Authors: George England
And once again the east began to glow, even as when he and she had
watched the moon rise over the hills beyond the Hudson; and their
hearts beat with joy for even that relief from the dark mystery of
solitude and night.
After a while the man spoke.
"It's this way," said he. "Whoever cut that cord and either let the
banca float away or else stole it, evidently doesn't want to come to
close quarters for the present, so long as these wolves are making
themselves friendly.
"Perhaps, in a way, the wolves are a factor in our favor; perhaps,
without them, we might have had a poisoned arrow sticking into us, or
a spear or two, before now. My guess is that we'll get a wide berth so
long as the wolves stay in the neighborhood. I think the anthropoids,
or whoever they were, must have been calculating on ambushing us as we
came back, and expected to 'get' us while we were hunting for the
boat.
"They didn't reckon on this little diversion. When they heard it they
probably departed for other regions. They won't be coming around just
yet, that's a safe wager. Mighty lucky, eh? Think what Ar targets we'd
make, up here in this willow, by moonlight!"
"You're right, Allan. But when it comes daylight we'll make better
ones. And I don't know that I enjoy sitting up here and starving to
death, with a body-guard of wolves to keep away the Horde, very much
more than I would taking a chance with the arrows. It's two sixes,
either way, and not a bit nice, is it?"
"Hang the whole business! There must be some other way—some way out
of this infernal pickle! Hold on—wait—I—I almost see it now!"
"What's your plan, dear?"
"Wait! Let me think, a minute!"
She kept silence. Together they sat among the spreading branches in
the growing moonlight. A bat reeled overhead, chippering weakly. Far
away a whippoorwill began its fluty, insistent strain. A distant cry
of some hunting beast echoed, unspeakably weird, among the dead,
deserted streets buried in oblivion. The brush crackled and snapped
with the movements of the wolf-pack; the continued snarling, whining,
yapping, stilled the chorus of the frogs along the sedgy banks.
"If I could only snare a good, lively one!" suddenly broke out Stern.
"What for?"
"Why, don't you see?" And with sudden inspiration he expounded.
Together, eager as children, they planned. Beatrice clapped her hands
with sheer delight.
"But," she added pensively, "it'll be a little hard on the wolf, won't
it?"
Stern had to laugh.
"Yes," he assented; "but think how much he'll learn about the new kind
of game he tried to hunt!"
Half an hour later a grim old warrior of the pack, deftly and securely
caught by one hind leg with the slip-noosed leather cord, dangled
inverted from a limb, high out of reach of the others.
Slowly he swung, jerking, writhing, frothing as he fought in vain to
snap his jaws upon the cord he could not touch. And night grew
horrible with the stridor of his yells.
"Now then," remarked Stern calmly, "to work. The moonlight's good
enough to shoot by. No reason I should miss a single target."
Followed a time of frightful tumult as the living ate the dying and
the dead, worrying the flesh from bones that had as yet scarcely
ceased to move. Beatrice, pale and silent, yet very calm, watched the
slaughter. Stern, as quietly methodical as though working out a
reaction, sighted, fired, sighted, fired. And the work went on apace.
The bag of cartridges grew steadily lighter. The work was done long
before all the wolves had died. For the survivors, gorged to
repletion, some wounded, others whole, slunk gradually away and
disappeared in the dim glades, there to sleep off their cannibal
debauch.
At last Stern judged the time was come to descend.
"Bark away, old boy!" he exclaimed. "The louder the better. You're our
danger-signal now. As long as those poor, dull anthropoid brains keep
sensing you I guess we're safe!"
To Beatrice he added:
"Come now, dear. I'll help you down. The quicker we tackle that raft
and away, the sooner we'll be home!"
"Home!" she repeated. "Oh, how glad I'll be to see our bungalow again!
How I hate the ruins of the city now! Look out, Allan—you'll have to
let me take a minute or two to straighten out in. You don't know how
awfully cramped I am!"
"Just slide into my arms—there, that's right!" he answered, and swung
her down as easily as though she had been a child. Her arms went round
his neck; their lips met and thrilled in a long kiss.
But not even the night-breeze and the moon could now beguile them to
another. For there was hard, desperate work to do, and time was short.
A moment they stood there together, under the old tree wherein the
wolf was dangling in loud-mouthed rage.
"Well, here's where I go at it!" exclaimed the man.
He opened the big sack. Fumbling among the tools, he quickly found the
ax.
"You, Beta," he directed, "get together all the plaited rope you can
take off the bag, and cut me some strips of hide. Cut a lot of them.
I'll need all you can make. We've got to work fast—got to clear out
of here before sunrise or there may be the devil to pay!"
It was a labor of extraordinary difficulty, there in those dense and
dim-lit thickets, felling a tall spruce, limbing it out and cutting it
into three sections. But Stern attacked it like a demon. Now and again
he stopped to listen or to jab tile suspended wolf with the ax-handle.
"Go on there, you alarm-signal!" he commanded. "Let's have plenty of
music, good and loud, too. Maybe if you deliver the goods and hold
out—well, you'll get away with your life. Otherwise, not!"
Robinson Crusoe's raft had been a mere nothing to build compared with
this one that the engineer had to construct there at the water's edge,
among the sedges and the reeds For Crusoe had planks and beams and
nails to help him; while Stern had naught but his ax, the forest, and
some rough cordage.
He had to labor in the gloom, as well, listening betimes for sounds of
peril or stopping to stimulate the wolf. The dull and rusty ax
retarded him; blisters rose upon his palms, and broke, and formed
again. But still he toiled.
The three longitudinal spruce timbers he lashed together with poles
and with the cords that Beatrice prepared for him. On these, again, he
laid and lashed still other poles, rough-hewn.
In half an hour's hard work, while the moon began to sink to the
westward, he had stepped a crude mast and hewed a couple of
punt-poles.
"No use our trying to row this monstrosity," he said to Beatrice,
stopping a moment to dash the sweat off his forehead with a shaking
hand. "We either rig the skin sack in some way as a sail, or we drift
up with the tide, tie at the ebb, and so on—and if we make the
bungalow in three days we're lucky!
"Come on now, Beatrice. Lend a hand here and we'll launch her! Good
thing the tide's coming up—she almost floats already. Now, one, two,
three!"
The absurd raft yielded, moved, slid out upon the marshy water and was
afloat!
"Get aboard!" commanded Allan. "Go forward to the
salon de luxe
.
I'll stow the bag aft, so."
He lifted her in his arms and set her on the raft. The bag he
carefully deposited at what passed for the stern. The raft sank a bit
and wallowed, but bore up.
"Now then, all aboard!" cried Stern.
"The wolf, Allan, the wolf! How about
him?
"
"That's right, I almost plumb forgot! I guess he's earned his life,
all right enough."
Quickly he slashed the cord. The wolf dropped limp, tried to crawl,
but could not, and lay panting on its side, tongue lolling, eyes
glazed and dim.
"He'll be a horrible example all his life of what it means to monkey
with the new kind of meat," remarked Allan, clambering aboard. "If
wolves or anthropoids can learn, they ought to learn from him!"
Strongly, steadily, they poled the raft out through the marshy slip,
on, on, past the crumbling wreckage of the pier-head.
"Now the tide's got us," exclaimed Allan with satisfaction, as the
moonlit current, all silver and rippling with calm beauty, swung them
up-stream.
Beatrice, still strong, and full of vigorous, pulsing life, in spite
of the long vigil in the tree and the hard night of work, curled up at
the foot of the rough mast, on the mass of fir-tips Stern had piled
there.
"You steer, boy," said she, "and I'll go to work on making some kind
of sail out of the big skin. By morning we ought to have our little
craft under full control."
"It's one beautiful boat, isn't it?" mocked Stern, poling off from a
gaunt hulk that barred the way.
"It mayn't be very beautiful," she answered softly, "but it carries
the greatest, purest, noblest love that ever was since the world
began—it carries the hope of the whole world, of all the ages—and
it's taking us home!"
A month had hardly gone, before order and peace and the promise
of bountiful harvests dwelt in and all about Hope Lodge, as they had
named the bungalow.
From the kitchen, where the stove and the aluminum utensils now shone
bright and free from rust, to the bedrooms where fir-tips and soft
skin rugs made wondrous sleeping places, the house was clean and sweet
and beautiful again. Rough-hewn chairs and tables, strong, serviceable
and eloquent of nature—through which this rebirth of the race all had
to come—adorned the rooms. Fur rugs covered the floors.
In lieu of pictures, masses of flowers and great sprays of foliage
stood in clay pots of Stern's own manufacture and firing. And on a
rustic book-case in their living room, where the big fireplace was,
and where the southern sun beat warmest in, stood their chief
treasure—a set of encyclopedias.
Stern had made leather bindings for these, with the deft help of
Beatrice. The original bindings had vanished before the attacks of
time and insects centuries before. But the leaves were still intact.
For these were thin sheets of nickel, printed by the electrolysis
process.
"Just a sheer streak of luck," Stern remarked, as he stood looking at
this huge piece of fortune with the girl. "Just a kindly freak of
fate, that Van Amburg should have bought one of Edison's first sets of
nickel-sheet books.
"Except for the few sets of these in existence, here and there, not a
book remains on the surface of this entire earth. The finest hand-made
linen paper has disintegrated ages ago. And parchment has probably
crinkled and molded past all recognition. Besides, up-to-date
scientific books, such as we need, weren't done on parchment. We're
playing into gorgeous luck with these cyclopedias, for everything I
need and can't remember is in them. But it certainly was one job to
sort those scattered sheets out of the rubbish-pile in the library and
rearrange them."
"Yes, that
was
hard work, but it's done now. Come on out into the
garden, Allan, and see if our crops have grown any during the night!"
The grounds about the bungalow were a delight to them. Like two
children they worked, day by day, to enlarge and beautify their
holdings, their lands won back from nature's greed.
Though wild fruits—some new, others familiar—and fish and the
plentiful game all about them offered abundant food, to be had for the
mere seeking, they both agreed on the necessity of reestablishing
agriculture. For they disliked the thought of being driven southward,
with the return of each successive winter. They wanted, if advisable,
to be able to winter in the bungalow. And this meant some provision
for the unproductive season.
"It won't always be summer here, you know," Stern told her. "This Eden
will sometime lie wet and dreary under the winter rains that I expect
now take the place of snow. And the eternal curse of Adam—toil—is
not yet lifted even from us two survivors of the fifteen hundred
million that once ruled the earth. We, and those who shall come after,
must have the old-time foods again. And that means work!"
They had cleared a patch of black, virgin soil, in a sunny hollow.
Here Stern had transplanted all the wild descendants of the vegetables
and grains of other time which in his still limited explorations he
had come across.
The work of clearing away the thorns and bushes, the tangled lianas
and tall trees, was severe; but it strengthened him and hardened his
whip-cord muscles till they ridged his skin like iron. He burned and
pulled the stumps, spaded and harrowed and hoed all by hand, and made
ready the earth for the reception of its first crop in a thousand
years.
He recalled enough of his anthropology and botany from university days
to recognize the reverted, twisted and stringy little degenerate
wild-potato root which had once served the Aztecs and Pueblo Indians
for food, and could again, with proper cultivation, be brought back to
full perfection. Likewise with the maize, the squash, the wild turnip,
and many other vegetable forms.
"Three years of cultivation," he declared, "and I can win them back to
edibility. Five, and they'll be almost where they were before the
great catastrophe. As for the fruits, the apple, cherry, and pear, all
they need is care and scientific grafting.
"I predict that ten years from to-day, orchards and cornfields and
gardens shall surround this bungalow, and the heritage of man shall be
brought back to this old world!"
"Always giving due credit to the encyclopedia," added Beatrice.
"And to
you!
" he laughed happily. "This is all on your account,
anyhow. If I were alone in the world, you bet there'd be no gardens
made!"
"No, I don't believe there would," she agreed, a serious look on her
face. "But, then," she concluded, smiling again, "you aren't alone,
Allan. You've got
me!
"