"I shall rest for a few moments and then go back," he said, throwing himself into a chair opposite Isabel. "I never forgot you, but I made sure Stone had delivered my message and that you were on the ranch. I saw my mother and Miss Montgomery an hour ago. You must get out of this at once."
"Tell me what you have been doing," said Isabel evasively.
"I have been alive," he said, intensely. "Never in all my days have I found life so wonderful. Battle is nothing to it. For the best part of two days I have been dodging the open jaws of death every minute; and the sensation of pitting one's puny human strength and the accumulated wit of several thousand years of varied civilization against an element in its might has inspired me with the only consummate approval of life that I have ever known—although I might have known it the day before yesterday if you had looked as you do now." He sat steadily regarding her for a few moments without speaking, but he was sensible of no immediate wish to touch her. That, too, belonged to a possibly greater but far different to-morrow. He was keyed very high. He did not feel himself so much a human being as a component part of one force disputing every inch of the progress of a mightier.
"Great God, what men!" he burst out. "I have been with some member of the Committee of Fifty, on and off, these two days, to say nothing of last night—Mr. Phelan invited me to serve on it yesterday morning. They are superb, not daunted for a moment, talking already of the new city, of the opportunity this conflagration has given them to make it over in every way. Architects were engaged before three o'clock yesterday afternoon. And the young business men that have been cleaned out! They talk only of the enormous possibilities of the future. I remember reading once of much the same spirit exhibited by Londoners after the Great Fire. It is the most wonderful thing in the world that for a few days at least you are permitted to cherish an unleavened respect for human nature. Every mean cowardly and selfish trait that chains man to earth is moribund to-day, in the normal at least; and the rats have run to other holes. The higher qualities, those that have inspired the world since it began, are in full possession. And, by Jove, it is going to be the pioneer life over again! Do you remember that I regretted once I could not be in at the foundation and growth of a great city, also that the drawback to such an opportunity was that one was never conscious of his part? Well, now we are back to the conditions of the Fifties, and we know it. We shall work for tremendous stakes, and in no doubt of the result."
"The enthusiastic moment has come," said Isabel.
"Rather. Here is my part cut out for me. Here I stay and become a chief factor in making this city greater even than before. That is enough for any man. And there will be plenty of fight. Politics will crawl back to new strongholds, as soon as men become egos again, but I shall fight them here, not in the country."
He stood up, and Isabel asked, hastily: "Have you had no sleep?"
"Hofer and I broke into an empty house in the Western Addition towards morning and slept on the floor for three hours. I have known harder beds. I must go. I felt that I must look at you and order you to leave at once."
"I don't want to leave the city."
"You must go. The fire will have taken this house before midnight. You will be ordered out before that. They may save the city west of Van Ness Avenue, for the mayor at last has consented that several blocks shall be blown up at once. I am carrying dynamite. If I saw Russian Hill on fire and was not sure that you were out of harm's way, it would unnerve me, and I need all the nerve I've got."