The Doomsman, Van Tassel Sutphen [top books to read TXT] 📗

be finally devoured by the birds and by a horde of rats and mice. Up to the last moment there had been confusion and dismay certainly, but the wheels of trade and of the civil administration had continued to turn; men had stood at their posts in answer to the call of duty or impressed by the blind instinct of habit. And then, suddenly, the sun went down, only to rise again upon a silent land.

"The relapse into barbarism was swift. The few who had escaped were segregated from one another in small family groups, each man content with the bare necessities of animal existence and fearing the face of the stranger. Under such circumstances, there could be but little neighborly intercourse, and the ancient highways speedily became overgrown with grass and weeds, or else they were undermined and washed out by the winter storms. It was not until the second generation after the Terror that men once more began to draw together, in obedience to inherited instincts, and even then the new movement must have been largely brought about through the increasing aggressions of the Doomsmen. But of this in another place.

"It has been asserted that fire played a principal part in the destruction of the ancient cities, and it was at one time supposed that these extensive conflagrations were partly accidental and partly attributable to the wide-spread lawlessness that marked the closing[Pg 17] hours of the greatest drama in all history. But later researches have evolved a new theory, and it now seems probable that the torch was employed by the authorities themselves as a final and truly a desperate measure. An heroic cautery, but, alas, a useless one.

"The comparative exemption of New York from the universal fate goes to support rather than to discredit this hypothesis. It escaped the dynamite cartridge and the torch simply because in that city no recognized authority remained in power; there was no one to carry out the imperative orders of the federal government. There were, of course, many isolated cases of incendiarism, but the city did not suffer from any general and organized conflagration, as was the fate of Philadelphia and St. Louis and New Orleans. The destiny of the metropolis was decided in a different way; already it had passed into the keeping of the Doomsmen.

"In effect, then, the highly civilized North American continent had relapsed, within the brief period of ninety years, into its primeval estate. In every direction stretched an inhospitable wilderness of morass and forest, with a few feeble settlements of the Stockade people fringing the principal waterways, and here and there the smoke of an encampment of the Painted Men rising in a thin spiral from out of the vast ocean of green leaves. To-day the wild boar ranges where once the tide of human passion most turbulently flowed, and the poor herdsman, eating his noonday curds from a wooden bowl, crushes with indifferent heel the priceless bit of faience lying half hidden in the [Pg 18]rotting leaves. Everywhere, the old order changing and disappearing, only to recreate itself in form ever more fantastic and enfeebled, a dead being, and yet inextricably bound up with the life of the new age. And over all, the shadow of Doom, gigantic, threatening, omnipotent."[Pg 19]

III

THE NEW WORLD

Again we make acknowledgment to the "Laudable" Vigilas and quote at large from the luminous pages of The Later Cosmos. Now the reader, scenting more learned discourse, may meditate upon skipping this chapter; nay, will probably do so. Yet, to my thinking, he will act more wisely in buckling down to it, seeing that it contains matter of moment for the perfect understanding of the narrative proper. The studying of guide-posts is not an amusing occupation, but it is infinitely less tedious than to wander around all day in a fog and perhaps miss one's destination altogether.

"It is, indeed, a small world as we know it to-day. Our philosophers, reconstructing, as best they may, the science of the ancients from the treatises, few and sadly incomplete, that have come down to us, affirm that the earth is an orb and that another continent (perhaps more than one) lies beyond the rim of the eastern horizon. It may be so, but the issue is not of practical importance, seeing that there are none who care to make adventure of the great salty gulf that lies between. And so the sea keeps its mysteries.

"On the other hand, we count it inadvisable to[Pg 20] wander far afield. To the north, to the west, and to the south stretches the unbroken forest, and in a few hours a man's legs may easily carry him out of hailing of the voice of his kind. The waterways form the only regular channels for social and commercial intercourse, and the busybody and gad-about are not regarded with favor by honest people.

"It appears highly probable that the human race was virtually annihilated over the general area of the ancient United States of America; it persisted only in a few particularly favored localities and through accidental circumstances of which we know nothing definite. In our own day, the northern, central, and southern group of colonies maintain a system of infrequent intercommunication, and beyond that certain knowledge does not extend. It is possible that mankind may exist in a degraded state, in many inaccessible corners of this vast continent of ours, but this is only a possibility, concerning which the theories of the learned are no more susceptible of proof than are the idle speculations of the vulgar.

"For convenience, we will accept the popular classification of the human race as it exists to-day—the Painted Men, the House People, and the Doomsmen. To take them up in that order.

"The Painted Men, otherwise the Wood Folk, are the descendants of the Indians of old, but the strain is largely mingled with that of the negro race, and, with hardly an exception, it is the weaker qualities both of body and of mind that have been emphasized in the hybrid. From their Indian forebears they have preserved the custom of painting their face with crude and hideous pigments upon all occasions of cere[Pg 21]mony; hence their popular designation—the 'Painted Men.'

"The House People are conveniently subdivided into two classes—the townsmen, or House People proper, and the stockade dwellers, colloquially, the Stockaders.

"The House People of the walled towns represent as nearly as may be the middle classes of the ancient civilization. Originally, the family was the political and social unit, just as with the patriarchs of Holy Writ, but within the last generation the community idea has been growing rapidly, and there are perhaps a score of towns and villages scattered along the banks of the Greater and Lesser rivers.

"The Stockaders, reversing the procedure of their kinsmen of the towns, live apart from one another, each proprietor depending wholly upon his own resources for sustenance and defence. Some of the larger estates contain several hundred acres enclosed by a strong timber stockade and otherwise defended against the assaults of enemies. The head of the family, or clan, as it might more properly be termed, is lord paramount within his own borders, even possessing the rights of life and death. But this last authority is rarely called in exercise, since these folk of the free country-side are naturally wholesome, honest, generous-hearted men, content to lead a simple life and coveting no man's honor or goods. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the stockade dweller is both provincial of habit and prejudiced of mind. He looks down upon the townsman as a huckster in private and a shuffler in public life, and this feeling of contemptuous enmity is fully[Pg 22] returned by the cit, who regards the free proprietor in the light of a boor and a bully. Moreover, it rankles in the Houseman's breast that no Stockader pays a farthing of head-money to the treasure-chest of the Doomsmen. Now and then some well-to-do proprietor may suffer loss from cattle thieving and rick burning, but as often as not the marauders pay full price for all they get. And this leads us to a consideration of the Doomsman himself, that foul excrescence upon our modern body politic. Fortunately, history here speaks clearly, and we have only to listen to her voice.

"It was a natural procedure, upon the coming of the Terror, to throw open the doors of the jails and other punitive institutions, thereby giving the wretched inmates an equal chance for life. The great mass of these degraded beings gravitated inevitably towards the cities, seeking plunder and opportunities for bestial dissipation that even the dread presence of the Terror could not restrain. Without hope and without fear, they rushed to the vulture's feast; here was wine and gold and soft raiment; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.

"It was the ancient city of New York that received the vast bulk of this army of human rats; naturally so, since it was the supreme treasure-house of the western world. In such overwhelming numbers did these vermin come that the civil and military administrations were literally swarmed over. Between two days the outlaws were in complete possession, and the small remnant of the decent residents retired precipitately, preferring to meet death under the open sky rather than in company with their new masters.[Pg 23]

"The years went on, but the changes that they brought were few. The descendants of the ancient criminals remained in the ruined city, at first of necessity, afterwards by choice, finding there fuel and shelter in abundance besides large stores of non-perishable food supplies. When, in the next generation, these provisions became exhausted it was inevitable that the refugees should fix covetous eyes upon the threshing-floors and herd-stalls of their rural neighbors. But although the outlaws had continued to gain in numbers, their natural increase was not proportionate to the growing power of their adversaries. Little by little the Doomsmen began to lose ground; already they had been defeated several times in pitched battle, and it looked as though the hornet's-nest would soon be smoked out.

"It was at this critical juncture that the infamous personality of Dom Gillian made itself of commanding account, and thenceforth the balance began to incline the other way. It was but the weight of one man's hand in the scale-pan, yet there are still many of us who remember how heavy that hand could be.

"Infamous is the adjective deliberately applied, and with reason. Dominus Gillian, to give him his full name, was a renegade, the unworthy son of a distinguished Stockader family. Admittedly a man of fine intellect and force, it is equally unquestionable that he was entirely devoid of moral sense. He possessed a genius for organization, and he succeeded in consolidating the unruly Doomsmen into a compact and disciplined body of outlaws. Murder and rapine were quickly reduced to exact sciences, and, unfortunately, the House People could not be made to see[Pg 24] the necessity of united action; the townsman and the stockade dweller preferred to contend with each other rather than against the common enemy. As a consequence, the freebooters had a clear road before them, and so was established that intolerable tyranny under which the land still groans. All this occurred upward of sixty years ago.

"It only remains to add that Dominus, or, more colloquially, Dom Gillian, still lives, albeit he must be verging upon ninety years of age. For many years he has not been seen in the field, and it is even asserted that he no longer takes active part in the councils of the Doomsmen. Be that as it may, his will still remains dominant to animate and direct the malign powers created by his wicked genius. And the evil that men do, doth it not live after them?

"Such is the world, or, rather, one infinitesimal portion of the cosmos, in the year 2015, according to the ancient calendar, or 90 since the Terror."[Pg 25]

IV

THE MAN ON HORSEBACK

Gavan of the Greenwood Keep was a prosperous man according to the standard of these latter days, and his estate was reckoned to be the largest and finest holding in all the western country-side. A man might walk from break of day until darkness and yet not complete the periphery of its boundary-lines, but the palisaded portion included only the arable land and home paddocks and was of comparatively limited extent. Viewed from a bird's-eye elevation, this stockaded enclosure appeared to be laid out in the shape of a pear, the house being situated near the small end. The greatest length of the area thus enclosed was a mile and a half, and it was three-quarters of a mile wide at the big or southern side, tapering down to a