Ancestors Part 54

I can be quite impersonal, keen, steady of hand and brain, if you are out of the city."

"Very well, I will go."

"The day the fire is over I will go for you and we will marry and live in any shanty we can find--begin life together like any Forty-niners.

You can help others as much as you choose then. There will be work for all--but now there is not, cannot be until organization begins. And I must be free to take care of you. Will you go at once? The launch is still there."

"Yes, I will go at once."

He left her, and a few moments later she was walking down the other side of the hill, the voluminous pillow-case slung over her shoulder. Beside her trudged Sugihara, the ancestors under one arm, and his library under the other. The street along the water-front was a moving ma.s.s of refugees from Telegraph Hill, and Mr. Clatt was standing in the launch, on the alert. He gave a shout of delight as he saw Isabel, and she waved her hand. As she reached the wharf and forced her way through the Italians and Mexicans, who regarded her with no great favor, she noticed a small party of Chinese evidently in distress. The woman, magnificently arrayed, and hardly larger than a child, was huddled against the sea-wall, dumbly protesting that she could go no farther. Her face was twisted and her eyes were staring with pain and fright. A pretty child in three shirts of different colors, all silken and embroidered, was wailing in the common language of his years, and the young husband argued with his wife in vain: she made no response, but her pa.s.sive resistance was as effective as if her feet had been six. She would not let her maid touch her, and her husband dared not relinquish his hold on his strong-box while surrounded by his formidable neighbors of Telegraph Hill.

Isabel, glad to be able to do something for some one, told him to hand the box to Mr. Clatt, then carry his wife on board the launch. The nurse followed with the child, while Isabel and Sugihara, having cast their own burdens on board, and drawn their pistols, brought up in the rear.

As the launch entered the current that would carry it east of Angel Island, Isabel looked at her guests--the Chinese wife and her child lying on the cushions of the cabin, stolid once more; the big-footed maid and the husband, his strong-box between his knees, seated opposite; the j.a.panese, sitting cross-legged on the roof, his back to the land--no doubt to emphasize his contempt for the rabble; Mr. Clatt, shaking his fist at a group of vociferating Italians--and smiled grimly as she recalled the romantic boat party that escaped from Pompeii. She did not feel in the least romantic, but she felt something greater and deeper.

She turned her head many times to look at the wonderful spectacle of the burning city, the red curtain in the background, along whose front rushed the pillars of fire driven by the rolling ma.s.ses of smoke. Where the fires on n.o.b Hill had burned low the flames looked like red sprouting corn. Fairmont had caught at last. It stood, a great square pile of white stone against the red background, and from its top alone poured a steady square volume of curling white smoke. The windows, and there were many hundreds of them, looked like plates of bra.s.s. The last thing she saw, as the launch shot up the bay towards San Pablo, was a wave of fire roll down Telegraph Hill, and hundreds of black pigmies fleeing before it.

It was a beautiful evening of perfect peace when the launch entered Rosewater creek. The marsh was bathed in all the faint colors of the afterglow. The birds were singing. People were sitting under the trees in their parks or gardens. A fisherman was sailing up to Rosewater with his catch. But for the red light in the south and the faint sound as of a besieging army, there was nothing to recall that a civilization had been arrested and a great city was burning down to its bones.

THE END

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE CONQUEROR A FEW OF HAMILTON'S LETTERS THE ARISTOCRATS SENATOR NORTH HIS FORTUNATE GRACE PATIENCE SPARHAWK AND HER TIMES RULERS OF KINGS THE TRAVELLING THIRDS THE BELL IN THE FOG

(_CALIFORNIA SERIES_)

REZaNOV THE DOOMSWOMAN THE SPLENDID IDLE FORTIES A DAUGHTER OF THE VINE THE CALIFORNIANS AMERICAN WIVES AND ENGLISH HUSBANDS A WHIRL ASUNDER