The Scarlet Plague |
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64-66 Fifth Avenue ain't airships babbled bacteriologists Bacterium began body boys brute burning called camp campus caught Chemistry Building Cloth COMPANY Publishers 64-66 crab crab-shells Cross-Eyes dead death-stick deserted disease dogs Edwin Elsinore everywhere eyes face feet fell fight fingers fire fled gabble goats grain of sand grandsons Granser hand Hare-Lip head heard Hoo-Hoo horse human hundred JACK LONDON killed knew Lake Temescal lived Livermore Valley looked MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers Magnates motor car mountain lions Mussels never night old man's pistol plague germs Point Richmond pony Professor Smith prowlers Publishers 64-66 Fifth San Francisco San Leandro Santa Rosans savage Scarlet Death SCARLET PLAGUE screamed Sea Wolf servant Shetland pony shot sick sixty smoke story strong survivor talk teeth tell things thousand to-day told Valley Vesta Van Warden walk wife wild woman women word young دو
Popular passages
Page 54 - Bay, in Berkeley. You remember those great stone houses, Edwin, when we came down the hills from Contra Costa? That was where I lived, in those stone houses. I was a professor of English literature." Much of this was over the heads of the boys, but they strove to comprehend dimly this tale of the past. "What was them stone houses for?" Hare-Lip queried. "You remember when your dad taught you to swim?" The boy nodded. "Well, in the University of California — that is the name we had for the houses...
Page 179 - 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...
Page 99 - There was a grocery store — a place where food was sold. The man to whom it belonged — I knew him well — a quiet, sober, but stupid and obstinate fellow, was defending it. The windows and doors had been broken in, but he, inside, hiding behind a counter, was discharging his pistol at a number of men on the sidewalk who were breaking in. In the entrance were several bodies — of men, I decided, whom he had killed earlier in the day. Even as I looked on from a distance, I saw one of the robbers...
Page 33 - ... toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away — the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach.
Page 19 - 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,...
Page 34 - My master still. We venture again that it is the same ecstatic vagrant who sings "A Vagabond Song" : There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood — Touch of manner, hint of mood; And my heart is like a rhyme, With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time. The scarlet of the maples can shake me like the cry Of bugles going by; And my lonely spirit thrills To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.
Page 181 - There were at least twenty of them, young colts and yearlings and mares, led by a beautiful stallion which stood in the foam at the edge of the surf, with arched neck and bright wild eyes, sniffing the salt air from off the sea. "What is it?" Granser queried. "Horses," was the answer. "First time I ever seen 'em on the beach. It's the mountain lions getting thicker and thicker and driving 'em down." The low sun shot red shafts of light, fan-shaped, up from a cloud-tumbled horizon. And close at hand,...
Page 73 - 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...
Page 145 - He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague germs spared him I can never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he live?— an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages— and especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the persons...
Page 178 - 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 ? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the new. It may take fifty thousand years to build, but 452 it will pass.