The Doomsman | Page 6

stranger. Under such circumstances, there could be but little neighborly

intercourse, and the ancient highways speedily became overgrown with
grass and weeds, or else they were undermined and washed out by the
winter storms. It was not until the second generation after the Terror
that men once more began to draw together, in obedience to inherited
instincts, and even then the new movement must have been largely
brought about through the increasing aggressions of the Doomsmen.
But of this in another place.
"It has been asserted that fire played a principal part in the destruction
of the ancient cities, and it was at one time supposed that these
extensive conflagrations were partly accidental and partly attributable
to the wide-spread lawlessness that marked the closing hours of the
greatest drama in all history. But later researches have evolved a new
theory, and it now seems probable that the torch was employed by the
authorities themselves as a final and truly a desperate measure. An
heroic cautery, but, alas, a useless one.
"The comparative exemption of New York from the universal fate goes
to support rather than to discredit this hypothesis. It escaped the
dynamite cartridge and the torch simply because in that city no
recognized authority remained in power; there was no one to carry out
the imperative orders of the federal government. There were, of course,
many isolated cases of incendiarism, but the city did not suffer from
any general and organized conflagration, as was the fate of Philadelphia
and St. Louis and New Orleans. The destiny of the metropolis was
decided in a different way; already it had passed into the keeping of the
Doomsmen.
"In effect, then, the highly civilized North American continent had
relapsed, within the brief period of ninety years, into its primeval estate.
In every direction stretched an inhospitable wilderness of morass and
forest, with a few feeble settlements of the Stockade people fringing the
principal waterways, and here and there the smoke of an encampment
of the Painted Men rising in a thin spiral from out of the vast ocean of
green leaves. To-day the wild boar ranges where once the tide of
human passion most turbulently flowed, and the poor herdsman, eating
his noonday curds from a wooden bowl, crushes with indifferent heel

the priceless bit of faience lying half hidden in the rotting leaves.
Everywhere, the old order changing and disappearing, only to recreate
itself in form ever more fantastic and enfeebled, a dead being, and yet
inextricably bound up with the life of the new age. And over all, the
shadow of Doom, gigantic, threatening, omnipotent."

III
THE NEW WORLD
AGAIN we make acknowledgment to the "Laudable" Vigilas and quote
at large from the luminous pages of The Later Cosmos. Now the reader,
scenting more learned discourse, may meditate upon skipping this
chapter; nay, will probably do so. Yet, to my thinking, he will act more
wisely in buckling down to it, seeing that it contains matter of moment
for the perfect understanding of the narrative proper. The studying of
guide-posts is not an amusing occupation, but it is infinitely less
tedious than to wander around all day in a fog and perhaps miss one's
destination altogether.
"It is, indeed, a small world as we know it to-day. Our philosophers,
reconstructing, as best they may, the science of the ancients from the
treatises, few and sadly incomplete, that have come down to us, affirm
that the earth is an orb and that another continent (perhaps more than
one) lies beyond the rim of the eastern horizon. It may be so, but the
issue is not of practical importance, seeing that there are none who care
to make adventure of the great salty gulf that lies between. And so the
sea keeps its mysteries.
"On the other hand, we count it inadvisable to wander far afield. To the
north, to the west, and to the south stretches the unbroken forest, and in
a few hours a man's legs may easily carry him out of hailing of the
voice of his kind. The waterways form the only regular channels for
social and commercial intercourse, and the busybody and gad-about are
not regarded with favor by honest people.

"It appears highly probable that the human race was virtually
annihilated over the general area of the ancient United States of
America; it persisted only in a few particularly favored localities and
through accidental circumstances of which we know nothing definite.
In our own day, the northern, central, and southern group of colonies
maintain a system of infrequent intercommunication, and beyond that
certain knowledge does not extend. It is possible that mankind may
exist in a degraded state, in many inaccessible corners of this vast
continent of ours, but this is only a possibility, concerning which the
theories