The Scarlet Plague | Page 2

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 José 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 Har-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