The Scarlet Plague | Page 4

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