_lady?_" Hoo-Hoo demanded.

"A _lady_ 's a Chauffeur squaw," was the quick reply of Hare-Lip.

"The first Chauffeur was Bill, a common fellow, as I said before," the
old man expounded; "but his wife was a lady, a great lady. Before the
Scarlet Death she was the wife of Van Worden. He was President of the
Board of Industrial Magnates, and was one of the dozen men who
ruled America. He was worth one billion, eight hundred millions of
dollars--coins like you have there in your pouch, Edwin. And then came
the Scarlet Death, and his wife became the wife of Bill, the first
Chauffeur. He used to beat her, too. I have seen it myself."

Hoo-Hoo, lying on his stomach and idly digging his toes in the sand,
cried out and investigated, first, his toe-nail, and next, the small
hole he had dug. The other two boys joined him, excavating the sand
rapidly with their hands till there lay three skeletons exposed. Two
were of adults, the third being that of a part-grown child. The old man
hudged along on the ground and peered at the find.

"Plague victims," he announced. "That's the way they died everywhere
in the last days. This must have been a family, running away from the
contagion and perishing here on the Cliff House beach. They--what are
you doing, Edwin?"

This question was asked in sudden dismay, as Edwin, using the back of
his hunting knife, began to knock out the teeth from the jaws of one of
the skulls.

"Going to string 'em," was the response.

The three boys were now hard at it; and quite a knocking and hammering
arose, in which Granser babbled on unnoticed.

"You are true savages. Already has begun the custom of wearing human
teeth. In another generation you will be perforating your noses and
ears and wearing ornaments of bone and shell. I know. The human race
is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night
ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization. When we
increase and feel the lack of room, we will proceed to kill one another.
And then I suppose you will wear human scalp-locks at your waist, as
well--as you, Edwin, who are the gentlest of my grandsons, have already
begun with that vile pigtail. Throw it away, Edwin, boy; throw it away."

"What a gabble the old geezer makes," Hare-Lip remarked, when, the teeth
all extracted, they began an attempt at equal division.

They were very quick and abrupt in their actions, and their speech, in
moments of hot discussion over the allot