“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.