ight, a common day-laborer. All three had found wives. To
Hale, a crude, illiterate farmer, had fallen Isadore, 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 has 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 and right-dealing, and she was far happier with him
than was Vesta with the Chauffeur.

"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 El-dredge, 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 oldest son of
Vesta Van Warden and the Chauffeur.

"And so it was that I became the nineteenth member of the Santa Rosa
Tribe. There were only two outsiders added after me. One was Mungerson,
descended from the Magnates, who wandered alone in the wilds of Northern
California for eight years before he came south and joined us. He it was
who waited twelve years more before he married my daughter, Mary. The
other was Johnson, the man who founded the Utah Tribe. That was where he
came from, Utah, a country that lies very far away from here, across the
great deserts, to the east. It was not until twenty-seven years after
the plague that Johnson reached California. In all that Utah region he
reported but three survivors, himself one, and all men. For many years
these three men lived and hunted together, until, at last, desperate,
fearing that with them the human race would perish utterly from the
planet, they headed westward on the possibility of finding women
survivors in California. Johnson alone came through the great desert,
where his two companions died. He was forty-six years old when he joined
us, and he married the fourth daughter of Isadore and Hale, and his