Victoria turned to Isabel with wide eyes. "It looked like kidnapping!" she exclaimed.
"I fancy they merely want him at the citizens' meeting. No doubt they want every steady clear brain they can muster. I think I had better go out and see what has become of Paula and the children. Will you come?"
Victoria shook her head. "This is all too interesting," she said. "I must see more of it, and I am no longer afraid. When I am tired I will go home. Shall we agree to meet there for luncheon?"
Isabel nodded and started up Stockton Street alone, intending to take the first car that led in her sister's direction. Some of the trolley wires were down, but no doubt others were uninjured, and the cable-cars had always seemed to her as fixed as fate. She could no more conceive of their system being dislocated for more than an hour at a time than of the city burning. So far she was merely interested, and although sorry for the unfortunate poor, felt that the fates had conspired to do the city a service in cleaning out so objectionable a quarter. Of the millions invested in that district she did not think, but sighed as she thought of South Park and Rincon Hill. Still, they would have been obliterated in the course of events and before long; and as for the fire itself it would be stopped by the great walls of masonry on and near Market Street. She looked eastward down the deserted streets towards the bay, and although the vista there also was closed with flame and smoke, the fires were far away, and the marines were fighting it.
She passed many people ascending and descending, some with pressed lips, others arguing with a certain fettered excitement against the pessimistic attitude. After she left the business blocks the sidewalks again were free of débris, although she could see the ruin within. The disreputable section of this street, known as the "Red light district," was crowded with women, to whose rescue or comfort no man would seem to have come. Isabel looked at them with an irresistible curiosity, but no sense of repulsion; she even stopped and answered their eager questions as best she could. She was possessed with the idea that there was but one person in San Francisco that day, no matter what the optical delusion. She was not at all dazed, but utterly impersonal.
Even in the blazing sunshine most of these women were handsome, and young. But all assurance was gone; when not strained and haggard from the recent and the menacing terror, they looked indescribably forlorn. But they were very quiet. Isabel heard but one excited cry, and something of its thrill ran along her own nerves. "My God! The wind is blowing from the southeast and it's blowing strong!"
Isabel glanced back. It seemed to her that the great suspended waves of smoke, red-lined, were rolling with more energy, and they certainly were inclining west as well as north. She wondered, with some irritation, why the wind blew from the southeast when the first of the trades should be roaring in from the Pacific. A strong steady west wind and the fire would be blown towards the bay, where it could be extinguished from the marine boats. Every time a gust ruffled her hair she shook her head irritably, wondering that she had ever loved the wind.
She reached California Street. The cars were not running. Far down where they should have started she saw nothing but smoke. Nor was there the usual rumble indicating that the cable was at work, a sound which was among the first of her memories. She turned west and climbed the almost perpendicular blocks to the summit of Nob Hill. The beautiful massive pile of white stone, to be known when finished as Fairmont Hotel, and which had already done so much to redeem the city from its architectural madness, looked as serene and unravaged as if it crowned a hill of ancient Athens; but so, for that matter, did its neighbors, two as faultless in their way; the others appearing even more outrageous than usual, inasmuch as they had had their opportunity to disappear and failed to take advantage of it.
From the summit of the hill Isabel gave a hasty glance southward, then walked rapidly west; the fires seemed to cover far more ground than when she had first looked at them from Russian Hill, an hour ago.
After she had tripped over two large paving-stones that had met in an upward bulge, she took more note of detail. Some of the houses had private cisterns, and their roofs and walls were still quite wet. Pretentious garden walls, and stone pillars supporting façades, had fallen, while next door an apparently more delicate structure was intact. It seemed to be a matter of foundation. And everywhere there were groups of silent people watching the fire. Even when the Red Cross men and women carried out the injured, Isabel did not hear a groan. And all were losing their dazed and frightened expressions. The careless philosophy of the city was reasserting itself, although in a more dignified phase.