"I can cook," he added. "Not well, but perhaps well enough for a few days. And perhaps if we are driven out I may go to the country with you. I should be willing to work for anything you could pay me until things were restored to their normal condition—if you would be good enough to give me my evenings for study."
Isabel promised him the protection of her ranch-house, and stood talking to him for some time. His English was unusually correct and his remarks were more intelligent than those of the average man of her acquaintance. He told her something of Japanese earthquakes, and was good enough to add that he had never felt quite so violent or so peculiar a series of earth movements as California had achieved that morning. He was curious to see the result as recorded on the seismograph, and to know at what hour it registered in Japan.
"I think Professor Omori will come over," he said, modestly. "This earthquake will interest him very much. He will wish to study the ground."
"Were you not frightened?" asked Isabel, curiously.
"I appreciated the danger, but frightened—no, miss, I think I have never felt frightened. But I do not like fire. I have seen Tokio burn. I shall walk about constantly and see that it does not steal upon us from the north or west. Some silly person might make a fire, and all the chimneys must be cracked."
"I feel much relieved to know that you will patrol," said Isabel, wondering if she were being gracious to a prince. "Would you mind going up to the top of the hill and asking some one if he knows whether all the injured were taken from the Mechanics' Pavilion? It is blazing like a wood pile."
He went up the hill and returned with the information that all the patients, as well as the doctors and nurses, had been taken out, the last of them while the roof was blazing, and conveyed in automobiles to other emergency hospitals far away; and that the prisoners in the City Hall had been transported, manacled, to the army prisons in the same manner.
"One of the gentlemen said he saw Mr. Gwynne running an automobile full of nurses and patients—one of Mr. Hofer's machines," he added. "And that he returned twice at least. All the young men that own machines are acting very well, they say, transporting the injured, and making themselves generally useful. Many are on the roofs of the greater buildings with the firemen fighting the fire with blankets, and hose attached to the cisterns. A few buildings have been saved in that way, but not many, and more or less of the water has to be turned on the men, who catch fire repeatedly from the sparks."
Isabel went into the house and put on her hat. "I cannot keep still any longer," she said to Victoria, a moment later. "And now I am quite rested. I shall go down and see Mrs. Hofer, and reconnoitre for myself. If Elton should come, ask him to wait for me here—he must need a rest—or walk down Taylor Street."