The Scarlet Plague | Page 5

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 hudged
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