The fire and the gold (9 page)

The fire had crossed Van Ness at more than one point. In the beginning it had burned as far west as their own section, south of Jefferson Square, almost a mile away from the Bonners' house. It had been touch and go with the weary fire fighters holding the blaze close by at Franklin and Clay. Most of the Mission district had gone earlier, and all Market Street, except for the waterfront along the Embarcadero where the fire could be fought by blue jackets manning pumps with water from the bay. It had swept back and forth upon its course and the Nob Hill mansions had gone with the rest. Now on Friday the flames were making a last assault up Russian and Telegraph Hills.

A strong stand was being made at Van Ness and the fire was not yet out of control at the points where it had crossed to the west side of the street. The east side had been dynamited practically out of existence.

By late Friday the prospect became constantly more hopeful, and at last came the welcome word from troopers that the fire was checked.

Melora could feel a sort of limpness go through her at the news. There were no great outbursts of joy from the community. Everyone was too worn and weary. Had all this happened in only three days? they asked one another. They seemed to have lived months in these hours.

But now at least apathy fell away and on every hand one heard the words, "What do we do now?" Not in tones of despair, but calmly as people looked about to see what most needed doing. Some four square miles of San Francisco lay in ruin and rubble. Quite an ash pile to clean up, and San Franciscans went to work with a will. What had happened was past—they must now get ready for the future.

Tony made a roundabout trip to Telegraph and Russian hills. His mother's little house on Russian Hill was gone, but the Lombardi Restaurant on Telegraph Hill had been saved and his relatives were living there.

Street kitchens sprang up to enable the populace to eat hot food. No fires were to be built indoors until chimneys had been inspected, and goodness knew when that would be.

On Saturday Quent persuaded Melora's mother that he and Tony should be permitted to escort the two girls on an exploration down Market Street. Only a few fires were smouldering here and there and the ruins were already cooling in that area. There was no danger except from falling walls, and if they stayed in the middle of the street they'd be all right.

"Shouldn't you boys be helping to dig San Francisco out of the rubble?" Gran asked.

"Oh, we'll get to that," Quent said airily. "The mess will be around for a while. But we ought to have a look before we all turn busy beaver."

"If I were young I expect I'd go myself," Gran admitted. "Let them have their exploring, Addy. This is something they'll tell their children about some day."

So Mama gave in. But she put her foot down absolutely about Alec going along. Alec would try to chmb about the ruins and she did not mean to let him out of her sight.

Mama was upset today because Gran had accepted some money Mr. Seymour had paid her and agreed to take him and Quent as boarders. Tony and his mother too, and of course Mrs. Forrest, who had still found no way to communicate with her son. In a day or two she would go to Oakland to her friends, but she didn't want to be caught in the crowds that were still jamming the ferries leaving San Francisco.

Hospitality, Gran told Mama, was a fine thing under the proper circumstances. But they all had to be reahstic. "Rent" couldn't be steady anyway until the banks opened and they all knew where they stood. Now Addy had to reahze that they were in the boarding house business. With one reservation, of course. The tenants might return at any moment—whereupon they might all be out in the cold.

That afternoon the four young people were permitted their walk about the city. Uncle Will was going their way in the car and dropped them off near Market Street. There the two girls had their first real look at the ashes of San Francisco.

What they saw was hard to believe. The City Hall stood a shattered skeleton, with only the top of its dome intact, though strangely enough the figure of Liberty still crowned the pinnacle proudly, with arm and torch lifted high above the wreckage. Quent said the main damage to the building had been from the earthquake, not the fire—a case of shoddy construction which had cheated the people of San Francisco.

Everywhere else stood broken walls, crumbled heaps of brick, tangled wires, lone chimneys. And everywhere the tall, charred spars of telegraph poles standing up like ships' masts in a harbor. At the foot of Market, white and clean and beautiful, stood the Ferry Building. The hands of its clock had stopped at earthquake time, and its flagstaff tilted off at a crazy angle, but the fire had not reached it and the very sight was a symbol of hope for the future.

A passageway had already been cleared through the rubble of Market Street and down its center two streams moved in opposite directions. One was the line of cars, wagons and carriages, coming up from the ferry, bringing supplies, bringing doctors and nurses, and officials bent on business. The second line, moving endlessly toward the water, was made up for the most part of refugees, still pouring out of the city, carrying their thinning loads.

Their own group fitted itself into the refugee line, walking two abreast From behind, Cora prodded Melora.

"I'm glad we're not running away!" she cried. "I'm glad we're staying to see it through!"

"Good for you," Tony approved, but Quent only smiled and Melora felt an impatience toward him. She too was glad that Gran was made of pioneer stuff that didn't run away.

She walked on, ignoring Quent, her eyes upon the nearby hills. Strange to be able to see them again, hitherto hidden by buildings, but heart-breaking now with their crown of ruin. Everywhere glowed the surprise of color. Where Melora had expected to find only a burned, dead black, bricks glowed pale red, and lavender and purple.

"How queer," Melora said over her shoulder to Cora and Tony. "I never thought there'd be color like this."

It was Quent who answered. "The temperatures were so great that what didn't burn was fused to these colors."

It was far from quiet here on Market. There was a ringing of pick and shovel and hammer, the clatter of rubble being tossed into carts and barrows, voices shouting. Now and then came the crash of a falling wall back among the ruins.

They had gone a few blocks down Market when a burly fellow in overalls, loggers' boots and a bowler hat stepped up and collared Quent without ceremony.

"You'll be volunteering, I think, young fellow?" he said, thrusting a shovel into Quent's hands. "Twenty minutes of service is all we ask of every man who passes by. You too, there,"—and he pointed to Tony.

The two boys went to work with a ready will and Melora and her sister found themselves a place where they could sit on a pile of bricks and be out of the moving stream in the middle of the street. The man in the bowler hat went after more "volunteers" and every man put heart and muscle into the effort.

"Of all things, look at that!" Cora cried, and Melora followed the direction of her pointing finger.

Across the street, against the charred front door of a building a man was nailing up a sign crudely lettered. Cora read the words aloud.

MOVED TO VAN NESS.

ELEVATOR HERE HAS

STOPPED RUNNING.

When the sign was secured the fellow turned toward the crowd and saluted with his hammer. There was laughter and a few cheers. Melora saw one man and woman with two small children in tow look at each other and then turn about to walk against the tide of fleeing refugees. Here were two who had changed their minds about flight. There was something hearteningly contagious in the air—a will to survive and build anew.

When the boys had served their stint and the four could go on again, Melora began to look closely at the cross streets for some sign of a landmark. Only the ruin of a business building on Market gave her the answer.

"It's queer not to know where we are because nothing is recognizable and there are no more street signs," she said. "Do you think we could go uphill a little way and see if—if our house—"

"Do you really want to?" Quent asked.

She nodded. "Yes, if the rest of you are willing. This street doesn't look too bad."

Before they left Market Tony called to Melora and Quent who were still ahead. "Wait! Look back up Market!"

Melora saw what he meant. The long diagonal stretched away from them, the ruins of one of the world's great thoroughfares, while above the ashes and destruction rose the green serenity of Twin Peaks. Here and there on distant hills marched a familiar line of eucalyptus trees, and there must be poppies nodding their orange heads in the grass up there. The world still stood, unrocked, unshattered, unscorched.

Now they left Market Street and faced the wilderness of ruins with a lift to their steps. The going was sometimes better, sometimes worse than it looked. Once Melora glanced down at her shoes and long skirts and saw that they were whitened with the powder of lime and brick dust that drifted over everything. Sometimes the girls had to gather up their skirts and climb over piles of debris in the street, sometimes they waited while Tony, his wire cutters out again, helped Quent to clear a path.

Here and there curls of smoke drifted up from some ash heap, and here, with the sounds of Market behind them, the silence was utter and desolate. No human being stirred anywhere. This was truly a dead city. If it had not been for the peculiar jog in the brick steps that had once led up to the Cranby house, they might have had trouble in knowing where it had stood. But a portion of the steps was there—with nothing else beyond but the usual heaps of rubble, the broken sections of wall.

Cora started up the steps with a cry of dismay, but Tony drew her back.

"Don't go up there," he said. "It's better to remember it the way it was."

Tony was right. Always now when Melora tried to remember these steps where she had played as a child, there would be a cavern of rubble beyond them. She would see only sky and the hill, where once the peaked roof had risen above the window of her father's little study. Having looked upon this, she would no longer be able to see Cindy, the rag doll, sitting in the chair beside her bed waiting for her to come home. Now there was no Cindy, no chair, no room, no house.

Only Quent went to the top of the steps and stared down into the ruins. He came down again almost at once, without comment.

"Let's go," he said shortly, and they turned west, picking their way through the cluttered street.

"If it's not too hard to reach," Tony suggested, "I'd like to go past the bookshop—or what's left of it."

The others were willing to try, and the going was not too difficult. They found the bookshop a dark cave between two brick walls. Its front was gone completely and there was nothing overhead. Tony stepped past the heap of masonry that had once been a door and looked inside.

"Wait for me," he said. "I won't be a minute. I just want to see what's left."

They heard him moving about beyond the debris that marked the front of the shop. Once he laughed as bricks tumbled with a clatter ail about him. Melora felt her sister's hand tighten on her arm. Then Tony yelled and there was a resounding crash, as if the whole rear of the shop had caved in with a roar of sound. A cloud of dust rose about them, filling the air.

There was no sound from Tony and Quent was already climbing through into the shop, while the girls waited. A moment later the two boys came out together.

Tony's cap was gone and there was brick dust in his hair and a long red scratch down one cheek. He managed to smile as he waved a black lump of something at them.

"Wow!" he said, when he was safely in the middle of the street again. "I didn't expect the whole back wall of the place to fall over like that." He stamped his feet and dusted his clothes. Then he felt gingerly of a lump on the side of his head.

"Mama said we were all to stay where walls couldn't fall on us," Cora said, looking white and a little sick, "You might have been killed!"

Melora said nothing, but her heart was still thumping with the fright he had given them.

Tony shrugged. He was more interested in the blackened object in his hand than in the danger he had barely escaped. As they continued down the street heading toward Van Ness and home, he held it out for them to see.

"Know what this is?"

"I suspect that it used to be a book," Quent said. "Though the deduction is due mainly to the fact that you found it in a bookshop."

"It's still a book," said Tony triumphantly. He fluttered the pages under Melora's nose. "Books aren't the easiest thing in the world to burn. The covers are gone and the outer pages, but look—you can read the rest. Melora—do you know what book it is?"

The edge of the page was brown and crumbling, but print stood out black against white and she needed to read only a few lines:

In I got bodily into the apple barrel, and found there was scarce an apple left; but, sitting down there in the dark, ... I had either fallen asleep, or was on the point of doing so, when a heavy man sat down with rather a clash close by. ... I was just about to jump up when the man began to speak. It was Silver's voice, and, before I had heard a dozen words, ... I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.

Cora started to speak, but Melora was first.

"Of course I know," she said. "It's Treasure Island"

Even Quent, who was no steady reader, glanced at the scorched page and nodded. "Best adventure story I ever read!"

Tony forgot the other two to walk beside Melora. "I couldn't help thinking about Stevenson the other night when I stood on Russian Hill and watched the downtown buildings burning all around Portsmouth Square."

She knew what he meant. Once Robert Louis Stevenson had lived for a time in San Francisco—in fact, his widow still lived on Russian Hill. In bygone days Stevenson had haunted Portsmouth Square, sitting for long hours in the sun while he talked to seamen, getting a taste for the South Seas, and a curiosity that would eventually send him sailing to those far islands. After his death a monument had been erected in that very square, topped by a golden galleon, its sails billowing full with wind as it sailed upon lapping waves.