hour, entered the main house and
sought the fighting platform on its roof. Why had no lookout been
stationed here? Surely an oversight. He gazed eagerly about him.
Directly to the right of the house lay the home paddock, stretching
away some two hundred yards to the edge of a white-birch plantation.
The Ochre brook bounded it on one side, and the current had scoured
out for itself an ever-deepening channel in the soft, alluvial soil. A
clump of alders, just bursting into leaf, masked the bed of the stream at
one particular point, where the bank rose into a miniature bluff.
Constans, from his elevated position, was enabled to overlook this
point, and so to make out the figure of a mounted man behind the alder
screen, his horse standing belly deep in the water. It was the cavalier of
the ostrich-feathers; and then, through the white trunks of the birches,
he caught the flutter of a woman's gown. Constans tried to shout, to call
out, but the vocal chords refused to relax, the sounds rattled in his
throat.
II
THE NIGHT OF THE TERROR
The reader, desiring to inform himself in extenso regarding the physical
and social changes that followed the catastrophe by which the ancient
civilization was so suddenly subverted, would do well to consult the
final authority upon the subject, the learned Vigilas, author of The
Later Cosmos (elephant folio edition). But for our present purpose a
brief epitome should suffice. To borrow then, with all due
acknowledgments, from our admirable historian:
"It was in the later years of the twentieth century that the Great Change
came; at least, so the traditions agree, and how is a man to know
certainly of such things except as he learns them from his father's lips?
True, the accounts differ, and widely so at times, but that much is to be
expected--where were there ever two men who heard or saw the same
things in the same way? It is human nature that we should color even
transparent fact with the reflected glow of our passions and fancies, and
so the distortion becomes inevitable; we should be satisfied if, to-day,
we succeed in making out even the broad outlines of the picture.
"It appears tolerably certain that the wreck of the ancient civilization
took place about three generations ago, the catastrophe being both
sudden and overwhelming; moreover,all the authorities agree that only
an infinitesimal portion of the race escaped, with whole skins, from
what were, in very sooth, cities of destruction. These fortunate ones
were naturally the politically powerful and the immensely rich, and
they owed their safety to the fact that they were able to seize upon the
shipping in the harbors for their exclusive use. The fugitives sailed
away, presumably to the southward, and so disappeared from the pages
of authentic history. We know nothing for certain; only that they
departed, and that we saw their faces no more.
"Let us reconstruct, as best we may, the panorama of those few but
awful days. The first rush was naturally to the country, but the crowds,
choking the ferry and railway stations, were quickly confronted with
the terror-stricken thousands of the suburbs, who were flocking to the
city for refuge. And all through the dragging hours the same despairing
reports flowed in from the remoter rural districts; everywhere the
Terror walked, and men were dying like flies. From ocean to ocean,
from the lakes to the gulf, the shadow rushed, and now the whole land
lay in darkness.
"Such was the situation in what was then the United States of America,
and similar conditions prevailed throughout the habitable world.
London and Hong-Kong, Vienna and Pekin, Buenos Ayres and
Archangel--from every direction came the same inquiry, to every
questioner was returned the same answer. It was the end of all things.
"Coincidently with this great recession of the human tide, occurred the
eclipse of industry, science, and, indeed, every form of thought and
progress. The plough rusted in the furrow, the half-formed web
dropped to pieces in the loom, the very crops stood unharvested in the
fields, to be finally devoured by the birds and by a horde of rats and
mice. Up to the last moment there had been confusion and dismay
certainly, but the wheels of trade and of the civil administration had
continued to turn; men had stood at their posts in answer to the call of
duty or impressed by the blind instinct of habit. And then, suddenly, the
sun went down, only to rise again upon a silent land.
"The relapse into barbarism was swift. The few who had escaped were
segregated from one another in small family groups, each man content
with the bare necessities of animal existence and fearing the face of the
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