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There is no other word for it." "Red is good enough for me," Hare-Lip muttered obstinately. "My dad calls red red, and he ought to know. He says everybody died of the Red Death." "Your dad is a common fellow, descended from a common fellow," Granser retorted heatedly. "Don't I know the beginnings of the Chauffeurs? Your grandsire was a chauffeur, a servant, and without education.
"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.
And ain't that a crab, Hoo-Hoo? Ain't that a crab? My, my, you boys are good to your old grandsire." Hoo-Hoo, who was apparently of the same age as Edwin, grinned. "All you want, Granser. I got four." The old man's palsied eagerness was pitiful. Sitting down in the sand as quickly as his stiff limbs would let him, he poked a large rock-mussel from out of the coals.
"My dad told me, an' he got it from his dad afore he croaked, that your wife was a Santa Rosan, an' that she was sure no account. He said she was a hash-slinger before the Red Death, though I don't know what a hash-slinger is. You can tell me, Edwin." But Edwin shook his head in token of ignorance. "It is true, she was a waitress," Granser acknowledged.
They tried to fight it with other germs, to put into the body of a sick man germs that were the enemies of the plague germs " "And you can't see these germ-things, Granser," Hare-Lip objected, "and here you gabble, gabble, gabble about them as if they was anything, when they're nothing at all. Anything you can't see, ain't, that's what. Fighting things that ain't with things that ain't!
He worked for other persons. But your grandmother was of good stock, only the children did not take after her. Don't I remember when I first met them, catching fish at Lake Temescal?" "What is education?" Edwin asked. "Calling red scarlet," Hare-Lip sneered, then returned to the attack on Granser.
They must have been all fools in them days. That's why they croaked. I ain't goin' to believe in such rot, I tell you that." Granser promptly began to weep, while Edwin hotly took up his defence. "Look here, Hare-Lip, you believe in lots of things you can't see." Hare-Lip shook his head. "You believe in dead men walking about. You never seen one dead man walk about."
Hare-Lip rose to his feet, glanced to see that the goats were safe, and looked at the sun's position in the afternoon sky, advertising impatience at the prolixity of the old man's tale. Urged to hurry by Edwin, Granser went on. "There is little more to tell.
Granser recollected himself, and with a start tore himself away from the rostrum of the lecture-hall, where, to another world audience, he had been expounding the latest theory, sixty years gone, of germs and germ-diseases. "Yes, yes, Edwin; I had forgotten.
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?
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