shing among
the bushes from the opposite side of the embankment told them the bear
had gone on. The boy grinned as he led back to the trail.

"A big un, Granser," he chuckled.

The old man shook his head.

"They get thicker every day," he complained in a thin, undependable
falsetto. "Who'd have thought I'd live to see the time when a man would
be afraid of his life on the way to the Cliff House. When I was a boy,
Edwin, men and women and little babies used to come out here from San
Francisco by tens of thousands on a nice day. And there weren't any
bears then. No, sir. They used to pay money to look at them in cages,
they were that rare."

"What is money, Granser?"

Before the old man could answer, the boy recollected and triumphantly
shoved his hand into a pouch under his bear-skin and pulled forth a
battered and tarnished silver dollar. The old man's eyes glistened, as
he held the coin close to them.

"I can't see," he muttered. "You look and see if you can make out the
date, Edwin."

The boy laughed.

"You're a great Granser," he cried delightedly, "always making believe
them little marks mean something."

The old man manifested an accustomed chagrin as he brought the coin back
again close to his own eyes.

"2012," he shrilled, and then fell to cackling grotesquely. "That was
the year Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States
by the Board of Magnates. It must have been one of the last coins
minted, for the Scarlet Death came in 2013. Lord! Lord!--think of it!
Sixty years ago, and I am the only person alive to-day that lived in
those times. Where did you find it, Edwin?"

The boy, who had been regarding him with the tolerant curiousness one
accords to the prattlings of the feeble-minded, answered promptly.

"I got it off of Hoo-Hoo. He found it when we was herdin' goats down
near San Jose last spring. Hoo-Hoo said it was _money_. Ain't you
hungry, Granser?"

The ancient caught his staff in a tighter grip and urged along the
trail, his old eyes shining greedily.

"I hope Har-Lip 's found a crab... or two," he mumbled. "They're good
eating, crabs, mighty good eating when you've no more teeth and you've
got grandsons that love their old grandsire and make a point of catching
crabs for him. When I was a boy--"

But Edwin, suddenly stopped by what he saw, was drawing the bowstring
on a fitted arrow. He had paused on the brink of a crevasse in the
embankment. An ancient culvert had h