Ancestors: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Isabel ran to the window. All the valley was a rolling sea of flame, and all space seemed to be filled with enormous surging billows of smoke. From every window of the Palace Hotel, an immense square building of some seven stories, from the great newspaper buildings, and from other brick and stone structures near by, tongues of flame were leaping; the wooden buildings were mere shapeless furnaces. Again a volume of smoke descended, and for the moment nothing was to be seen but a red blur somewhere in the midst of rolling black.

Victoria communicated to Isabel the information she had received from the neighbors, always coming and going. People were pouring out of the city, not only by the Southern Pacific boats to Oakland, and indirectly to Berkeley and Alameda, but by freight-boats and launches to the Marin towns. They were obliged to make a long detour round the base of the northern hills, as the water-front and the streets behind were a roaring furnace, although the fires had not crossed East Street. All houses in the towns across the bay had opened to the refugees, tents had been erected in the public squares, and emergency hospitals had been started before nine o'clock. The militia had been called out to assist the regulars, and also the Cadet Battalion of the State University. A Citizens' Patrol had been formed to protect the still unburned districts, each man provided with arms at the Presidio. People on the lower slopes were now in full flight towards the western parks and hills, as well as the Presidio, many being under the impression that the ferry-boats were not running. It was doubtful if a hotel or a boarding-house would harbor a soul that night; not east of Van Ness Avenue, at least, and many in that region were preparing to sleep in the Park and squares, lest the fire attack them from the south. Refugees, exhausted, were lying on the doorsteps and in the streets of the Western Addition.

Victoria relapsed into silence and Isabel gazed down upon the beautiful terrible scene—the curtain had rolled upward again—at the enormous tongues of flame leaping from every window, the showers of golden sparks, the swooping and soaring clouds, many of them white, with convoluted edges, and faintly tinted like the day smoke of Vesuvius. These curled white masses rolled among the black waves towards the west, and the low deep roar waxed louder as one listened to it.

All the wooden bow-windows of the Palace Hotel had been eaten off, but it would be hours before the stoutly built old hotel ceased to feed the flames. Sometimes sheets of fire seemed to drive from the apertures across the great width of Market Street, to be beaten back by a solid wall of flame. In the intense clear yellow light that bathed the street Isabel could see the twisted car tracks. More than once she fancied she saw a prostrate body, but it may have been an achievement of the shifting flames, and certainly nothing living moved down there. The mounted officers and their men were patrolling the blocks along all the northern front of the fire.

"Are you not in the least worried about Elton?" asked Isabel, abruptly.

"Not a bit. I never worried about him when he was a child. He was always the most agile and ready youngster I ever saw."

"But he is very venturesome. He might be caught in one of those furnaces as well as another, or killed by falling bricks."

"He is a man of destiny," said Victoria indifferently. "He will live to accomplish what he was born for."

Isabel, in truth, found worry as impossible as any other common emotion, nevertheless thought it odd that he did not come to them for a moment or send a message. She could appreciate his wholly masculine mood, his temporary indifference to the charms of her sex, but he had an ingrained sense of responsibility, and was more considerate than the average man.

Lady Victoria returned to her vantage-point on the veranda, and Isabel went down to the garden fence where the three Japs were standing, and asked them if they intended to remain—half the servants had already fled from the city. Two replied that later in the day they should go to Oakland where they had friends. Isabel told them that she should not part with what little money there was in the house, and they answered politely that they expected to wait for their wages. The oldest of the three, a respectable man of thirty, who looked like, and no doubt was, a student, announced his intention to remain.