Chapter 4

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_ CHAPTER IV

ABOUT two o'clock that afternoon Sayre rushed into camp with his scanty hair on end.

Langdon, who had been attempting to boil a blank-book for dinner, gazed at him in consternation.

"What is it? Bears, William?" he asked fearfully. "D-d-don't be f-f-frightened; I'll stand by you."

"It isn't bears, you simp! I've just unearthed the most colossal conspiracy of the century! Curtis, things are happening in these woods that are incredible, abominable, horrible----"

"_What_ is happening?" faltered Langdon, turning paler. "Murder?"

"Worse! They've got Willett and the others! She admitted it to me----"

"Hey?"

"Willett and Carrick and the others!" shouted Sayre, gesticulating. "They've caught 'em all! She said so! I----"

"They? She? Who's caught what? Who's 'they'? What it is? Who's 'she'? What are you talking about, anyway?"

"Amourette told me----"

"Amourette? Who the deuce is Amourette?"

"I don't know. Shut up! My head's spinning like a gyroscope. All I know is that I want to marry her and she won't let me--and I believe she would if I had a reliable hair-restorer and wasn't near-sighted--but she ran away and got inside the fence and locked the gate."

"Are you drunk?" demanded Langdon, "or merely frolicsome?"

"_I_ don't know. I guess I am. I'm about everything else. What do I know about anything anyway? Nothing!"

He began to run around in circles; Langdon, having seen similar symptoms in demented cats, regarded him with growing alarm.

"I tell you it's an outrageous social condition which tolerates such doings!" shouted Sayre. "It's a perfectly monstrous state of things! Nine handsome men out of ten are fatheads! I told her so! I tried to point out to her--but she wouldn't listen--she wouldn't listen!"

Langdon stared at him, jaw agape. Then:

"Quit that ghost-dancing and talk sense," he ventured.

"Do you think that men are going to stand for it?" yelled Sayre, waving his hands, "ordinary, decent, God-fearing, everyday young men like you and me? If this cataclysmic cult gains ground among American women--if these exasperating suffragettes really intend to carry out any such programme, everybody on earth will resemble everybody else--like those wax figures marked 'neat,' 'imported,' and 'nobby'! And I told Amourette that, too; but she wouldn't listen--she wouldn't lis--My God! _Why_ am I bald?"

He swung his arms like a pair of flails and advanced distractedly upon Langdon, who immediately retreated.

"Come back here," he said. "I want to picture to you the horrors that are going on in your native land! You ought to know. You've got to know!"

"Certainly, old man," quavered Langdon, keeping a tree between them. "But don't come any closer or I'll scream."

"Do you think I'm nutty?"

"Oh, not at all--not _at_ all," said Langdon soothingly. "Probably the wafers disagreed with you."

"Curtis, wouldn't it rock any man's equilibrium to fall head over heels in love with a girl inside of ten minutes? I merely ask you, man to man."

"It sure would, dear friend----"

"And then to see that divine girl almost ready to love you in return--see it perfectly, plainly? And have her tell you that she could learn to care for you if your hair wasn't so thin and you didn't wear eye-glasses? By Jinks! That was _too_ much! I'll leave it to you--_wasn't_ it?"

Langdon swallowed hard and watched his friend fixedly.

"And then," continued Sayre, grinding his teeth, "_then_ she told me about Willett!"

"Hey?"

"Oh, the whole thing is knocked in the head from a newspaper standpoint. They've all written home. They're married--or on the point of it----"

"What!"

"But that isn't what bothers me. What do I care about this job, or any other job, since I've seen the only girl on earth that I could ever stay home nights for! And to think that she ran away from me and I'm never to see her again because I'm near-sighted and partly bald!"

He waved his arms distractedly.

"But, by the gods and demons!" he cried, "I'm not going to stand for her going hunting with that man-net! If she catches any insufferable pup in it I'll go insane!"

Langdon's eyes rolled and he breathed heavily.

"Old man," he ventured, kindly, "don't you think you'd better lie down and try to take a nice little nap----"

Sayre instantly chased him around the tree and caught him.

"Curt," he said savagely, "get over the idea that there's anything the matter with me mentally except love and righteous indignation. I _am_ in love; and it hurts. I'm indignant, because those people are treating my sex with an outrageous and high-handed effrontery that would bring the blush of impotent rage to any masculine cheek!"

"What people?" said the other warily. "You needn't answer till you get your wits back."

"They're back, Curt; that twelve-foot fence of heavy elephant-proof wire which we noticed in the forest day before yesterday isn't the fencing to a game park. It encloses a thousand acres belonging to the New Race University. Did you know that?"

"What's The New Race University?" asked Langdon, astonished.

"You won't believe it--but, Curtis, it's a reservation for the--the p-p-propagation of a new and s-s-symmetrically p-p-proportioned race of g-g-god-like human beings! It's a deliberate attempt at cold-blooded scientific selection--an insult to every bald-headed, near-sighted, thin-shanked young man in the United States!"

"William," said the other, coaxingly, "you had better lie down and let me make some wafer soup for you."

"You listen to me. I'm getting calmer now. I want to tell you about these New Race women and their University and Amourette and Reginald Willett and the whole devilish business."

"Is there--is there really such a thing, William? You would not tell me a bind like that just to make a goat of me, would you?"

"No, I wouldn't. There _is_ such a thing."

"Did you see it?"

"No, I----"

"How do you know?"

"Amourette told me--shamelessly, defiantly, adorably! It was organised in secret out of the most advanced and determined as well as the most healthy, vigorous, and physically beautiful of all the suffragettes in North America. One of their number happened to own a thousand acres here before the State took the rest for its park. And here they have come, dozens and dozens of them--to attend the first summer session of the New Race University."

"Is--is there actually a University in these woods?"

"There is."

"Buildings?" demanded Langdon, amazed.

"No, burrows. Isn't that the limit? Curt, believe me, they live in caves. It's their idea of being vigorous and simple and primitive. Their cult is the cave woman. They have classes; they study and recite and exercise and cook and play auction bridge. Their object is to hasten not only political enfranchisement, but the era of a physical and intellectual equality which will permit them to mate as they choose and people this republic with perfect progeny. Every girl there is pledged to mate only with the very pick of physical masculine perfection. Their pledge is to build up a new, god-like race on earth, which ultimately will dominate, crush out, survive, and replace all humanity which has become degenerate. Nothing mentally or physically or politically imperfect is permitted inside that wire fence. My eye-glasses bar me out; your shanks exclude you--also your politics, because you're a democrat."

"That's monstrous!" exclaimed Langdon, indignantly.

"More monstrous still, these disciples of the New Race movement are militant! Their audacity is unbelievable! Certain ones among them, adepts in woodcraft, have now begun to range this forest with nets. What do you think of that! And when they encounter a young fellow who agrees with the remorseless standard of perfection set up by the University, they stalk him and net him! They've got four so far. And now it's Amourette's turn to go out!"

Langdon's teeth chattered.

"W-w-what are they g-going to do with their captures?"

"Marry them!"

"Willett? And Carrick and----"

"Yes. Isn't it awful, Curt?"

"Was she the girl with the net in the photo? I mean, was that her hand?"

"No; that was a friend of her's who bagged Willett. Amourette started out yesterday for the first time after--well, I suppose you'd call it 'big game.' She saw me, stalked me, got near enough to see my glasses, and let me go. And to-day, thinking that she might have been mistaken and that perhaps I only wore sun-glasses, she came back. But I was ass enough to take off my cap to her, and she saw my hair--saw where it wasn't--and that settled it."

"What a mortifying thing to happen to you, William."

"I should think so. There's nothing unusual the matter with me. Caesar was bald. It's idiotic to bar a man out because he has fewer hairs than the next man. And the exasperating part of it is that I believe I could win her if I had half a chance."

"Of course you could. If she's any good as a sport, she'd rather have you, hairless myopiac that you are, than a tailor's dummy."

Sayre said: "Isn't it a terrible thing, Curtis, to think of that sweet, lovely young girl pledged to a scientific life like that? P-pledged to p-p-propagate p-p-perfection?"

"What a mean-spirited creature that fellow Willett must be," observed Langdon in disgust; "and the other three--Ugh!"

"Why?"

"To tamely submit to being kidnapped and woo'd and wed that way--endure the degradation of a captivity among all those young girls----"

Sayre said: "Would _you_ call for help if kidnapped?"

Langdon gazed into space: "I wonder," he murmured.

Sayre looked at him searchingly.

"I don't believe you'd make the welkin ring with your yelps. It's probably the same with those four men."

"Probably."

"I don't suppose those suffragettes of the New Race University really require any fence there to keep those men in."

"No; only to keep the rest of us out."

"The chances are that Willett and that poet Carrick and De Lancy Smith and Alphonso W. Green couldn't be chased out of that University."

"Those _are_ the chances. How I hate those four men. It's curious, William, that no man can ever tolerate the idea of any other man ever getting solid with any looker. I always did dislike to see another man with a pretty girl. . . . William?"

"What?"

"Think of the concentrated beauty in that University! Think of that rich round-up of creamy dreams! Consider that mellifluous marmalade! And--we can't have any--because _you_ are slightly bald and near-sighted and _I_ am thin and scholarly!" He ran at the camp-kettle and kicked it.

After a painful silence Sayre said timidly: "Don't laugh, but _is_ there any known substance which will bring in hair?"

"You mean bring it out?"

"Well, dammit, grow it! Is there?"

"There are too many bald monarchs and millionaires to prove the contrary. Nor is there anything that can make my thin shanks fatter."

"--I'd be willing to go about without glasses," said Sayre humbly. "I told her so."

"Couldn't you deceive her with a wig? It wouldn't matter afterward. After you're once married let her shriek."

"Amourette _saw_ my head." And he hung it in bitter dejection.

"Come on," said Langdon cheerily. "Let's peek through their fence and see what happens. Much has been done with a merry eye in this world of haughty ladies."

As they turned away into the woods Sayre clenched his fists.

"I'd like to knock the collective blocks off those four young men inside that fence. And--to think--to _think_ of Amourette going out again to-morrow, man hunting, with her net! I can't endure it, Curt--I simply can't."

Langdon looked at his friend in deep commiseration.

"I wish I could help you, William--but I don't see--I--don't--exactly--see----" He hesitated. "Of course I _could_ go to Utica and pay a wig-maker and costumer to make me up into the kind of Charlie-Gussie they're looking for at that University. . . . And when your best girl goes out hunting, she'll see me and net me, and you can be in hiding near by, and rush out and net her."

In their excitement they seized each other and danced.

"Why not?" exclaimed Langdon. "Shall I try? Trust me to come back a specimen of sickening symmetry--the kind of man women write about and draw pictures of--pink and white and silky-whiskered! Shall I? And I'll bring you a net to catch her in! Is it a go, William?"

Sayre broke down and began to cry.

"Heaven bless you, friend," he sobbed. "And if ever I get that girl inside a net she'll learn something about natural selection that they p-p-probably forgot to teach in their accursed New Race University!" _

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