The river

TWO days later, there was a shock of earthquake, so slight that the lapping of the water in Rickard’s bath was his intimation of the earth’s uneasiness. In the dining-room, later, he found every one discussing it. “Who could remember an earthquake in that desert?” “The first shake!”

“The Indians might have something to say about that,” thought Rickard.

His pompadoured waitress was ready to fall into hysteria. “Several dishes fell off the pantry shelves. Give me a Kansas cyclone to an earthquake, I say, every time. For there is always a cyclone cellar. But the earth under your feet! Me for Kansas, every time!”

After he had placed his breakfast order, while waiting for his eggs—“Ten minutes in boiling water, off the stove, mind!”—Rickard got the Crossing on the telephone. Matt Hamlin answered the call. He insisted on describing the exact place he had stood when the shock came. It wasn’t anything of a quake. A baby to the shake of ’67. No harm done out there. While he was on the line, Rickard heard the sound of other voices. “It’s Silent just in from the Heading.” “Hello, there,” cried Rickard. “Don’t hang up. Ask him about the gate. Any damage done?”

Silent, himself, came on the wire. The gate was all right. “That was nothing of a quake.” Rickard then got Grant’s Heading. The temblor had been felt more there, but no serious damage had been done. Rickard went back to his boiled eggs. The earthquake was forgotten.

During the morning, unfathered, as rumors are born, the whisper of disaster somewhere spread. Their own slight shock was the edge of the convulsion which had been serious elsewhere, no one knew quite where, or why they knew it at all. The men who were shoveling earth on the levee began to talk of San Francisco. Some one said, that morning, that the city was badly hurt. No one could confirm the rumor, but it grew with the day.

Rickard met it at the office late in the afternoon. The word was growing in definiteness. There was trouble up North. A terrible disaster; people had been killed; towns were burning. There was a report of a tidal wave which had swept San Francisco. Another quoted that San Jose had telegraphed all the wires from San Francisco down; that San Francisco was burning. He went direct to the telegraph operator’s desk.

“Get Los Angeles, the O. P. office. And be quick about it.”

In ten minutes, he was talking to Babcock. That human clock confirmed some of the ugly rumors. The wires between San Francisco and the rest of the world were down; impossible to get any word from there.

“Any relative there?” he inquired with sympathy on tap. Such messages had been coming in all day.

“Oh, no. How much do you know? How do you know it?” persisted Rickard.

Babcock said that the damage by earthquake to that city was not known, but it was afire. San Jose had confirmed it. Oakland had reported the flames creeping up the residence hills of that gay western city. Cinders were already falling in the transbay town.

Rickard dropped the receiver. “Where’s Hardin?”

Tom Hardin emerged from a knot of men who were talking in a corner by the door.

“Where’s that machinery?”

“What machinery?”

Rickard saw the answer to his question in the other’s face.

“The dredge machinery. Did you attend to that? Did you send for it?”

“Oh, yes, that’s all right. It’s all right.”

“Is it here?”

Hardin attempted jocularity. “I didn’t know as you wanted it here. I ordered it sent to Yuma.”

“Is it at Yuma?”

Hardin admitted that it was not yet at Yuma; it would be there soon; he had written; oh, it was all right.

“When did you write?”

Hardin reddened under the catechism of questions. He resented being held up before his men. The others felt the electricity in the air. Hardin and his successor were glaring at each other like belligerents.

“I asked when did you write?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday!” Rickard ripped out an oath. “Yesterday. Why at all, I’d like to know? Did you understand that you were ordered to get that here? Now, it’s gone.”

“Gone?” The others crowded up.

“San Francisco’s burning.” He walked into his inner office, mad clear through. The group around Hardin were tearing his wisp of news. San Francisco on fire. The city of their fun gone.

He was not thinking of the ruin of the gay young city; not a thought yet did he have of the human tragedies enacting there; of homes, lives, fortunes swept into that huge bonfire. As it affected the work at the river, the first block to his campaign, the catastrophe came home to him. He had a picture of tortured, twisted iron, of ruined machinery, the machinery for his dredge. He saw it lying like a spent Laocoön, writhing in its last struggle. He blamed himself for leaving even such a small detail as the hastening of the parts to Hardin’s care, for Hardin wasn’t fit to be trusted for anything. No one could tell him now the man was unlucky; he was a fool. A month wasted, and days were precious. A month? Months. Hardin’s luck. Oh, hell!

Then he began to speculate, as he cooled, over the trouble up yonder. A whole city burning? They would surely get it under control. He began to think of the isolation; the telegraph wires all down. That might happen anywhere! He walked to the door and looked thoughtfully at the company’s big water-tower. That wasn’t such a bad idea! He picked up his hat, and went out.