poor, dull anthropoid brains keep sensing you I guess we’re safe!”
To Beatrice he added:
“Come now, dear. I’ll help you down. The quicker we tackle that raft and away, the sooner we’ll be home!”
“Home!” she repeated. “Oh, how glad I’ll be to see our bungalow again! How I hate the ruins of the city now! Look out, Allan—you’ll have to let me take a minute or two to straighten out in. You don’t know how awfully cramped I am!”
“Just slide into my arms—there, that’s right!” he answered, and swung her down as easily as though she had been a child. Her arms went round his neck; their lips met and thrilled in a long kiss.
But not even the night-breeze and the moon could now beguile them to another. For there was hard, desperate work to do, and time was short.
A moment they stood there together, under the old tree wherein the wolf was dangling in loud-mouthed rage.
“Well, here’s where I go at it!” exclaimed the man.
He opened the big sack. Fumbling among the tools, he quickly found the ax.
“You, Beta,” he directed, “get together all the plaited rope you can take off the bag, and cut me some strips of hide. Cut a lot of them. I’ll need all you can make. We’ve got to work fast—got to clear out of here before sunrise or there may be the devil to pay!”
It was a labor of extraordinary difficulty, there in those dense and dim-lit thickets, felling a tall spruce, limbing it out and cutting it into three sections. But Stern attacked it like a demon. Now and again he stopped to listen or to jab tile suspended wolf with the ax-handle.
“Go on there, you alarm-signal!” he commanded. “Let’s have plenty of music, good and loud, too. Maybe if you deliver the goods and hold out—well, you’ll get away with your life. Otherwise, not!”
Robinson Crusoe’s raft had been a mere nothing to build compared with this one that the engineer had to construct there at the water’s edge, among the sedges and the reeds For Crusoe had planks and beams and nails to help him; while Stern had naught but his ax, the forest, and some rough cordage.
He had to labor in the gloom, as well, listening betimes for sounds of peril or stopping to stimulate the wolf. The dull and rusty ax retarded him; blisters rose upon his palms, and broke, and formed again. But still he toiled.
The three longitudinal spruce timbers he lashed together with poles and with the cords that Beatrice prepared for him. On these, again, he laid and lashed still other poles, rough-hewn.
In half an hour’s hard work, while the moon began to sink to the westward, he had stepped a crude mast and hewed a couple of punt-poles.
“No use our trying to row this monstrosity,” he said to Beatrice, stopping a moment to dash the sweat off his forehead with a shaking hand. “We either rig the skin sack in some way as a sail, or we drift up with the tide, tie at the ebb, and so on—and if we make the bungalow in three days we’re lucky!
“Come on now, Beatrice. Lend a hand here and we’ll launch her! Good thing the tide’s coming up—she almost floats already. Now, one, two, three!”
The absurd raft yielded, moved, slid out upon the marshy water and was afloat!
“Get aboard!” commanded Allan. “Go forward to the salon de luxe. I’ll stow the bag aft, so.”
He lifted her in his arms and set her on the raft. The bag he carefully deposited at what passed for the stern. The raft sank a bit and wallowed, but bore up.
“Now then, all aboard!” cried Stern.
“The wolf, Allan, the wolf! How about him?”
“That’s right, I almost plumb forgot! I guess he’s earned his life, all right enough.”
Quickly he slashed the cord. The wolf dropped limp, tried to crawl, but could not, and lay panting on its side, tongue lolling, eyes glazed and dim.
“He’ll be a horrible example all his life of what it means to monkey with the new kind of meat,” remarked Allan, clambering aboard. “If wolves or anthropoids can learn, they ought to learn from him!”
Strongly, steadily, they poled the raft out through the marshy slip, on, on, past the crumbling wreckage of the pier-head.
“Now the tide’s got us,” exclaimed Allan with satisfaction, as the moonlit current, all silver and rippling with calm beauty, swung them up-stream.
Beatrice, still strong, and full of vigorous, pulsing life, in spite of the long vigil in the tree and the hard night of work, curled up at the foot of the rough mast, on the mass of fir-tips Stern had piled there.
“You steer, boy,” said she, “and I’ll go to work on making some kind of sail out of the big skin. By morning we ought to have our little craft under full control.
“It’s one beautiful boat, isn’t it?” mocked Stern, poling off from a gaunt hulk that barred the way.
“It mayn’t be very beautiful,” she answered softly, “but it carries the greatest, purest, noblest love that ever was since the world began—it carries the hope of the whole world, of all the ages—and it’s taking us home!”
CHAPTER VIII. THE REBIRTH OF CIVILIZATION
A MONTH had hardly gone, before order and peace and the promise of bountiful harvests dwelt in and all about Hope Lodge, as they had named the bungalow.
From the kitchen, where the stove and the aluminum utensils now shone bright and free from rust, to the bedrooms where fir-tips and soft skin rugs made wondrous sleeping places, the house was clean and sweet and beautiful again. Rough-hewn chairs and tables, strong, serviceable and eloquent of nature—through which this rebirth of the race all had to come—adorned the rooms. Fur rugs covered the floors.
In lieu of pictures, masses of flowers and great sprays of foliage stood in clay pots of Stern’s own manufacture and firing. And on a rustic book-case in their living room, where the big fireplace was, and where the southern sun beat warmest in, stood their chief treasure—a set of encyclopedias.
Stern had made leather bindings for these, with the deft help of Beatrice. The original bindings had vanished before the attacks of time and insects centuries before. But the leaves were still intact. For these were thin sheets of nickel, printed by the electrolysis process.
“Just a sheer streak of luck,” Stern remarked, as he stood looking at this huge piece of fortune with the girl. “Just a kindly freak of fate, that Van Amburg should have bought one of Edison’s first sets of nickel-sheet books.
“Except for the few sets of these in existence, here and there, not a book remains on the surface of this entire earth. The finest hand-made linen paper has disintegrated ages ago. And parchment has probably crinkled and molded past all recognition. Besides, up-to-date scientific books, such as we need, weren’t done on parchment. We’re playing into gorgeous luck with these cyclopedias, for everything I need and can’t remember is in them. But it certainly was one job to sort those scattered sheets out of the rubbish-pile in the library and rearrange them.”
“Yes, that was hard work, but it’s done now. Come on out into the garden, Allan, and see if our crops have grown any during the night!”
The grounds about the bungalow were a delight to them. Like two children they worked, day by day, to enlarge and beautify their holdings, their lands won back from nature’s greed.
Though wild fruits—some new, others familiar—and fish and the plentiful game all about them offered abundant food, to be had for the mere seeking, they both agreed on the necessity of reestablishing agriculture. For they disliked the thought of being driven southward, with the return of each successive winter. They wanted, if advisable, to be able to winter in the bungalow. And this meant some provision for the unproductive season.
“It won’t always be summer here, you know,” Stern told her. “This Eden will sometime lie wet and dreary under the winter rains that I expect now take the place of snow. And the eternal curse of Adam—toil—is not yet lifted even from us two survivors of the fifteen hundred million that once ruled the earth. We, and those who shall come after, must have the old-time foods again. And that means work!”
They had cleared a patch of black, virgin soil, in a sunny hollow. Here Stern had transplanted all the wild
