d on this beach. And also, in that same
invisible world it might well be that new kinds of germs came to be.
It might be there that life originated--the 'abysmal fecundity,'
Soldervetzsky called it, applying the words of other men who had written
before him...."

It was at this point that Hare-Lip rose to his feet, an expression of
huge contempt on his face.

[Illustration: Granser, you make me sick with your gabble 071]

"Granser," he announced, "you make me sick with your gabble. Why don't
you tell about the Red Death? If you ain't going to, say so, an' we'll
start back for camp."

The old man looked at him and silently began to cry. The weak tears of
age rolled down his cheeks and all the feebleness of his eighty-seven
years showed in his grief-stricken countenance.

"Sit down," Edwin counselled soothingly. "Granser's all right. He's just
gettin' to the Scarlet Death, ain't you, Granser? He's just goin' to
tell us about it right now. Sit down, Hare-Lip. Go ahead, Granser."

III

THE old man wiped the tears away on his grimy knuckles and took up the
tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened as he got the
swing of the narrative.

"It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came. I was twenty-seven
years old, and well do I remember it. Wireless despatches--"

Hare-Lip spat loudly his disgust, and Granser hastened to make amends.

"We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thousands of
miles. And the word came of a strange disease that had broken out in
New York. There were seventeen millions of people living then in that
noblest city of America. Nobody thought anything about the news. It was
only a small thing. There had been only a few deaths. It seemed, though,
that they had died very quickly, and that one of the first signs of
the disease was the turning red of the face and all the body. Within
twenty-four hours came the report of the first case in Chicago. And on
the same day, it was made public that London, the greatest city in the
world, next to Chicago, had been secretly fighting the plague for two
weeks and censoring the news despatches--that is, not permitting the
word to go forth to the rest of the world that London had the plague.

"It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else, were
not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to
overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the
past. But the trouble wa