Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 172, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1915 — Page 2

The Scarlet Plague

By JACK LONDON

(Oo»?llgkt. mi. t>7 MoClnr* Newspaper 8n»UoM«) CHAPTER IV—Continued. “Once, when the Chauffeur was away fishing, she begged me to kill him. With tears In her eyes she begged me to kill him. But he was a strong and violent man, and I was afraid. Afterward I talked with him. I offered him my horse, my pony, my dogs, all that I possessed, if he would give Vesta to me. and he grinned In my face and shook his head. He was very insulting. He said that In the old days he had been a servant, had been dirt under the feet of men like me and of women like Vesta, and that now he had the greatest lady in the land to be servant to him and cook his food and nurse his brats. 'You had your day before the plague.’ he said; ‘but <this is my day, and a damned good day it Is. I wouldn't trade back to the old times for anything.’ Such words he spoke, but they are not his words. He was a vulgar, low-minded man, and vile oaths fell continually from his lips. "Also he told me that If he caught me making eyes at his woman he'd wring my neck and give her a beating as well. What was I to do? I was afraid. He was a brute. That first night, when I discovered the camp, Vesta and I had great talk about the things of our vanished world. We talked of art, and books, and poetry; and the Chauffeur listened and grinned and sneered. He was bored and angered by our way of speech which he did not comprehend, and finally he spoke up and said: ‘And this is Vesta Van Warden, one-time wife of Van Warden the magnate —a high and ■tuck-up beauty, who is now my gquaw. Eh, Professor Smith, times is changed, times is changed. Here, you, woman, take off my moccasins, and lively about it. I want Professor Smith to see how well I have you trained.’ “I saw her clench her teeth, and the flame of revolt rise in her face. He drew back his gnarled fist to strike, and I was afraid, and sick at heart. I could do nothing to prevail against him. So I got up to go, and not be witness to such indignity. But the Chauffeur laughed and threatened me with a beating if I did not stay and behold. And I sat there, perforce, by the campfire on the shore of Lake Temescal and saw Vesta, Vesta Van Warden, kneel and remove the moccasins of that grinning, hairy, apelike human brute. " —Oh, you do not understand, my grandsons. You have never known anything else, and you do not understand. “ ‘Halter broke and bridle wise,’ the Chauffeur gloated, while she performed that dreadful, menial task. ‘A trifle balky at times, professor, a trifle balky; but a clout alongside the jaw makes her as meek and gentle as a lamb.’ “And another time he said: ‘We’ve got to start all over and replenish the earth and multiply. You’re handicapped, professor. You ain't got no wife, and we’re up against a regular Garden-of-Eden proposition. But I ain’t proud. I'll tell you what, professor.' He pointed at their little infant, barely a year old. ‘There's your wife, though you’ll have to wait till she grows up. It’s rich, ain’t it? We’re all equals here, and Fm the biggest toad in the splash. But I ain’t stuck up—not L I do you the honor, Professor Smith, the very great honor, of betrothing to you my and Vesta Warden's daughter. Ain’t it cussed bad that Van Warden ain't here to see?’ “I lived three weeks of infinite torment there in the Chauffeur’s camp. And then, one day, tiring of me, or of what to Lim was my bad effect on Vesta, he told me that the year before, wandering through the Contra Costa hills to the straits of Carquinez, across the straits he had seen a smoke. This meant that there were still other human beings, and that for three weeks he bad kept this inestimable precious information from me. 1 departed at once, my dogs and horses, and journeyed across the Contra Costa hills to the straits. I saw no smoke on the other side, but at Port Costa discovered a small steel barge on which I was able to embark my animals. Old canvas which I found served me for a m»b. and r southerly breeze fanned me across the straits and up to the ruins of Vallejo. Here, on the outskirts of the city I found evidences of a recently occupied camp. Many clam shells showed me why these humans had come to the shores of the bay. This was the Santa Rosa tribe, and I followed its track along the old railroad right of way across the salt marshes to Sonoma valley. Here, at '’’ttie old brickyard at Glen Ellen, I came upon the camp. There were eighteen souls all told. Two were old men, one of whom was Jones, a banker. The other was Harrison, a retired pawnbroker, who had taken for a wife the matron of the State Hospital for

the Insane at Napa Of all the persons of the city of Napa and of all (he other towns and villages in that rich and populous valley, she had been the only survivor. Next, there were the three young men—Cardiff and Hale, who had been farmers, and Walnwright, a common day laborer. All three had found wives. To Hale, a crude, illiterate farmer, had fallen Isadora, the greatest prize, next to Vesta, of the women who came through the plague. She was one of the world’s most noted singers, and the plague had caught her at San Francisco. She had talked with me for hours at a time, telling me of her adventures, until, at last, rescued by Hale in the Mendocino forest reserve, there had remained nothing for her to do but become his wife. But Hale was a good fellow in spite of his illiteracy. He had a keen sense of Justice. “The wives of Cardiff and Wainwright were ordinary women, accustomed to toil, with strong constitutions —just the type for the wild new life which they were compelled to live. In addition were two adult idiots from the feeble-minded home at Eldredge, and five or six young children and infants born after the formation of the Santa Rosa tribe. Also, there was Bertha. She was a good woman. Hare-Lip,/in spite of the sneers of your father. Her I took for wife. She was the mother of your father, Edwin, and of yours, Hoo-Hoo. And it was our daughter, Vera, who married your father, Hare-Lip —your father, Sandow, who was the eldest son of Vesta Van Warden and the Chauffeur.

‘‘There are only two other tribes that we know of —the Los Angelitos and the Carmelitos. The latter started from one man and woman. He was called Lopez, and he was descended from the ancient Mexicans and was very black. He was a cowherd in the ranges beyond Carmel, and his wife was a maidservant in the Great Del Monte hotel. It was seven years before w T e first got in touch with the Los Angelitos. They have a good country down there, but it is too warm. I estimated the present population of the world at between three hundred and fifty and four hundred —provided, of course, that there are no scattered little tribes elsewhere in the world. If there be such, we have not heard of them. Since Johnson crossed the desert from Utah, no word or sign has come from the East or anywhere else. The great world which I knew in my boyhood and early manhood is gone. It has ceased to be. I am the last man w r ho was alive in the days of the plague and who knows the wonders of that far-off time. We, who mastered the planet—its earth, and sea, and sky—and who were as very gods, now live in primitive savagery along the water courses of this California country. “But we are increasing rapidly—your sister, Hare-Lip, already has four children. We are increasing rapidly and making ready for a new climb toward civilization. In time, pressure of population will compel us to spread out, and a hundred generations from now we may expect our descendants to start across the Sierras, oozing slowly along, generation by generation, over the great continent to the colonization of the East —a new Aryan drift around the world. “But it will be slow, very slow; we have so far to climb. We fell so hopelessly far. If only one physicist or one chemist had survived! But it was not to be, and we have forgotten everything. The Chauffeur started working in iron. He built the forge which we use to this day. But he was a lazy man, and when he died he took with him all he knew of metals and machinery. - What was I to know of such things? I was a classical scholar, not a chemist. The other men who survived were not educated. Only two things did the Chauffeur accomplish—the brewing of strong drink and the growing of tobacco. It was while he was drunk, once, that he killed Vesta. I firmly believe that he killed Vesta in a fit of drunken cruelty, though he always maintained that she fell into the lake and was drowned. “And, my grandsons, let me warn you against the medicine men. They call themselves doctors, travestying what was once a noble profession, but in reality they are medicine men, devil men, and they make for superstition and darkness. They are cheats and liars. But so debased and degraded are we that we believe their lies. They, too, will increase in numbers as we increase, and they will strive to rule us. Yet they are liars and charlatans. Look at young Cross-Eyes, posing as a doctor, selling charms against sickness, giving good hunting, exchanging promises of fair weather for good meat and skins, sending the death stick, performing a thousand abominations. Yet I say to you, that when he says he can do these things, he lies. I, J. H. Smith, say that he lies. I have told him so to his teeth. Why has he not sent me the death stick? Because he knows that with me it is without avail. But you, HareLip, so deeply are you gunk in black superstition that did you awake this night and find the death stick beside you, you would surely die. And you would die, not because of any virtue in the stick, but because you are a savage with the dark and clouded mind of a savage. “The doctors must be destroyed, and all that was lost must be discovered over again. Wherefore, earnestly. I repeat unto you certain things which you must remember and tell to your children after you. You must tell them that when water is made hot by fire there resides in it a wonderful thing called steam, which is stronger than ten thousand men and which can do all man's work tor him. Thera ate

THE EVENING REPUBLICAN, RENSSELAER, TND.

other very useful things. In the lightning flash there resides a similarly strong servant of man, which was of old his slave and which some day will be his slave again. “Quite a different thing is the alphabet It is what enables me to know the meaning of fine markings, whereas you boys know only rude picture writing. I have stored many books in that dry cave on Telegraph hill, where you see me often go when the tribe is down by the sea In them is great wisdom. Also with them, I have placed a key to the alphabet, so that one who knows picture writing may also know print. Bome day men will read again; and then, if no accident has befallen my cave, they will know that Profeesor Smith once lived and saved for them the knowledge of the ancients. “There is another little device that man inevitably will rediscover. It is called gunpowder. It was what enabled us to kill surely and at long distances. Certain things which are found in the ground, when combined in the right proportions, will make this gunpowder. What these things are, I have forgotten, or else I never knew. But I wish I did know. Then would I make powder, and then would I certainly kill Cross-Eyes and rid the land of superstition—” “After I am man grown I am going to give Cross-Eyes all the goats and meat, and skins I can get, so that he’ll teach me to be a doctor," Hoo-Hoo asserted. “And when I know, I’ll make everybody else sit up and take notice. They’ll get down in the dirt to me, you bet” The old man nodded his head solemnly, and murmured: “Strange it is to hear the vestige and remnants of the complicated Aryan speech fall from the lips of a filthy little skin-clad savage. All the world is topsy-turvy. And it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.” “You won’t make me sit up,” HareLip boasted to the would-be medicine man. “If I paid you for a sending of the death stick, and it didn’t work, I’d bust in your head —understand, you Hoo-Hoo, you?” “I’m going to get Granser to remember this here gunpowder stuff,” Edwin said softly, “and then I’ll have you all on the run. You, Hare-Lip, will do my fighting for me, and you, HooHoo, will send the death stick for me and make everybody afraid. And if I catch Hare-Lip trying to bust your head, Hoo-Hoo, I’ll fix him with that same gunpowder. Granser ain’t such a fool as you think, and I’m going to listen to him and some day I’ll be boss over the whole bunch of you.” The old man shook his head sadly, and said:

“The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it —the same old story over and over. Man will increase, and men will fight The gunpowder will enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and blood, will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved. And of what profit will it be? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the new. It may take fifty thousand years to build, but it will pass. All things pass. Only remain cosmic force and matter, ever in flux, ever acting and reacting and realizing the eternal types —the priest, the soldier, and the king. Out of the mouths of babes comes the wisdom of all the ages. Some will fight, some will rule, some will pray; and all the rest will toil and suffer sore while on their bleeding carcasses is reared again, and yet again, without end, the amazing beauty and surpassing wonder of the civilized state. It were just as well that I destroyed those cave-stock books —whether they remain or perish, all their old truths will be discovered, their old lies lived and handed down. What is the profit—” Hare-Lip leaped to his feet, giving a quick glance at the pasturing goats and the afternoon sun. “Gee!” he muttered to Edwin. “The old geezer gets more long winded every day. Let’s pull for camp.” While the other two, aided by the dogs, assembled the goats and started them for the trail through the forest, Edwin stayed by the old man and guided him in the same direction. When they reached the old right-of-way. Edwin stopped suddenly and looked back. Hare-Lip and Hoo-Hoo and the dogs and the goats passed on. Edwin was looking at a small herd of wild horses which had come down on the hard sand. There were at least twenty of them, young colts and yearlings and mares, led by a beautiful stallion which stood in the foam at the edge of the surf, with arched neck and bright wild eyes, sniffing the salt air from the sea. “What is it?” Granser queried. “Horses,” was the answer. “First time I ever seen ’em on the beach. It’s the mountain lions getting thicker and thicker and driving ’em down.” The low sun shot red shafts of light, fan-shaped, up from a cloud-tumbled horizon. And close at hand, in the white waste of shore-lashed waters, the sea lions, bellowing their old primeval chant, hauled up out of the sea on the black rocks and fought and loved. “Come on, Granser,” Edwin prompted. And old man and boy, skin-clad and barbaric, turned and went along the rightof-way into the forest in the wake of the goats. THE BIND.

Beavers Becoming Scarce.

In spite of all their intelligence, the beavers are having a hard struggle for existence. They are so eagerly sought by trappers and they have so many enemies among the other four-footed creatures that in America they are threatened with speedy extinction.

MAINSTAY OF WHITE SOX PITCHING STAFF

Urban Faber, Who Held Slugging Athletics to One Hit.

Urban “Red” Faber promises to be the mainstay of the Chicago White Sox pitching staff this season. Faber came to the White Sox in 1914 from Des Moines of the Western league. He worked in 16 games last year, winning eight and losing eight. His most notable achievement in his first year in the big league was in holding the then slugging Athletics to one hit. He came within an ace of holding the champions without a hit, but in the ninth inning Jack Lapp, with two out, rapped a roller between second and first which Russell Blackburne had trouble in handling, and the official

CUB RECRUIT PROVES A STAR

Manager Bresnahan Predicts That Zabel Will Be One of Best Hurlers in National League.

George Zabel, who recently pitched the Cubs to victory in a 19inning contest with the Brooklyn Dodgers, will be one of the best young pitchers in the National league this year, if Bresnahan of the Cubs has his way. All last season Roger thought Zabel was destined to be a great hurler, and believed then that with the

George Zabei.

proper kind of coaching he would develop into a star. The Cub manager has devoted much time to the young flinger and thinks that he has taught him enough to depend on him, as one of the regulars —that is, as one of the twirlers to be used constantly with Cheney, Vaughn, Pierce, Lavender and Humphries.

Stallings Signs Youngster.

Manager Stallings has signed another college than f6ri his club. He has taken Pitcher Cram of Brown university, who also plays the outfield.

Only One Bad Game.

Only one really bad game has been played at home by the New Yorks this season, and that was the opening game.

scorer ruled that it was a hit. The lowa pitcher was overworked during the middle part of the season when the team was short of pitchers, and became stale. He is showing great form this season, however, and Manager Rowland expects great things of the red-topped boy. Faber is a right-hander and is twenty-four years old. He was born in Cascade, lowa, and began his professional career with Des Moines, in the Western league, from which team he was brought to Chicago. He weighs 178 pounds and is six feet.

DIAMOND NOTES

Cy Williams is developing into a fast base runner. * • • Fred Clarke seems to have made a fair outfielder of Baird. * * * John Beall is now the leading batter of the American association. * • * i Manager Rowland is called the Beau Brummel of the major league managers. • * * You can’t expect a fellow who hits $175 a month on the pay roll to bat .300 on the field. * • * Buck Herzog believes that it is quite necessary to drive ball players to get work out of them. * * * Pat Moran’s only blunder as a manager has been not to sign players with nonbreakable bones. * * * Pitcher Charley Jackson did not iast long with St. Joseph, though he showed well in the trials he had. * * * Third Baseman McLafferty of the Terre Haute team Is out for the rest of the season, with a broken leg. . • * * Boston’s claims to both pennants in the major leagues, which were strong sometime ago, appear to be weakening. * * * Peckinpaugh, Pipp and Nunamaker, who are helping keep the New York club in the pennant fight in the American league, were castoffs from other big league clubs. • * * The death of Tim Hurst is the seo« ond one within a year of former members of the American league staff of umpires. Jack Sheridan died less than a year ago. * * • The Little Rock team has been going better since President Bob Allen quit trying to manage his team and instead turned that end of the game over to Charley Starr. * * • Ray Caldwell, for some reason, is not equaling his work of last year, although his salary has been almost doubled. —New York Evening Sun. Perhaps that is the reason. • • * Herzog and McGraw are having it out good and plenty this time. The manager of the Reds has it on his former manager, because McGraw does not seem to get his Giants started at all this year. • • • Tommy Connolly, a recruit, is the only Washington player batting above the .300 mark. Griffith’s men can field, but they cannot hit, and that about eliminates them from the pennant fight

CALLS BALK ON CATCHER

One of the most peculiar incidents ever seen in a ball game came up in the TuftsDartmouth game recently. With a Tufts man on third, the signal for a squeeze play was given. The Dartmouth pitcher started to wind up, and the man on third dug for hofflM. The Dartmouth cat cher jumped out of his position and yelled to the pitcher, who had just time to deflect the ball to the left. As it came, the batter moved out of his box, and, stretching around, hit the ball. The base runner came rushing in and the ball hit him. This was a fine mix-up for the umpire. He called a balk on Wanamaker, the Dartmouth catcher, for being out of his box, and allowed the runner to score. The batter was ordered back to bat, the ball counting nothing against or for him, being dead on account of the balk. In addition to this decision, which was the logical one, two plays might have been called. The batter might be put out for jumping out of his box and batting the ball, or the base runner out for being hit by a batted ball. The balk occurred first, and therefore took precedence. It was a play that could not come up in years. Not all baseball fans realize that a balk can be called on the catcher as well as the pitcher.

THREE LEADING SLUGGERS

Hore are the leading sluggers of the American, National and Federal leagues, according to the latest figures. Ty Cobb and Jake Daubert are familiar figures as leading sw'atters, but in Manager Lee Magee of the Brookfeds the fans see a new fencebreaker.

Speaker Hard to Fool.

“Tris Speaker is the hardest player in the American league for me to pitch to,” says Bill Steen of Detroit. “He can hit anything I throw up to him. I simply can’t fool him. I’ve tried everything in my pitching repertoire with Speaker up, but it has availed me nothing. He refuses to hit at balls inside, and when he gets -one outside he slams it down the foul line at a mile-a-minute clip. Crawford and Cobb are hard to fool. Both show their greatest weakness in going after slow balls.”

Umpires Have Hard Time.

The umpires of the National league have been having a hard time of it in St. Louis. After the assault on Umpire Byron the league president ordered the Cardinals to get more policemen in order to keep the rowdies down.

Watching Young Star.

Pitcher Hendrickson, the eighteen-year-old star of the Ohio State university baseball team, is being watched every day by big league scouts, but he says he will not accept any offers. He averaged about twelve strikeout* per game all spring-