They had reached Jackson Street on the flat of Nob Hill. It was now evening and the exodus from Chinatown had begun. The Mongolians were streaming up from their threatened quarter, and, like the others, tramping silently out to the Presidio. The merchants had put on their fine clothes, and their families—exposed to the Occidental eye for the first time—wore gorgeous garments of bright silks covered with embroideries. The poor little respectable wives tottered along on their foolish feet, held up by their lords or their "big-footed" serving-women, while their children trudged along uncomplainingly and stared at the fire with big expressionless eyes. Mingling freely with the wealthy autocrats of Chinatown were the coolies, and the disreputable women with which the quarter swarmed. The Chinese rarely import their wives. The coolies wore their blue blouses and soft felt hats, and the women had painted their faces and built up their hair as usual, shining tower-like coiffures stuck with large-lobed pins, cheap or costly, according to their grade. All were as stolid as their own wooden gods. They would have looked like a solemn procession on a festa day had it not been for the bundles and strong-chests they carried.
"Come up to dinner, such as it is," said Isabel, to Anne. "What are you going to do to-night?"
"Camp down in the sand-lots by Fort Mason and see what I can do for those poor refugees. There will be great suffering, I am afraid. Many women should be in hospital with every attention; and with all this excitement who knows what may happen? I fancy either a tent-hospital will be erected, or the worst cases will be taken into the fort. I am a good nurse, and I told the Leader I should be there. There will be many children to look after, too. The parents, the best of them, won't be up to much."
"Perhaps I will go down later. But I shall wait at the house until I have seen Mr. Gwynne—he may need food, or be hurt in any of a dozen ways. If you see him—and no doubt you will, if you are to be at the fort—tell him that I have not gone to the country and have no intention of going."
XIV
They had passed members of the Citizens' Patrol on every block, and they found one pacing the plank walk on Russian Hill. He told them that the edict had gone forth that not so much as a candle should be lit in a house that night and that all cooking must be done out-of-doors. The spectacled Jap was boiling soup on one of the oil stoves, which he had carried into the garden and half surrounded by a screen. Beside him was what looked like an open newly-dug grave, and the girls, startled, demanded what it meant.
Sugihara, apparently, never smiled, but his eyes flickered. "Before Cusha and Kuranaga went I made them dig a hole for the silver," he said. "It is too heavy for the launch. If we are driven away, I will cut your ancestors from their frames and take them with us."
"Well, you are a treasure," said Isabel, with a sigh. "You shall do nothing but read when you get to the ranch."
Lady Victoria was pacing slowly up and down the porch, her eyes seldom wandering from the fire. When dinner was ready, she merely shook her head impatiently, and Isabel and her guest sat down in the little tower-room, which was brilliantly illuminated from below. Sugihara had made a very good soup of canned corn and tomatoes and had fried bits of meat and potato. There was little conversation. The dynamiting was now something more than sporadic. The detonations were so terrific that it was not difficult for the San Franciscans to imagine themselves—supposing they had a grain of imagination left—in a besieged city. Isabel suggested, and Anne agreed with her, that they might have been far worse off than they were; nature at her extremest is never so pitiless as the human brute when the lust to kill is on him.