The Scarlet Plague

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 itself into pure English. The sentences grew longer and were enunciated with a rhythm and ease that was reminiscent of the lecture platform.

'Tell us about the Red Death, Granser,' Hare-Lip demanded, when the teeth affair had been satisfactorily concluded.

'The Scarlet Death,' Edwin corrected.

'An' don't work all that funny lingo on us,' Hare-Lip went on. 'Talk sensible, Granser, like a Santa Rosan ought to talk. Other Santa Rosans don't talk like you.'

II

THE old man showed pleasure in being thus called upon. He cleared his throat and began.

'Twenty or thirty years ago my story was in great demand. But in these days nobody seems interested —'

'There you go!' Hare-Lip cried hotly. 'Cut out the funny stuff and talk sensible. What's interested? You talk like a baby that don't know how.'

'Let him alone,' Edwin urged, 'or he'll get mad and won't talk at all. Skip the funny places. We'll catch on to some of what he tells us.'

'Let her go, Granser,' Hoo-Hoo encouraged; for the old man was already maundering about the disrespect for elders and the reversion to cruelty of all humans that fell from high culture to primitive conditions.

The tale began.

'There were very many people in the world in those days. San Francisco alone held four millions—'

'What is millions?' Edwin interrupted.

Granser looked at him kindly.

'I know you cannot count beyond ten, so I will tell you. Hold up your two hands. On both of them you have altogether ten fingers and thumbs. Very well. I now take this grain of sand—you hold it, Hoo-Hoo.' He dropped the grain of sand into the lad's palm and went on. 'Now that grain of sand stands for the ten fingers of Edwin. I add another grain. That's ten more fingers. And I add another, and another, and another, until I have added as many grains as Edwin has fingers and thumbs. That makes what I call one hundred. Remember that word—one hundred. Now I put this pebble in Hare-Lip's hand. It stands for ten grains of sand, or ten tens of fingers, or one hundred fingers. I put in ten pebbles. They stand for a thousand fingers. I take a mussel-shell, and it stands for ten pebbles, or one hundred grains of sand, or one thousand fingers….' And so on, laboriously, and with much reiteration, he strove to build up in their minds a crude conception of numbers. As the quantities increased, he had the boys holding different magnitudes in each of their hands. For still higher sums, he laid the symbols on the log of driftwood; and for symbols he was hard put, being compelled to use the teeth from the skulls for millions, and the crab-shells for billions. It was here that he stopped, for the boys were showing signs of becoming tired.

'There were four million people in San Francisco —four teeth.'

The boys' eyes ranged along from the teeth and from hand to hand, down through the pebbles and sand- grains to Edwin's fingers. And back again they ranged along the ascending series in the effort to grasp such inconceivable numbers.

'That was a lot of folks, Granser,' Edwin at last hazarded.

'Like sand on the beach here, like sand on the beach, each grain of sand a man, or woman, or child. Yes, my boy, all those people lived right here in San Francisco . And at one time or another all those people came out on this very beach—more people than there are grains of sand. More—more—more. And San Francisco was a noble city. And across the bay—where we camped last year, even more people lived, clear from Point Richmond, on the level ground and on the hills, all the way around to San Leandro —one great city of seven million people.—Seven teeth… there, that's it, seven millions.'

Again the boys' eyes ranged up and down from Edwin's fingers to the teeth on the log.

'The world was full of people. The census of 2010 gave eight billions for the whole world—eight crab-shells, yes, eight billions. It was not like to-day. Mankind knew a great deal more about getting food. And the more food there was, the more people there were. In the year 1800, there were one hundred and seventy millions in Europe