Elmore County Republican. [volume] (Mountain Home, Idaho) 1910-1915, 1915-01-23


desire to embrace him, though the
Chauffeur was brute, perfect brute
the most abhorrent man have ever
known His name was strange,
how have forgotten his name
Everybody called him Chaufeur-it
was the name of his occupation, and
it stuck That is how to this day,
the tribe he founded is called the
/ Chauffeur tribe.
HE was a violent, unjust man.
Why the plague spared him | can
never understand It would seem, in
spite of our old metaphysical notions
about absolute justice, that there is
no justice in the universe Why did
he live?--an Ubiquitous, moral mon
ster, blot on the face of nature, a
cruel relentless, bestial cheat as we'll.
All he could talk about was motor
cars, machinery, gasoline, and garage
and especially With huge delight of
his mean pilferings and sordid swim
dlings of the persons who had EN-
ployed him in the days before the
coming of the plague And yet he was
spared while hundreds of millions,
yea. billions, of better men we're de-
stroyed
Il went on with him to his camp,
and there | saw her, Vesta, the one
woman. 1t was glorious and :.
pitiful There she was, Vesta Van
Warden. the young wife of John Van
Warden, clad in rags, with married and
SCARED and toilcalloused hands, bend
ing over the campfire and doing soul
lion work-she Vesta, who mad been
born to the purple of the greatest
baronage of wealth the world had
ever known. John Van Warden her
husband worth one billion eight hun
dred millions, and president of the
Board of Industrial Magnates, mad
been the ruler of America Also, Sit
ting on the Industrial Board Of Con-
troll he had been one Of the seven
men who ruled the world And she
herself had come of equally noble
stock. Her father, Philip Saxon, had
been President of the Board of Indus
trial Magnates up to the time of his
death. This office was in process of
becoming hereditary, and had Philip
Saxon had a son that son would have
succeeded him But his only child
was Vesta, the perfect flower of gen
erations of the highest culture tr's
planet has ever produced. 1t was
not until the engagement between
Vesta and Van Warden took place that
Saxon indicated the latter as his sue
cessor 1t was, | am sure, political
marriage. / have reason to believe
that Vesta never really loved her hus
band in the mad passionate way of
which the poets used to sing. 1t was
more like the marriages that OBJ
tanned among crowned heads before
they were displaced by the Magnates
"And there she was, boiling fish
chowder in soot-coyered pot, her
glorious eyes infamed by the acrid
smoke of the open fire Here was a
bdu SUI y. oub w 40 LI1C OlAC FlNOl
in a million, as | had been, as the
Chauffeur had been. On a browning
eminence of the Alameda Hills, over
looking San Francisco Bay, Van
Warden had built vast summer pal
ace, 1t was surrounded by park of
a thousand acres. When the plague
broke out, Van Warden sent her there.
Armed guards patrolled the boundar-
les of the park, and nothing entered
in the way of provisions or even mail
matter that was not first fumigated.
And yet did the plague enter, killing
the guards at their posts, the serv-
ants at their tasks, sweeping away
the whole army of retainers-or, at
least, all them who did not flee to die
elsewhere. So it was that Vesta
found herself the sole living person
in the palace that had become char
mel house.
"Now, the Chauffeur had been one
of the servants that ran away. Re-
turning, two months afterWard, he dis
covered Vesta in little summer pa
vilion where there had been no
deaths and where she had established
herself He was a brute. She was
afraid, and she ran away and hid
among the trees, That night, on foot,
she fed into the mountains-she,
whose tender feet and delicate body
had never known the bruise of stones
nor the scratch of briers. He fol-
lowed, and that night he caught her.
He struck her Do you understand?
He beat her with those terrible fists
of his and made her his slave. 1t
was she who had to gather the fire
wood, build the fires, cook and do
all the degrading camp labor-she,
who had never performed a mental
act in her life These things he com
-. yelled her to do, while he, proper
savage, elected to lie around camp
and look on. He did nothing, abso-
lutely nothing. except on occasion to
hunt meat or catch fish"
Good for Chauffeur Hare-Lip com
mented in an understone to the other
boys. II remember him before he died.
lie was a corker. But he did things,
| o,,J he y.,odo +bf,, orc on Won kuaW do