"The man who sent this news, the wireless operator, was alone with his instrument on the top of a lofty building.

"The man who sent this news, the wireless operator, was alone with his  instrument on the top of a lofty building. The people remaining in the  city—he estimated them at several hundred thousand—had gone mad from  fear and drink, and on all sides of him great fires were raging. He was  a hero, that man who staid by his post—an obscure newspaperman, most  likely. "For twenty-four hours, he said, no transatlantic airships had arrived,  and no more messages were coming from England. He did state, though,  that a message from Berlin—that's in Germany—announced that Hoffmeyer,  a bacteriologist of the Metchnikoff School, had discovered the serum for  the plague. That was the last word, to this day, that we of America  ever received from Europe. If Hoffmeyer discovered the serum, it was too  late, or otherwise, long ere this, explorers from Europe would have  come looking for us. We can only conclude that what happened in America  happened in Europe, and that, at the best, some several score may have  survived the Scarlet Death on that whole continent. "For one day longer the despatches continued to come from New York.  Then they, too, ceased. The man who had sent them, perched in his lofty  building, had either died of the plague or been consumed in the great  conflagrations he had described as raging around him. And what had  occurred in New York had been duplicated in all the other cities. It was  the same in San Francisco, and Oakland, and Berkeley. By Thursday the  people were dying so rapidly that their corpses could not be handled,  and dead bodies lay everywhere. Thursday night the panic outrush for  the country began. Imagine, my grandsons, people, thicker than the  salmon-run you have seen on the Sacramento river, pouring out of the  cities by millions, madly over the country, in vain attempt to escape  the ubiquitous death. You see, they carried the germs with them. Even  the airships of the rich, fleeing for mountain and desert fastnesses,  carried the germs. "Hundreds of these airships escaped to Hawaii, and not only did they  bring the plague with them, but they found the plague already there  before them. This we learned, by the despatches, until all order in San  Francisco vanished, and there were no operators left at their posts to  receive or send. It was amazing, astounding, this loss of communication  with the world. It was exactly as if the world had ceased, been blotted  out. For sixty years that world has no longer existed for me. I know  there must be such places as New York, Europe, Asia, and Africa; but not  one word has been heard of them—not in sixty years. With the coming of  the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably. Ten  thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the twinkling of an  eye, 'lapsed like foam.' "I was telling about the airships of the rich. They carried the plague  with them and no matter where they fled, they died. I never encountered  but one survivor of any of them—Mungerson. He was afterwards a Santa  Rosan, and he married my eldest daughter. He came into the tribe eight  years after the plague. He was then nineteen years old, and he was  compelled to wait twelve years more before he could marry. You see,  there were no unmarried women, and some of the older daughters of the  Santa Rosans were already