ou see me
often go when the tribe is down by the sea, I have stored many books.
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.
Some day men will read again; and then, if no accident has befallen my
cave, they will know that Professor James Howard Smith once lived and
saved for them the knowledge of the ancients.

"There is another little device that men 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 vestiges and remnants of the complicated
Aryan speech falling 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," Hare-Lip 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 get my meat for me, and you, Hoo-Hoo, 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? Ju