Her eyes had been fixed dreamily upon Tamalpais, but suddenly they were drawn irresistibly upward by the pricking consciousness of something strange. It was a moment before she realized that she had never seen a sky just like that before. Her back was to the east, and although the sun was rising it was still low; at this stage of the dawn the sky was generally gray. This morning it was a ghastly electric blue. And then, while her eyes were still staring, and something in her brain moving towards expression, she heard a noise that sounded like the roar of artillery charging across the world. She fancied it rushing through the Golden Gate and up the bays and marsh, before it hurled itself with a vicious and personal violence against the wall beneath her window. She braced herself against the sash as the house shook in the strongest earthquake she had ever felt. It appeared to be brief, however, and she was turning away to dress herself, when it commenced again with a fury and violence of which she had never dreamed the modern earth to be capable. She threw herself on her knees the better to grip the window-ledge, but her only sensations were surprise and an intense expectation. Electric flames, as blue and ghastly as the reeling sky, were playing all over the marsh, she saw the long bare line of Tamalpais charge down and up like a colossal seesaw; and in that terrific plunging and dancing, that abrupt leaping from one point of the compass to the opposite, or towards all at once, that hysterical shaking and struggling as if two planets had rushed from their orbits and were fighting for life in midspace, Isabel expected the entire globe to stand on end, and was convinced that the finish of California, at least, had come. She had read of earthquakes that lasted for hours, and even days, and no doubt this one was merely getting up steam, for it increased in violence and momentum every second. The house rattled like a big dice-box. She expected it to leap down the slope into the shivering marsh. Pieces of rock fell down the face of the cliff opposite, but so great was the roar of the earthquake, so close the sound of creaking and straining timbers, of falling chimneys, and china, and even plaster, that she could not hear the impact as they struck the ground and bounded high in air.
Then, there was a bulge of the earth upward, a twist that seemed to wrench the house from its foundations, and the earthquake ceased as suddenly as it had come. Isabel waited a few moments for it to return, incredulous that the mighty forces beneath could compose themselves so abruptly; then rose and began to dress herself.
Human blades of a fine temper meet a sudden and terrific onslaught of Nature in one of two spirits: utter cowardice, or an attitude of impersonal curiosity. It is not a matter of heroism but of nerves. The bravest may become abject, if their will has been weakened by some drain on the nervous system; others, that would run from a mouse or prove unequal to the long-heralded danger, rise, in the intense concentrated excitement and surprise of the moment, to a state of absolute and even cynical indifference. One of the unwritten laws that has descended from father to son in California is that an earthquake, no matter how severe, is a mere joke, and should incite prompt and facetious comment. Isabel being both heroic and hardy, paid the California tradition the tribute of a smile and a shrug, and regretted that she had not been in San Francisco; she "liked being in the midst of things." Sentiment, psychology, egoism, had literally been bounced out of her. She knew that Gwynne might easily have been killed, but although she intended to find out in the least possible time, to feel merely human in the face of such a stupendous exhibition of what nature could do when she chose, was a descent of which she, at least, felt herself incapable.
She hurried on her riding-clothes, dropped her braid under her jacket, and ran down the stairs. Chuma, trim and spotless, was sweeping the hall, white with fallen plaster. He gave her his usual good-morning grin and went on with his work. She paused and regarded him curiously.
"What do you think of our earthquakes?" she demanded.
"Oh, very big shake," he said, cheerfully. "Very big shake."
Vaguely nettled she took her hat from the rack and went out by the back way. Mac had knocked on her door immediately after the earthquake, and was now with Abe in the colony on the hills. He came running down when he saw her, and it was patent that his rheumatism, for once, was forgotten. His old red face with its prominent bones set in thick sandy gray hair was more animated than Isabel had ever seen it.
"Glory be!" he exclaimed, as he reached her. "That was about the worst! I was just tellin' Abe that I felt the great earthquake of '68 in this very house, in that very room, by gum, although I was up and dressed, for it was eight o'clock, and I'd gone back for my pipe. So, I know what I'm talkin' about, Miss Isabel, when I say that this was about four times as bad—"
"Please saddle my horse."
"Yes, marm. Wisht I could have got out of bed. I'd like to have seen if the earth rose and fell in a long wave like the shake of '68. Land's sakes, but those chickens did squawk." And although he saddled Kaiser rapidly, he never paused in his reminiscence of the last Northern California earthquake to pass into history. "But this one! By Jiminy! Well, I guess we take the cake in everything out here, earthquakes included."