starving and pillaging the farmers and all the towns and
+villages on the way.
+
+[Illustration: Fled from the city by millions 092]
+
+"The man who sent this news, the wireless operator, was alone with his
+instrument on the top of a lofty building. The people remaining in the
+city--he estimated them at several hundred thousand--had gone mad from
+fear and drink, and on all sides of him great fires were raging. He was
+a hero, that man who staid by his post--an obscure newspaperman, most
+likely.
+
+"For twenty-four hours, he said, no transatlantic airships had arrived,
+and no more messages were coming from England. He did state, though,
+that a message from Berlin--that's in Germany--announced that Hoffmeyer,
+a bacteriologist of the Metchnikoff School, had discovered the serum for
+the plague. That was the last word, to this day, that we of America
+ever received from Europe. If Hoffmeyer discovered the serum, it was too
+late, or otherwise, long ere this, explorers from Europe would have
+come looking for us. We can only conclude that what happened in America
+happened in Europe, and that, at the best, some several score may have
+survived the Scarlet Death on that whole continent.
+
+"For one day longer the despatches continued to come from New York.
+Then they, too, ceased. The man who had sent them, perched in his lofty
+building, had either died of the plague or been consumed in the great
+conflagrations he had described as raging around him. And what had
+occurred in New York had been duplicated in all the other cities. It was
+the same in San Francisco, and Oakland, and Berkeley. By Thursday the
+people were dying so rapidly that their corpses could not be handled,
+and dead bodies lay everywhere. Thursday night the panic outrush for
+the country began. Imagine, my grandsons, people, thicker than the
+salmon-run you have seen on the Sacramento river, pouring out of the
+cities by millions, madly over the country, in vain attempt to escape
+the ubiquitous death. You see, they carried the germs with them. Even
+the airships of the rich, fleeing for mountain and desert fastnesses,
+carried the germs.
+
+"Hundreds of these airships escaped to Hawaii, and not only did they
+bring the plague with them, but they found the plague already there
+before them. This we learned, by the despatches, until all order in San
+Francisco vanished, and there were no operators left at their posts to
+receive or send. It was amazing, astounding, this loss of communication
+with the world. It was exactly as if the world had ceased, been blotted
+out. For sixty years that world has no longer existed for me. I know
+there must be such places as New York, Europe, Asia, and Africa; but not
+one word has been heard of them--not in sixty years. With the coming of
+the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably. Ten
+thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the twinkling of an
+eye, 'lapsed like foam.'
+
+"I was telling about the airships of the rich. They carried the plague
+with them and no matter where they fled, they died. I never encountered
+but one survivor of any of them--Mungerson. He was afterwards a Santa
+Rosan, and he married my eldest daughter. He came into the tribe eight
+years after the plague. He was then nineteen years old, and he was
+compelled to wait twelve years more before he could marry. You see,
+there were no unmarried women, and some of the older daughters of the
+Santa Rosans were already bespoken. So he was forced to wait until
+my Mary had grown to sixteen years. It was his son, Gimp-Leg, who was
+killed last year by the mountain lion.
+
+"Mungerson was eleven years old at the time of the plague. His father
+was one of the Industrial Magnates, a very wealthy, powerful man. It was
+on his airship, the Condor, that they were fleeing, with all the family,
+for the wilds of British Columbia, which is far to the north of here.
+But there was some accident, and they were wrecked near Mount Shasta.
+You have heard of that mountain. It is far to the north. The plague
+broke out amongst them, and this boy of eleven was the only survivor.
+For eight years he was alone, wandering over a deserted land and looking
+vainly for his own kind. And at last, travelling south, he picked up
+with us, the Santa Rosans.
+
+"But I am ahead of my story. When the great exodus from the cities
+around San Francisco Bay began, and while the telephones were still
+working, I talked with my brother. I told him this flight from the
+cities was insanity, that there were no symptoms of the plague in
+me, and that the thing for us to do was to isolate ourselves and our
+relatives in some safe place. We decided on the Chemistry Building, at
+the university, and we planned to lay in a supply of provisions, and by
+force of arms to prevent any other persons from forcing their presence
+upon us after we had retired to our refuge.
+
+"All this being arranged, my brother begged me to stay in my own
+house for at least twenty-four hours more, on the chance of the plague
+developing in me. To this I agreed, and he promised to come for me next
+day. We talked on over the details of the provisioning and the defending
+of the Chemistry Building until the telephone died. It died in the midst
+of our conversation. That evening there were no electric lights, and
+I was alone in my house in the darkness. No more newspapers were being
+printed, so I had no knowledge of what was taking place outside.
+
+[Illustration: I heard sounds of rioting and of pistol shots 098]
+
+"I heard sounds of rioting and of pistol shots, and from my windows I
+could see the glare of the sky of some conflagration in the direction
+of Oakland. It was a night of terror. I did not sleep a wink. A man--why
+and how I do not know--was killed on the sidewalk in front of the house.
+I heard the rapid reports of an automatic pistol, and a few minutes
+later the wounded wretch crawled up to my door, moaning and crying out
+for help. Arming myself with two automatics, I went to him. By the light
+of a match I ascertained that while he was dying of the bullet wounds,
+at the same time the plague was on him. I fled indoors, whence I heard
+him moan and cry out for half an hour longer.
+
+"In the morning, my brother came to me. I had gathered into a handbag
+what things of value I purposed taking, but when I saw his face I knew
+that he would never accompany me to the Chemistry Building. The plague
+was on him. He intended shaking my hand, but I went back hurriedly
+before him.
+
+"'Look at yourself in the mirror,' I commanded.
+
+[Illustration: Look at yourself in the mirror 100]
+
+"He did so, and at sight of his scarlet face, the color deepening as he
+looked at it, he sank down nervelessly in a chair.
+
+"'My God!' he said. 'I've got it. Don't come near me. I am a dead man.'
+
+"Then the convulsions seized him. He was two hours in dying, and he
+was conscious to the last, complaining about the coldness and loss of
+sensation in his feet, his calves, his thighs, until at last it was his
+heart and he was dead.
+
+"That was the way the Scarlet Death slew. I caught up my handbag and
+fled. The sights in the streets were terrible. One stumbled on bodies
+everywhere. Some were not yet dead. And even as you looked, you saw men
+sink down with the death fastened upon them. There were numerous fires
+burning in Berkeley, while Oakland and San Francisco were apparently
+being swept by vast conflagrations. The smoke of the burning filled the
+heavens, so that the midday was as a gloomy twilight, and, in the shifts
+of wind, sometimes the sun shone through dimly, a dull red orb. Truly,
+my grandsons, it was like the last days of the end of the world.
+
+"There were numerous stalled motor cars, showing that the gasoline and
+the engine supplies of the garages had given out. I remember one such
+car. A man and a woman lay back dead in the seats, and on the pavement
+near it were two more women and a child. Strange and terrible sights
+there were on every hand. People slipped by silently, furtively, like
+ghosts--white-faced women carrying infants in their arms; fathers
+leading children by the hand; singly, and in couples, and in
+families--all fleeing out of the city of death. Some carried supplies
+of food, others blankets and valuables, and there were many who carried
+nothing.
+
+"There was a grocery store--a place where food was sold. The man to whom
+it belonged--I knew him well--a quiet, sober, but stupid and obstinate
+fellow, was defending it. The windows and doors had been broken in, but
+he, inside, hiding behind a counter, was discharging his pistol at a
+number of men on the sidewalk who were breaking in. In the entrance were
+several bodies--of men, I decided, whom he had killed earlier in the
+day. Even as I looked on from a distance, I saw one of the robbers break
+the windows of the adjoining store, a place where shoes were sold,
+and deliberately set fire to it. I did not go to the groceryman's
+assistance. The time for such acts had already passed. Civilization was
+crumbling, and it was each for himself."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I WENT away hastily, down a cross-street, and at the first corner I saw
+another tragedy. Two men of the working class had caught a man and a
+woman with two children, and were robbing them. I knew the man by sight,
+though I had never been introduced to him. He was a poet whose verses I
+had long admired. Yet I did not go to his help, for at the moment I came
+upon the scene there was a pistol shot, and I saw him sinking to the
+ground. The woman screamed, and she was felled with a fist-blow by one
+of the brutes. I cried out threateningly, whereupon they discharged
+their pistols at me and I ran away around the corner. Here I was blocked
+by an advancing conflagration. The buildings on both sides were burning,
+and the street was filled with smoke and flame. From somewhere in that
+murk came a woman's voice calling shrilly for help. But I did not go to
+her. A man's heart turned to iron amid such scenes, and one heard all
+too many appeals for help.
+
+"Returning to the corner, I found the two robbers were gone. The poet
+and his wife lay dead on the pavement. It was a shocking sight. The two
+children had vanished--whither I could not tell. And I knew, now, why
+it was that the fleeing persons I encountered slipped along so furtively
+and with such white faces. In the midst of our civilization, down in our
+slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a race of barbarians, of savages;
+and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild
+beasts they were and destroyed us. And they destroyed themselves as
+well.
+
+[Illustration: Now in the time of calamity they turned on us 108]
+
+"They inflamed themselves with strong drink and committed a thousand
+atrocities, quarreling and killing one another in the general madness.
+One group of workingmen I saw, of the better sort, who had banded
+together, and, with their women and children in their midst, the sick
+and aged in litters and being carried, and with a number of horses
+pulling a truck-load of provisions, they were fighting their way out
+of the city. They made a fine spectacle as they came down the street
+through the drifting smoke, though they nearly shot me when I first
+appeared in their path. As they went by, one of their leaders shouted
+out to me in apologetic explanation. He said they were killing the
+robbers and looters on sight, and that they had thus banded together as
+the only-means by which to escape the prowlers.
+
+"It was here that I saw for the first time what I was soon to see so
+often. One of the marching men had suddenly shown the unmistakable mark
+of the plague. Immediately those about him drew away, and he, without
+a remonstrance, stepped out of his place to let them pass on. A woman,
+most probably his wife, attempted to follow him. She was leading a
+little boy by the hand. But the husband commanded her sternly to go on,
+while others laid hands on her and restrained her from following him.
+This I saw, and I saw the man also, with his scarlet blaze of face, step
+into a doorway on the opposite side of the street. I heard the report of
+his pistol, and saw him sink lifeless to the ground.
+
+"After being turned aside twice again by advancing fires, I succeeded in
+getting through to the university. On the edge of the campus I came
+upon a party of university folk who were going in the direction of the
+Chemistry Building. They were all family men, and their families were
+with them, including the nurses and the servants. Professor Badminton
+greeted me, I had difficulty in recognizing him. Somewhere he had gone
+through flames, and his beard was singed off. About his head was a
+bloody bandage, and his clothes were filthy.
+
+[Illustration: He told me he had been Cruelly Beaten 112]
+
+"He told me he had prowlers, and that his brother had been killed the
+previous night, in the defence of their dwelling.
+
+"Midway across the campus, he pointed suddenly to Mrs. Swinton's face.
+The unmistakable scarlet was there. Immediately all the other women set
+up a screaming and began to run away from her. Her two children were
+with a nurse, and these also ran with the women. But her husband, Doctor
+Swinton, remained with her.
+
+"'Go on, Smith,' he told me. 'Keep an eye on the children. As for me,
+I shall stay with my wife. I know she is as already dead, but I can't
+leave her. Afterwards, if I escape, I shall come to the Chemistry
+Building, and do you watch for me and let me in.'
+
+"I left him bending over his wife and soothing her last moments, while
+I ran to overtake the party. We were the last to be admitted to the
+Chemistry Building. After that, with our automatic rifles we maintained
+our isolation. By our plans, we had arranged for a company of sixty to
+be in this refuge. Instead, every one of the number originally planned
+had added relatives and friends and whole families until there were over
+four hundred souls. But the Chemistry Building was large, and, standing
+by itself, was in no danger of being burned by the great fires that
+raged everywhere in the city.
+
+"A large quantity of provisions had been gathered, and a food committee
+took charge of it, issuing rations daily to the various families and
+groups that arranged themselves into messes. A number of committees were
+appointed, and we developed a very efficient organization. I was on the
+committee of defence, though for the first day no prowlers came near. We
+could see them in the distance, however, and by the smoke of their fires
+knew that several camps of them were occupying the far edge of the
+campus. Drunkenness was rife, and often we heard them singing ribald
+songs or insanely shouting. While the world crashed to ruin about them
+and all the air was filled with the smoke of its burning, these low
+creatures gave rein to their bestiality and fought and drank and died.
+And after all, what did it matter? Everybody died anyway, the good and
+the bad, the efficients and the weaklings, those that loved to live and
+those that scorned to live. They passed. Everything passed.
+
+"When twenty-four hours had gone by and no signs of the plague were
+apparent, we congratulated ourselves and set about digging a well. You
+have seen the great iron pipes which in those days carried water to all
+the city-dwellers. We feared that the fires in the city would burst the
+pipes and empty the reservoirs. So we tore up the cement floor of the
+central court of the Chemistry Building and dug a well. There were many
+young men, undergraduates, with us, and we worked night and day on the
+well. And our fears were confirmed. Three hours before we reached water,
+the pipes went dry.
+
+"A second twenty-four hours passed, and still the plague did not
+appear among us. We thought we were saved. But we did not know what I
+afterwards decided to be true, namely, that the period of the incubation
+of the plague germs in a human's body was a matter of a number of days.
+It slew so swiftly when once it manifested itself, that we were led to
+believe that the period of incubation was equally swift. So, when two
+days had left us unscathed, we were elated with the idea that we were
+free of the contagion.
+
+"But the third day disillusioned us. I can never forget the night
+preceding it. I had charge of the night guards from eight to twelve,
+and from the roof of the building I watched the passing of all man's
+glorious works. So terrible were the local conflagrations that all the
+sky was lighted up. One could read the finest print in the red glare.
+All the world seemed wrapped in flames. San Francisco spouted smoke and
+fire from a score of vast conflagrations that were like so many active
+volcanoes. Oakland, San Leandro, Haywards--all were burning; and to the
+northward, clear to Point Richmond, other fires were at work. It was an
+awe-inspiring spectacle. Civilization, my grandsons, civilization was
+passing in a sheet of flame and a breath of death. At ten o'clock that
+night, the great powder magazines at Point Pinole exploded in rapid
+succession. So terrific were the concussions that the strong building
+rocked as in an earthquake, while every pane of glass was broken. It was
+then that I left the roof and went down the long corridors, from room to
+room, quieting the alarmed women and telling them what had happened.
+
+"An hour later, at a window on the ground floor, I heard pandemonium
+break out in the camps of the prowlers. There were cries and screams,
+and shots from many pistols. As we afterward conjectured, this fight had
+been precipitated by an attempt on the part of those that were well
+to drive out those that were sick. At any rate, a number of the
+plague-stricken prowlers escaped across the campus and drifted against
+our doors. We warned them back, but they cursed us and discharged a
+fusillade from their pistols. Professor Merryweather, at one of the
+windows, was instantly killed, the bullet striking him squarely between
+the eyes. We opened fire in turn, and all the prowlers fled away with
+the exception of three. One was a woman. The plague was on them and they
+were reckless. Like foul fiends, there in the red glare from the skies,
+with faces blazing, they continued to curse us and fire at us. One of
+the men I shot with my own hand. After that the other man and the woman,
+still cursing us, lay down under our windows, where we were compelled to
+watch them die of the plague.
+
+"The situation was critical. The explosions of the powder magazines
+had broken all the windows of the Chemistry Building, so that we were
+exposed to the germs from the corpses. The sanitary committee was called
+upon to act, and it responded nobly. Two men were required to go out and
+remove the corpses, and this meant the probable sacrifice of their own
+lives, for, having performed the task, they were not to be permitted to
+reenter the building. One of the professors, who was a bachelor, and
+one of the undergraduates volunteered. They bade good-bye to us and
+went forth. They were heroes. They gave up their lives that four hundred
+others might live. After they had performed their work, they stood for
+a moment, at a distance, looking at us wistfully. Then they waved their
+hands in farewell and went away slowly across the campus toward the
+burning city.
+
+"And yet it was all useless. The next morning the first one of us was
+smitten with the plague--a little nurse-girl in the family of Professor
+Stout. It was no time for weak-kneed, sentimental policies. On the
+chance that she might be the only one, we thrust her forth from the
+building and commanded her to be gone.
+
+[Illustration: We thrust her forth from the building 121]
+
+"She went away slowly across the campus, wringing her hands and crying
+pitifully. We felt like brutes, but what were we to do? There were four
+hundred of us, and individuals had to be sacrificed.
+
+"In one of the laboratories three families had domiciled themselves, and
+that afternoon we found among them no less than four corpses and seven
+cases of the plague in all its different stages.
+
+"Then it was that the horror began. Leaving the dead lie, we forced the
+living ones to segregate themselves in another room. The plague began to
+break out among the rest of us, and as fast as the symptoms appeared, we
+sent the stricken ones to these segregated rooms. We compelled them to
+walk there by themselves, so as to avoid laying hands on them. It was
+heartrending. But still the plague raged among us, and room after
+room was filled with the dead and dying. And so we who were yet clean
+retreated to the next floor and to the next, before this sea of the
+dead, that, room by room and floor by floor, inundated the building.
+
+"The place became a charnel house, and in the middle of the night
+the survivors fled forth, taking nothing with them except arms and
+ammunition and a heavy store of tinned foods. We camped on the opposite
+side of the campus from the prowlers, and, while some stood guard,
+others of us volunteered to scout into the city in quest of horses,
+motor cars, carts, and wagons, or anything that would carry our
+provisions and enable us to emulate the banded workingmen I had seen
+fighting their way out to the open country.
+
+"I was one of these scouts; and Doctor Hoyle, remembering that his motor
+car had been left behind in his home garage, told me to look for it. We
+scouted in pairs, and Dombey, a young undergraduate, accompanied me. We
+had to cross half a mile of the residence portion of the city to get
+to Doctor Hoyle's home. Here the buildings stood apart, in the midst of
+trees and grassy lawns, and here the fires had played freaks, burning
+whole blocks, skipping blocks and often skipping a single house in a
+block. And here, too, the prowlers were still at their work. We carried
+our automatic pistols openly in our hands, and looked desperate enough,
+forsooth, to keep them from attacking us. But at Doctor Hoyle's house
+the thing happened. Untouched by fire, even as we came to it the smoke
+of flames burst forth.
+
+"The miscreant who had set fire to it staggered down the steps and out
+along the driveway. Sticking out of his coat pockets were bottles of
+whiskey, and he was very drunk. My first impulse was to shoot him, and
+I have never ceased regretting that I did not. Staggering and maundering
+to himself, with bloodshot eyes, and a raw and bleeding slash down one
+side of his bewhiskered face, he was altogether the most nauseating
+specimen of degradation and filth I had ever encountered. I did not
+shoot him, and he leaned against a tree on the lawn to let us go by.
+It was the most absolute, wanton act. Just as we were opposite him,
+he suddenly drew a pistol and shot Dombey through the head. The next
+instant I shot him. But it was too late. Dombey expired without a groan,
+immediately. I doubt if he even knew what had happened to him.
+
+"Leaving the two corpses, I hurried on past the burning house to the
+garage, and there found Doctor Hoyle's motor car. The tanks were filled
+with gasoline, and it was ready for use. And it was in this car that I
+threaded the streets of the ruined city and came back to the survivors
+on the campus. The other scouts returned, but none had been so
+fortunate. Professor Fairmead had found a Shetland pony, but the poor
+creature, tied in a stable and abandoned for days, was so weak from want
+of food and water that it could carry no burden at all. Some of the men
+were for turning it loose, but I insisted that we should lead it along
+with us, so that, if we got out of food, we would have it to eat.
+
+"There were forty-seven of us when we started, many being women and
+children. The President of the Faculty, an old man to begin with, and
+now hopelessly broken by the awful happenings of the past week, rode
+in the motor car with several young children and the aged mother of
+Professor Fairmead. Wathope, a young professor of English, who had a
+grievous bullet-wound in his leg, drove the car. The rest of us walked,
+Professor Fairmead leading the pony.
+
+"It was what should have been a bright summer day, but the smoke from
+the burning world filled the sky, through which the sun shone murkily,
+a dull and lifeless orb, blood-red and ominous. But we had grown
+accustomed to that blood-red sun. With the smoke it was different. It
+bit into our nostrils and eyes, and there was not one of us whose eyes
+were not bloodshot. We directed our course to the southeast through the
+endless miles of suburban residences, travelling along where the first
+swells of low hills rose from the flat of the central city. It was by
+this way, only, that we could expect to gain the country.
+
+"Our progress was painfully slow. The women and children could not walk
+fast. They did not dream of walking, my grandsons, in the way all people
+walk to-day. In truth, none of us knew how to walk. It was not until
+after the plague that I learned really to walk. So it was that the pace
+of the slowest was the pace of all, for we dared not separate on account
+of the prowlers. There were not so many now of these human beasts of
+prey. The plague had already well diminished their numbers, but enough
+still lived to be a constant menace to us. Many of the beautiful
+residences were untouched by fire, yet smoking ruins were everywhere.
+The prowlers, too, seemed to have got over their insensate desire to
+burn, and it was more rarely that we saw houses freshly on fire.
+
+"Several of us scouted among the private garages in search of motor cars
+and gasoline. But in this we were unsuccessful. The first great flights
+from the cities had swept all such utilities away. Calgan, a fine young
+man, was lost in this work. He was shot by prowlers while crossing a
+lawn. Yet this was our only casualty, though, once, a drunken brute
+deliberately opened fire on all of us. Luckily, he fired wildly, and we
+shot him before he had done any hurt.
+
+"At Fruitvale, still in the heart of the magnificent residence section
+of the city, the plague again smote us. Professor Fairmead was the
+victim. Making signs to us that his mother was not to know, he turned
+aside into the grounds of a beautiful mansion. He sat down forlornly on
+the steps of the front veranda, and I, having lingered, waved him a last
+farewell. That night, several miles beyond Fruitvale and still in the
+city, we made camp. And that night we shifted camp twice to get away
+from our dead. In the morning there were thirty of us. I shall never
+forget the President of the Faculty. During the morning's march his
+wife, who was walking, betrayed the fatal symptoms, and when she
+drew aside to let us go on, he insisted on leaving the motor car and
+remaining with her. There was quite a discussion about this, but in the
+end we gave in. It was just as well, for we knew not which ones of us,
+if any, might ultimately escape.
+
+"That night, the second of our march, we camped beyond Haywards in the
+first stretches of country. And in the morning there were eleven of us
+that lived. Also, during the night, Wathope, the professor with the
+wounded leg, deserted us in the motor car. He took with him his sister
+and his mother and most of our tinned provisions. It was that day, in
+the afternoon, while resting by the wayside, that I saw the last airship
+I shall ever see. The smoke was much thinner here in the country, and I
+first sighted the ship drifting and veering helplessly at an elevation
+of two thousand feet. What had happened I could not conjecture, but even
+as we looked we saw her bow dip down lower and lower. Then the bulkheads
+of the various gas-chambers must have burst, for, quite perpendicular,
+she fell like a plummet to the earth.
+
+[Illustration: She fell like a plummet to the earth 132]
+
+"And from that day to this I have not seen another airship. Often and
+often, during the next few years, I scanned the sky for them, hoping
+against hope that somewhere in the world civilization had survived. But
+it was not to be. What happened with us in California must have happened
+with everybody everywhere.
+
+"Another day, and at Niles there were three of us. Beyond Niles, in the
+middle of the highway, we found Wathope. The motor car had broken down,
+and there, on the rugs which they had spread on the ground, lay the
+bodies of his sister, his mother, and himself.
+
+"Wearied by the unusual exercise of continual walking, that night I
+slept heavily. In the morning I was alone in the world. Canfield and
+Parsons, my last companions, were dead of the plague. Of the four
+hundred that sought shelter in the Chemistry Building, and of the
+forty-seven that began the march, I alone remained--I and the Shetland
+pony. Why this should be so there is no explaining. I did not catch the
+plague, that is all. I was immune. I was merely the one lucky man in
+a million--just as every survivor was one in a million, or, rather, in
+several millions, for the proportion was at least that."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+"FOR two days I sheltered in a pleasant grove where there had been no
+deaths. In those two days, while badly depressed and believing that my
+turn would come at any moment, nevertheless I rested and recuperated. So
+did the pony. And on the third day, putting what small store of tinned
+provisions I possessed on the pony's back, I started on across a very
+lonely land. Not a live man, woman, or child, did I encounter, though
+the dead were everywhere. Food, however, was abundant. The land then
+was not as it is now. It was all cleared of trees and brush, and it was
+cultivated. The food for millions of mouths was growing, ripening, and
+going to waste. From the fields and orchards I gathered vegetables,
+fruits, and berries. Around the deserted farmhouses I got eggs and
+caught chickens. And frequently I found supplies of tinned provisions in
+the store-rooms.
+
+"A strange thing was what was taking place with all the domestic
+animals. Everywhere they were going wild and preying on one another. The
+chickens and ducks were the first to be destroyed, while the pigs were
+the first to go wild, followed by the cats. Nor were the dogs long in
+adapting themselves to the changed conditions. There was a veritable
+plague of dogs. They devoured the corpses, barked and howled during the
+nights, and in the daytime slunk about in the distance. As the time went
+by, I noticed a change in their behavior. At first they were apart from
+one another, very suspicious and very prone to fight. But after a not
+very long while they began to come together and run in packs. The dog,
+you see, always was a social animal, and this was true before ever he
+came to be domesticated by man. In the last days of the world before the
+plague, there were many many very different kinds of dogs--dogs without
+hair and dogs with warm fur, dogs so small that they would make scarcely
+a mouthful for other dogs that were as large as mountain lions. Well,
+all the small dogs, and the weak types, were killed by their fellows.
+Also, the very large ones were not adapted for the wild life and bred
+out. As a result, the many different kinds of dogs disappeared, and
+there remained, running in packs, the medium-sized wolfish dogs that you
+know to-day."
+
+"But the cats don't run in packs, Granser," Hoo-Hoo objected.
+
+"The cat was never a social animal. As one writer in the nineteenth
+century said, the cat walks by himself. He always walked by himself,
+from before the time he was tamed by man, down through the long ages of
+domestication, to to-day when once more he is wild.
+
+"The horses also went wild, and all the fine breeds we had degenerated
+into the small mustang horse you know to-day. The cows likewise went
+wild, as did the pigeons and the sheep. And that a few of the chickens
+survived you know yourself. But the wild chicken of to-day is quite a
+different thing from the chickens we had in those days.
+
+"But I must go on with my story. I travelled through a deserted land. As
+the time went by I began to yearn more and more for human beings. But I
+never found one, and I grew lonelier and lonelier. I crossed Livermore
+Valley and the mountains between it and the great valley of the San
+Joaquin. You have never seen that valley, but it is very large and it is
+the home of the wild horse. There are great droves there, thousands and
+tens of thousands. I revisited it thirty years after, so I know. You
+think there are lots of wild horses down here in the coast valleys, but
+they are as nothing compared with those of the San Joaquin. Strange to
+say, the cows, when they went wild, went back into the lower mountains.
+Evidently they were better able to protect themselves there.
+
+"In the country districts the ghouls and prowlers had been less in
+evidence, for I found many villages and towns untouched by fire. But
+they were filled by the pestilential dead, and I passed by without
+exploring them. It was near Lathrop that, out of my loneliness, I picked
+up a pair of collie dogs that were so newly free that they were urgently
+willing to return to their allegiance to man. These collies accompanied
+me for many years, and the strains of them are in those very dogs there
+that you boys have to-day. But in sixty years the collie strain has
+worked out. These brutes are more like domesticated wolves than anything
+else."
+
+Hare-Lip rose to his feet, glanced to see that the goats were safe,
+and looked at the sun's position in the afternoon sky, advertising
+impatience at the prolixity of the old man's tale. Urged to hurry by
+Edwin, Granser went on.
+
+"There is little more to tell. With my two dogs and my pony, and riding
+a horse I had managed to capture, I crossed the San Joaquin and went on
+to a wonderful valley in the Sierras called Yosemite. In the great hotel
+there I found a prodigious supply of tinned provisions. The pasture was
+abundant, as was the game, and the river that ran through the valley was
+full of trout. I remained there three years in an utter loneliness that
+none but a man who has once been highly civilized can understand. Then
+I could stand it no more. I felt that I was going crazy. Like the dog,
+I was a social animal and I needed my kind. I reasoned that since I had
+survived the plague, there was a possibility that others had survived.
+Also, I reasoned that after three years the plague germs must all be
+gone and the land be clean again.
+
+[Illustration: With my horse and dogs and pony, I set out 144]
+
+"With my horse and dogs and pony, I set out. Again I crossed the San
+Joaquin Valley, the mountains beyond, and came down into Livermore
+Valley. The change in those three years was amazing. All the land had
+been splendidly tilled, and now I could scarcely recognize it, 'such was
+the sea of rank vegetation that had overrun the agricultural handiwork
+of man. You see, the wheat, the vegetables, and orchard trees had always
+been cared for and nursed by man, so that they were soft and tender. The
+weeds and wild bushes and such things, on the contrary, had always been
+fought by man, so that they were tough and resistant. As a result, when
+the hand of man was removed, the wild vegetation smothered and destroyed
+practically all the domesticated vegetation. The coyotes were greatly
+increased, and it was at this time that I first encountered wolves,
+straying in twos and threes and small packs down from the regions where
+they had always persisted.
+
+"It was at Lake Temescal, not far from the one-time city of Oakland,
+that I came upon the first live human beings. Oh, my grandsons, how can
+I describe to you my emotion, when, astride my horse and dropping down
+the hillside to the lake, I saw the smoke of a campfire rising through
+the trees. Almost did my heart stop beating. I felt that I was going
+crazy. Then I heard the cry of a babe--a human babe. And dogs barked,
+and my dogs answered. I did not know but what I was the one human alive
+in the whole world. It could not be true that here were others--smoke,
+and the cry of a babe.
+
+"Emerging on the lake, there, before my eyes, not a hundred yards away,
+I saw a man, a large man. He was standing on an outjutting rock and
+fishing. I was overcome. I stopped my horse. I tried to call out but
+could not. I waved my hand. It seemed to me that the man looked at me,
+but he did not appear to wave. Then I laid my head on my arms there
+in the saddle. I was afraid to look again, for I knew it was an
+hallucination, and I knew that if I looked the man would be gone. And so
+precious was the hallucination, that I wanted it to persist yet a little
+while. I knew, too, that as long as I did not look it would persist.
+
+"Thus I remained, until I heard my dogs snarling, and a man's voice.
+What do you think the voice said? I will tell you. It said: '_Where in
+hell did you come from??_'
+
+"Those were the words, the exact words. That was what your other
+grandfather said to me, Hare-Lip, when he greeted me there on the shore
+of Lake Temescal fifty-seven years ago. And they were the most ineffable
+words I have ever heard. I opened my eyes, and there he stood before me,
+a large, dark, hairy man, heavy-jawed, slant-browed, fierce-eyed. How I
+got off my horse I do not know. But it seemed that the next I knew I was
+clasping his hand with both of mine and crying. I would have embraced
+him, but he was ever a narrow-minded, suspicious man, and he drew away
+from me. Yet did I cling to his hand and cry."
+
+Granser's voice faltered and broke at the recollection, and the weak
+tears streamed down his cheeks while the boys looked on and giggled.
+
+"Yet did I cry," he continued, "and desire to embrace him, though the
+Chauffeur was a brute, a perfect brute--the most abhorrent man I have
+ever known. His name was... strange, how I have forgotten his name.
+Everybody called him Chauffeur--it was the name of his occupation, and
+it stuck. That is how, to this day, the tribe he founded is called the
+Chauffeur Tribe.
+
+[Illustration: Everybody called him Chauffeur 149]
+
+"He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague germs spared him I can
+never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical
+notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the
+universe. Why did he live?--an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the
+face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he
+could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages--and
+especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid
+swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before the
+coming of the plague. And yet he was spared, while hundreds of millions,
+yea, billions, of better men were destroyed.
+
+[Illustration: Vesta the one woman 150]
+
+"I went on with him to his camp, and there I saw her, Vesta, the one
+woman. It was glorious and... pitiful. There she was, Vesta Van Warden,
+the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred
+and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion
+work--she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple of the greatest
+baronage of wealth the world had ever known. John Van Warden, her
+husband, worth one billion, eight hundred millions and President of the
+Board of Industrial Magnates, had been the ruler of America. Also,
+sitting on the International Board of Control, he had been one of the
+seven men who ruled the world. And she herself had come of equally noble
+stock. Her father, Philip Saxon, had been President of the Board of
+Industrial Magnates up to the time of his death. This office was in
+process of becoming hereditary, and had Philip Saxon had a son that son
+would have succeeded him. But his only child was Vesta, the perfect
+flower of generations of the highest culture this planet has ever
+produced. It was not until the engagement between Vesta and Van Warden
+took place, that Saxon indicated the latter as his successor. It was, I
+am sure, a political marriage. I have reason to believe that Vesta never
+really loved her husband in the mad passionate way of which the poets
+used to sing. It was more like the marriages that obtained among crowned
+heads in the days before they were displaced by the Magnates.
+
+[Illustration: There she was, boiling fish-chowder 153]
+
+"And there she was, boiling fish-chowder in a soot-covered pot, her
+glorious eyes inflamed by the acrid smoke of the open fire. Hers was a
+sad story. She was the one survivor in a million, as I had been, as
+the Chauffeur had been. On a crowning eminence of the Alameda Hills,
+overlooking San Francisco Bay, Van Warden had built a vast summer
+palace. It was surrounded by a park of a thousand acres. When the
+plague broke out, Van Warden sent her there. Armed guards patrolled the
+boundaries of the park, and nothing entered in the way of provisions or
+even mail matter that was not first fumigated. And yet did the plague
+enter, killing the guards at their posts, the servants at their tasks,
+sweeping away the whole army of retainers--or, at least, all of them who
+did not flee to die elsewhere. So it was that Vesta found herself the
+sole living person in the palace that had become a charnel house.
+
+"Now the Chauffeur had been one of the servants that ran away.
+Returning, two months afterward, he discovered Vesta in a little summer
+pavilion where there had been no deaths and where she had established
+herself. He was a brute. She was afraid, and she ran away and hid among
+the trees. That night, on foot, she fled into the mountains--she, whose
+tender feet and delicate body had never known the bruise of stones nor
+the scratch of briars. He followed, and that night he caught her. He
+struck her. Do you understand? He beat her with those terrible fists of
+his and made her his slave. It was she who had to gather the firewood,
+build the fires, cook, and do all the degrading camp-labor--she, who had
+never performed a menial act in her life. These things he compelled her
+to do, while he, a proper savage, elected to lie around camp and look
+on. He did nothing, absolutely nothing, except on occasion to hunt meat
+or catch fish."
+
+"Good for Chauffeur," Hare-Lip commented in an undertone to the other
+boys. "I remember him before he died. He was a corker. But he did
+things, and he made things go. You know, Dad married his daughter, an'
+you ought to see the way he knocked the spots outa Dad. The Chauffeur
+was a son-of-a-gun. He made us kids stand around. Even when he was
+croaking he reached out for me, once, an' laid my head open with that
+long stick he kept always beside him."
+
+Hare-Lip rubbed his bullet head reminiscently, and the boys returned to
+the old man, who was maundering ecstatically about Vesta, the squaw of
+the founder of the Chauffeur Tribe.
+
+"And so I say to you that you cannot understand the awfulness of the
+situation. The Chauffeur was a servant, understand, a servant. And he
+cringed, with bowed head, to such as she. She was a lord of life, both
+by birth and by marriage. The destinies of millions, such as he, she
+carried in the hollow of her pink-white hand. And, in the days before
+the plague, the slightest contact with such as he would have been
+pollution. Oh, I have seen it. Once, I remember, there was Mrs. Goldwin,
+wife of one of the great magnates. It was on a landing stage, just
+as she was embarking in her private dirigible, that she dropped her
+parasol. A servant picked it up and made the mistake of handing it to
+her--to her, one of the greatest royal ladies of the land! She shrank
+back, as though he were a leper, and indicated her secretary to receive
+it. Also, she ordered her secretary to ascertain the creature's name and
+to see that he was immediately discharged from service. And such a woman
+was Vesta Van Warden. And her the Chauffeur beat and made his slave.
+
+[Illustration: And her the Chauffeur beat and made his slave 158]
+
+"--Bill--that was it; Bill, the Chauffeur. That was his name. He was
+a wretched, primitive man, wholly devoid of the finer instincts and
+chivalrous promptings of a cultured soul. No, there is no absolute
+justice, for to him fell that wonder of womanhood, Vesta Van Warden. The
+grievous-ness of this you will never understand, my grandsons; for
+you are yourselves primitive little savages, unaware of aught else but
+savagery. Why should Vesta not have been mine? I was a man of culture
+and refinement, a professor in a great university. Even so, in the time
+before the plague, such was her exalted position, she would not have
+deigned to know that I existed. Mark, then, the abysmal degradation
+to which she fell at the hands of the Chauffeur. Nothing less than the
+destruction of all mankind had made it possible that I should know her,
+look in her eyes, converse with her, touch her hand--ay, and love her
+and know that her feelings toward me were very kindly. I have reason to
+believe that she, even she, would have loved me, there being no other
+man in the world except the Chauffeur. Why, when it destroyed eight
+billions of souls, did not the plague destroy just one more man, and
+that man the Chauffeur?
+
+"Once, when the Chauffeur was away fishing, she begged me to kill him.
+With tears in her eyes she begged me to kill him. But he was a strong
+and violent man, and I was afraid. Afterwards, I talked with him. I
+offered him my horse, my pony, my dogs, all that I possessed, if he
+would give Vesta to me. And he grinned in my face and shook his head. He
+was very insulting. He said that in the old days he had been a servant,
+had been dirt under the feet of men like me and of women like Vesta, and
+that now he had the greatest lady in the land to be servant to him and
+cook his food and nurse his brats. 'You had your day before the plague,'
+he said; 'but this is my day, and a damned good day it is. I wouldn't
+trade back to the old times for anything.' Such words he spoke, but they
+are not his words. He was a vulgar, low-minded man, and vile oaths fell
+continually from his lips.
+
+"Also, he told me that if he caught me making eyes at his woman he'd
+wring my neck and give her a beating as well. What was I to do? I was
+afraid. He was a brute. That first night, when I discovered the camp,
+Vesta and I had great talk about the things of our vanished world. We
+talked of art, and books, and poetry; and the Chauffeur listened and
+grinned and sneered. He was bored and angered by our way of speech which
+he did not comprehend, and finally he spoke up and said: 'And this is
+Vesta Van Warden, one-time wife of Van Warden the Magnate--a high and
+stuck-up beauty, who is now my squaw. Eh, Professor Smith, times is
+changed, times is changed. Here, you, woman, take off my moccasins,
+and lively about it. I want Professor Smith to see how well I have you
+trained.'
+
+"I saw her clench her teeth, and the flame of revolt rise in her face.
+He drew back his gnarled fist to strike, and I was afraid, and sick at
+heart. I could do nothing to prevail against him. So I got up to go,
+and not be witness to such indignity. But the Chauffeur laughed and
+threatened me with a beating if I did not stay and behold. And I sat
+there, perforce, by the campfire on the shore of Lake Temescal, and
+saw Vesta, Vesta Van Warden, kneel and remove the moccasins of that
+grinning, hairy, apelike human brute.
+
+"--Oh, you do not understand, my grandsons. You have never known
+anything else, and you do not understand.
+
+"'Halter-broke and bridle-wise,' the Chauffeur gloated, while she
+performed that dreadful, menial task. 'A trifle balky at times,
+Professor, a trifle balky; but a clout alongside the jaw makes her as
+meek and gentle as a lamb.'
+
+"And another time he said: 'We've got to start all over and replenish
+the earth and multiply. You're handicapped, Professor. You ain't got no
+wife, and we're up against a regular Garden-of-Eden proposition. But I
+ain't proud. I'll tell you what, Professor.' He pointed at their little
+infant, barely a year old. 'There's your wife, though you'll have to
+wait till she grows up. It's rich, ain't it? We're all equals here, and
+I'm the biggest toad in the splash. But I ain't stuck up--not I. I do
+you the honor, Professor Smith, the very great honor of betrothing to
+you my and Vesta Van Warden's daughter. Ain't it cussed bad that Van
+Warden ain't here to see?'"
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+"I LIVED three weeks of infinite torment there in the Chauffeur's camp.
+And then, one day, tiring of me, or of what to him was my bad effect
+on Vesta, he told me that the year before, wandering through the Contra
+Costa Hills to the Straits of Carquinez, across the Straits he had seen
+a smoke. This meant that there were still other human beings, and that
+for three weeks he had kept this inestimably precious information from
+me. I departed at once, with my dogs and horses, and journeyed across
+the Contra Costa Hills to the Straits. I saw no smoke on the other side,
+but at Port Costa discovered a small steel barge on which I was able to
+embark my animals. Old canvas which I found served me for a sail, and
+a southerly breeze fanned me across the Straits and up to the ruins
+of Vallejo. Here, on the outskirts of the city, I found evidences of a
+recently occupied camp.
+
+[Illustration: Found evidences of a recently occupied camp 169]
+
+"Many clam-shells showed me why these humans had come to the shores of
+the Bay. This was the Santa Rosa Tribe, and I followed its track along
+the old railroad right of way across the salt marshes to Sonoma Valley.
+Here, at the old brickyard at Glen Ellen, I came upon the camp. There
+were eighteen souls all told. Two were old men, one of whom was Jones, a
+banker. The other was Harrison, a retired pawnbroker, who had taken for
+wife the matron of the State Hospital for the Insane at Napa. Of all the
+persons of the city of Napa, and of all the other towns and villages
+in that rich and populous valley, she had been the only survivor. Next,
+there were the three young men--Cardiff and Hale, who had been farmers,
+and Wainwright, a common day-laborer. All three had found wives. To
+Hale, a crude, illiterate farmer, had fallen Isadore, the greatest
+prize, next to Vesta, of the women who came through the plague. She was
+one of the world's most noted singers, and the plague had caught her at
+San Francisco. She has talked with me for hours at a time, telling me of
+her adventures, until, at last, rescued by Hale in the Mendocino Forest
+Reserve, there had remained nothing for her to do but become his wife.
+But Hale was a good fellow, in spite of his illiteracy. He had a keen
+sense of justice and right-dealing, and she was far happier with him
+than was Vesta with the Chauffeur.
+
+"The wives of Cardiff and Wainwright were ordinary women, accustomed
+to toil with strong constitutions--just the type for the wild new life
+which they were compelled to live. In addition were two adult idiots
+from the feeble-minded home at Eldredge, and five or six young children
+and infants born after the formation of the Santa Rosa Tribe. Also,
+there was Bertha. She was a good woman, Hare-Lip, in spite of the sneers
+of your father. Her I took for wife. She was the mother of your father,
+Edwin, and of yours, Hoo-Hoo. And it was our daughter, Vera, who married
+your father, Hare-Lip--your father, Sandow, who was the oldest son of
+Vesta Van Warden and the Chauffeur.
+
+"And so it was that I became the nineteenth member of the Santa Rosa
+Tribe. There were only two outsiders added after me. One was Mungerson,
+descended from the Magnates, who wandered alone in the wilds of Northern
+California for eight years before he came south and joined us. He it was
+who waited twelve years more before he married my daughter, Mary. The
+other was Johnson, the man who founded the Utah Tribe. That was where he
+came from, Utah, a country that lies very far away from here, across the
+great deserts, to the east. It was not until twenty-seven years after
+the plague that Johnson reached California. In all that Utah region he
+reported but three survivors, himself one, and all men. For many years
+these three men lived and hunted together, until, at last, desperate,
+fearing that with them the human race would perish utterly from the
+planet, they headed westward on the possibility of finding women
+survivors in California. Johnson alone came through the great desert,
+where his two companions died. He was forty-six years old when he joined
+us, and he married the fourth daughter of Isadore and Hale, and his
+eldest son married your aunt, Hare-Lip, who was the third daughter of
+Vesta and the Chauffeur. Johnson was a strong man, with a will of his
+own. And it was because of this that he seceded from the Santa Rosans
+and formed the Utah Tribe at San Jose. It is a small tribe--there are
+only nine in it; but, though he is dead, such was his influence and the
+strength of his breed, that it will grow into a strong tribe and play a
+leading part in the recivilization of the planet.
+
+"There are only two other tribes that we know of--the Los Angelitos
+and the Carmelitos. The latter started from one man and woman. He was
+called Lopez, and he was descended from the ancient Mexicans and was
+very black. He was a cowherd in the ranges beyond Carmel, and his wife
+was a maidservant in the great Del Monte Hotel. It was seven years
+before we first got in touch with the Los Angelitos. They have a
+good country down there, but it is too warm. I estimate the present
+population of the world at between three hundred and fifty and four
+hundred--provided, of course, that there are no scattered little tribes
+elsewhere in the world. If there be such, we have not heard from them.
+Since Johnson crossed the desert from Utah, no word nor sign has come
+from the East or anywhere else. The great world which I knew in my
+boyhood and early manhood is gone. It has ceased to be. I am the last
+man who was alive in the days of the plague and who knows the wonders of
+that far-off time. We, who mastered the planet--its earth, and sea, and
+sky--and who were as very gods, now live in primitive savagery along the
+water courses of this California country.
+
+"But we are increasing rapidly--your sister, Hare-Lip, already has four
+children. We are increasing rapidly and making ready for a new climb
+toward civilization. In time, pressure of population will compel us
+to spread out, and a hundred generations from now we may expect our
+descendants to start across the Sierras, oozing slowly along, generation
+by generation, over the great continent to the colonization of the
+East--a new Aryan drift around the world.
+
+"But it will be slow, very slow; we have so far to climb. We fell so
+hopelessly far. If only one physicist or one chemist had survived!
+But it was not to be, and we have forgotten everything. The Chauffeur
+started working in iron. He made the forge which we use to this day.
+But he was a lazy man, and when he died he took with him all he knew
+of metals and machinery. What was I to know of such things? I was a
+classical scholar, not a chemist.. The other men who survived were not
+educated. Only two things did the Chauffeur accomplish--the brewing
+of strong drink and the growing of tobacco. It was while he was drunk,
+once, that he killed Vesta. I firmly believe that he killed Vesta in a
+fit of drunken cruelty though he always maintained that she fell into
+the lake and was drowned.
+
+"And, my grandsons, let me warn you against the medicine-men. They call
+themselves _doctors_, travestying what was once a noble profession, but
+in reality they are medicine-men, devil-devil men, and they make for
+superstition and darkness. They are cheats and liars. But so debased and
+degraded are we, that we believe their lies. They, too, will increase
+in numbers as we increase, and they will strive to rule us. Yet are
+they liars and charlatans. Look at young Cross-Eyes, posing as a
+doctor, selling charms against sickness, giving good hunting,
+exchanging promises of fair weather for good meat and skins, sending the
+death-stick, performing a thousand abominations. Yet I say to you,
+that when he says he can do these things, he lies. I, Professor Smith,
+Professor James Howard Smith, say that he lies. I have told him so to
+his teeth. Why has he not sent me the death-stick? Because he knows that
+with me it is without avail. But you, Hare-Lip, so deeply are you
+sunk in black superstition that did you awake this night and find the
+death-stick beside you, you would surely die. And you would die, not
+because of any virtues in the stick, but because you are a savage with
+the dark and clouded mind of a savage.
+
+"The doctors must be destroyed, and all that was lost must be discovered
+over again. Wherefore, earnestly, I repeat unto you certain things which
+you must remember and tell to your children after you. You must tell
+them that when water is made hot by fire, there resides in it a
+wonderful thing called steam, which is stronger than ten thousand men
+and which can do all man's work for him. There are other very useful
+things. In the lightning flash resides a similarly strong servant of
+man, which was of old his slave and which some day will be his slave
+again.
+
+[Illustration: I have stored many books in a cave 179]
+
+"Quite a different thing is the alphabet. It is what enables me to
+know the meaning of fine markings, whereas you boys know only rude
+picture-writing. In that dry cave on Telegraph Hill, where you see me
+often go when the tribe is down by the sea, I have stored many books.
+In them is great wisdom. Also, with them, I have placed a key to the
+alphabet, so that one who knows picture-writing may also know print.
+Some day men will read again; and then, if no accident has befallen my
+cave, they will know that Professor James Howard Smith once lived and
+saved for them the knowledge of the ancients.
+
+"There is another little device that men inevitably will rediscover. It
+is called gunpowder. It was what enabled us to kill surely and at long
+distances. Certain things which are found in the ground, when combined
+in the right proportions, will make this gunpowder. What these things
+are, I have forgotten, or else I never knew. But I wish I did know. Then
+would I make powder, and then would I certainly kill Cross-Eyes and rid
+the land of superstition--"
+
+"After I am man-grown I am going to give Cross-Eyes all the goats,
+and meat, and skins I can get, so that he'll teach me to be a doctor,"
+Hoo-Hoo asserted. "And when I know, I'll make everybody else sit up and
+take notice. They'll get down in the dirt to me, you bet."
+
+The old man nodded his head solemnly, and murmured:
+
+"Strange it is to hear the vestiges and remnants of the complicated
+Aryan speech falling from the lips of a filthy little skin-clad savage.
+All the world is topsy-turvy. And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the
+plague."
+
+"You won't make me sit up," Hare-Lip boasted to the would-be
+medicine-man. "If I paid you for a sending of the death-stick and it
+didn't work, I'd bust in your head--understand, you Hoo-Hoo, you?"
+
+"I'm going to get Granser to remember this here gunpowder stuff," Edwin
+said softly, "and then I'll have you all on the run. You, Hare-Lip, will
+do my fighting for me and get my meat for me, and you, Hoo-Hoo, will
+send the death-stick for me and make everybody afraid. And if I catch
+Hare-Lip trying to bust your head, Hoo-Hoo, I'll fix him with that same
+gunpowder. Granser ain't such a fool as you think, and I'm going to
+listen to him and some day I'll be boss over the whole bunch of you."
+
+The old man shook his head sadly, and said:
+
+"The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it--the same old story over
+and over. Man will increase, and men will fight. The gunpowder will
+enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and
+blood, will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved. And of
+what profit will it be? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the
+new. It may take fifty thousand years to build, but it will pass. All
+things pass. Only remain cosmic force and matter, ever in flux, ever
+acting and reacting and realizing the eternal types--the priest, the
+soldier, and the king. Out of the mouths of babes comes the wisdom of
+all the ages. Some will fight, some will rule, some will pray; and all
+the rest will toil and suffer sore while on their bleeding carcasses
+is reared again, and yet again, without end, the amazing beauty and
+surpassing wonder of the civilized state. It were just as well that I
+destroyed those cave-stored books--whether they remain or perish, all
+their old truths will be discovered, their old lies lived and handed
+down. What is the profit--"
+
+Hare-Lip leaped to his feet, giving a quick glance at the pasturing
+goats and the afternoon sun.
+
+"Gee!" he muttered to Edwin, "The old geezer gets more long-winded every
+day. Let's pull for camp."
+
+While the other two, aided by the dogs, assembled the goats and started
+them for the trail through the forest, Edwin stayed by the old man and
+guided him in the same direction. When they reached the old right of
+way, Edwin stopped suddenly and looked back. Hare-Lip and Hoo-Hoo and
+the dogs and the goats passed on. Edwin was looking at a small herd of
+wild horses which had come down on the hard sand. There were at least
+twenty of them, young colts and yearlings and mares, led by a beautiful
+stallion which stood in the foam at the edge of the surf, with arched
+neck and bright wild eyes, sniffing the salt air from off the sea.
+
+"What is it?" Granser queried.
+
+"Horses," was the answer. "First time I ever seen 'em on the beach. It's
+the mountain lions getting thicker and thicker and driving 'em down."
+
+The low sun shot red shafts of light, fan-shaped, up from a
+cloud-tumbled horizon. And close at hand, in the white waste of
+shore-lashed waters, the sea-lions, bellowing their old primeval chant,
+hauled up out of the sea on the black rocks and fought and loved.
+
+"Come on, Granser," Edwin prompted. And old man and boy, skin-clad and
+barbaric, turned and went along the right of way into the forest in the
+wake of the goats.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London
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