End of the world -- Fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Regression (Civilization) -- Fiction; Science fiction
“The wives of Cardiff and Wainwright were ordinary women, accustomed
to toil with strong constitutions--just the type for the wild new life
which they were compelled to live. In addition were two adult idiots
from the feeble-minded home at Eldredge, and five or six young children
and infants born after the formation of the Santa Rosa Tribe. Also,
there was Bertha. She was a good woman, Hare-Lip, in spite of the sneers
of your father. Her I took for wife. She was the mother of your father,
Edwin, and of yours, Hoo-Hoo. And it was our daughter, Vera, who married
your father, Hare-Lip--your father, Sandow, who was the oldest son of
Vesta Van Warden and the Chauffeur.
“And so it was that I became the nineteenth member of the Santa Rosa
Tribe. There were only two outsiders added after me. One was Mungerson,
descended from the Magnates, who wandered alone in the wilds of Northern
California for eight years before he came south and joined us. He it was
who waited twelve years more before he married my daughter, Mary. The
other was Johnson, the man who founded the Utah Tribe. That was where he
came from, Utah, a country that lies very far away from here, across the
great deserts, to the east. It was not until twenty-seven years after
the plague that Johnson reached California. In all that Utah region he
reported but three survivors, himself one, and all men. For many years
these three men lived and hunted together, until, at last, desperate,
fearing that with them the human race would perish utterly from the
planet, they headed westward on the possibility of finding women
survivors in California. Johnson alone came through the great desert,
where his two companions died. He was forty-six years old when he joined
us, and he married the fourth daughter of Isadore and Hale, and his
eldest son married your aunt, Hare-Lip, who was the third daughter of
Vesta and the Chauffeur. Johnson was a strong man, with a will of his
own. And it was because of this that he seceded from the Santa Rosans
and formed the Utah Tribe at San José. It is a small tribe--there are
only nine in it; but, though he is dead, such was his influence and the
strength of his breed, that it will grow into a strong tribe and play a
leading part in the recivilization of the planet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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