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‘ Here you, woman, take oil my moccasins, and lively about it. I want Professor Smith
to see how well I have you trained ’ ”
Chapter V
XI) there she was, boiling fish-
chowder in a soot-covered pot,
her glorious eyes inflamed by
the acrid smoke of the open
fire. Hers was a sad story.
She was the one survivor in
a million, as I had been, as
the Chauffeur had been. On
a crowning eminence of the Alameda Hills, over
looking San Francisco Bay. Van Warden had built
a vast summer palace. It was surrounded by a park
of a thousand acres. When the plague broke out,
Van Warden sent her there. Armed guards pa
trolled the boundaries of the park, and nothing
entered in the way of provisions or even mail matter
that was not first fumigated. And yet did the
plague enter, killing the guards at their posts, the
servants at their tasks, sweeping away the whole
army of retainers—or, at least, all of them who did
not flee or die elsewhere. So it was that \esta
found herself the sole living person in the palace
that had become a charnel house.
" Now the Chauffeur had been one of the servants
that ran away. Returning, two months afterward,
he discovered Vesta in a little summer pavilion
where there had been no deaths and where she had
established herself. He was a brute. She was
afraid, and she ran away and hid among the trees.
That night, on foot, she fled into the mountains—
she, whose tender feet and delicate body had never
known the bruise of stones nor the scratch of briars.
He followed, and that night he caught her. He
struck her. Do you understand, he beat her with
those terrible lists of his and made her his slave.
Synopsis of Previous Instalment—b was in the year
2073. Sixty years had passed since the Scarlet Plague
had tumbled civilization back into the hunting and
fishing stage. The last survivor of the great disaster
was telling his savage grand-children as they sat on the
deserted beach near San Francisco, of how it all hap
pened. He had been a Professor of Fnglish Literature.
When the plague reached San Francisco the population
fled in mobs toward the country, fighting, robbing and
killing each other. One by one they died until the Pro
fessor was left apparently alone in the world. He saw the
forest and the weeds sweep back over the cities and the
domesticated animals return to the wild. At last years
later he came upon a solitary man and then his mate.
It was she who had to gather fhe firewood, build
the fires, cook, and do all the degrading labor
she, who had never performed a menial act in her
life. These things he compelled her to do, while he,
a proper savage, elected to lie around camp and look
on. He did nothing, absolutely nothing, except on
occasion to hunt meat or catch fish.”
“Good for Chauffeur,” Hare-Lip commented in
an undertone to the other boys. “1 remember him
before he died. I le was a corker. But he did
things, and he made things go. You know, Dad
married his daughter, an’ you ought to see the way
he knocked the spots outa Dad. The Chauffeur
was a son-of-a-gun. He made us kids stand around.
Kvcn when he was croakin’, he reached out for me,
once, an’ laid my head open with that long stick
he kept always beside him.”
Hare-Lip rubbed his bullet-head reminiscently,
and the boys returned to the old man, who was
maundering ecstatically about Vesta, the squaw
of the founder of the Chauffeur Tribe.
“And so I say to you that you cannot understand
the awfulness of the situation. The Chauffeur
was a servant, understand, a servant. And he
cringed, with bowed head, to such as she. She was
a lord of life, both by birth and by marriage. The
destinies of millions, such as he, she carried in the
hollow of her pink-white hand. And, in the days
before the plague, the slightest contact with such as
he would have been pollution. Oh, 1 have seen it.
Once, I remember, there was Mrs. Goldwin, wife
of one of the great magnates. It was on a landing
stage, just as she was embarking in her private
dirigible, that she dropped her parasol. A servant
picked it up and made the mistake of handing it
to her—to her, one of the greatest ladies of the land!
She shrank back, as though he were a leper, and
indicated her secretary to receive it. Also, she or
dered her secretary to ascertain the creature’s name
and to see that he was immediately discharged from
service. And such a woman was Vesta Van Warden.
And her the Chauffeur beat and made his slave.
“—Bill that was it; Bill, the Chauffeur. That
was his name. He was a wretched, primitive man,
wholly devoid of the liner instincts and chivalrous
promptings of a cultured soul. Xo, there is no
absolute justice, for to him fell that wonder of
womanhood, V'esta Van Warden. Fhe grievousne-s
of this you will never understand, my grandsons;
for you are yourselves primitive little savages,
unaware of aught else but savagery. W hy should.
Vesta not have been mine? 1 was a man of culture
and refinement, a professor in a great university.
Even so, in the time before the plague, such was her
exalted position, she would not have deigned to
know that I existed. Mark, then, the abysmal
degradation to which she fell at the hands of the
Chauffeur. Nothing less than the destruction of all
mankind had made it possible that I should know her,
3
Copyright, 1913, by the Star Co.