People converged toward parks and open spaces. Union Square was crowded with a strangely varied human mass; opera singers from the St. Francis Hotel, jabbering excitedly in Italian or French, and making many gestures with their jeweled hands; Chinese and Japanese from the Oriental quarter hard by; women-of-the-town, bedraggled, sleepy-eyed and fearful; sailors, clerks, folk from apartment houses.
Near the pansy bed a woman lay. She screamed piercingly at intervals. Frank learned that she was in travail. By and by a doctor came, a nurse. They were putting up tents on the green sward. Automobiles rolled up, sounding their siren alarms. Out of them were carried bandaged men who moaned, silent forms on litters, more screaming women. They were taken to the tents. Extra police appeared to control the crowds that surged hither and thither without seeming reason, swayed by sudden curiosities and trepidation.
San Francisco was burning. The water mains were broken by the quake, Frank learned. The fire department was demoralized. Chief Sullivan was dead. A falling chimney from the California Hotel had crushed him.
There were emergency reservoirs, but no one seemed to know where. They had not been used for years.
Swiftly the fire gained. It ravaged like a fiend in the factory district south and east, toward the bay.
By noon a huge smoke curtain hid the sky; through it the sun gleamed palely like a blood-red disc. Wild rumors were in circulation. Los Angeles was wiped out. St. Louis had been destroyed. New York and Chicago were inundated by gigantic tidal waves.
Frank decided to return home and discover how his people fared. Perhaps there would be a bite for him. He found his father's house surrounded by a cordon of young soldiers--student militiamen from Berkeley, some one said. They ordered him off.
"But--" he cried. "It's my HOME. My father and mother are there."
"They were ordered out two hours since," said a youthful officer, who came up to settle the dispute. "We'll have to dynamite the place.... No water.... Desperate measures necessary...."
He stopped Frank's effort to reply with further stereotyped announcements. "Orders of the Admiral, Mayor, Chief of Police.... Sorry. Can't be helped.... Keep back, everybody. Men have orders to shoot."