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"You mean, on account of the tower?"

He nodded

"Yes, if they've got any religious ideas at all, or rather superstitions, such would very likely center round theis a regular voodoo hangout The row, last night, oing to run the show"

"But," exclaiirl, in alarm--"but if they do stay a while, what about us? We sih And, inasmuch as we can't drink brine and don't knohere there's any other spring, it looks as though we'd either have to make up to these fellows or wade into theh, never fear Just now, for the ioing to work They see up, a bit, after their pleasant little soiree Now, if they'd only all go to sleep, it'd be a walk-over!"

The girl looked at hio out there alone, whatever happens!" she exclaiain, "how much have you really found out about them--whatever they are"

"Not much They sees, that's about all I can tell as yet Perhaps all the white and yellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclys only a few scattered blacks You know blacks are ierm-infections that destroy other races"

"Yes And you mean--?"

"It's quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degenerate survivors of that other tione to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Doo once did, hite rule ceased?"

"Yes, only a million times more so I see you know your history! If my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, you can easily iine what must have happened"

"For a while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, theycivilization Probably the English language for a while continued, in ever more and more corrupt for the school system, railroads, steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of that wonderfully complex system we once knew But after a while--"

"Yes? What then?"

"Why, the whole false shell crumbled, that's all It must have! History shows it It didn't take a hundred years after Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to grass huts and human sacrifice--to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate And we--have had a thousand, Beatrice, since the white man died!"