ON the following afternoon Roderick saddled his pony Badger and rode
over to the Conchshell ranch. The Holdens received the news of Buell
Hampton’s mysterious departure with deep regret; the Major had become
very dear to their hearts, how dear they only fully realized now that he
was gone.
It was toward evening when Gail proposed that they go riding in the
woods. The invitation delighted Roderick, and Fleetfoot and Badger were
speedily got ready.
“Let us follow the old timber road to the south,” Roderick
suggested. “I want to show you, only a few miles from here, a
beautiful lake.”
“I know of no such lake,” she replied.
“Yet it is less than five miles away, and we shall christen it Spirit
Lake, if you like the name, for it lies above Spirit Falls.”
“You are dreaming. There is no such lake.”
“I will show it to you. Come along.”
Upward and onward he led her over the range. And when they gained the
summit, there at their feet lay the great new lake about which Buell
Hampton had told him, fully seven miles long and two miles wide, and not
less than six or seven hundred feet deep as Roderick knew, for he had
gathered nuggets of gold on the floor of the little canyon now submerged
beneath the placid blue waters.
Gail gazed in silent admiration. At last she exclaimed: “Spirit Lake!
It is well named. It is more like a dream than reality.”
He helped her from the saddle. They tethered their mounts in western
fashion by throwing the reins over the horses’ heads. They were
standing under the branches of a big pine, and again they gazed over
the waters. At the lower end of the lake was a most wonderful waterfall,
dashing sheer down some four hundred feet into Spirit River.
For several minutes they continued to gaze in enraptured silence on
the scene of tranquil beauty. Toward the east the forest was darkly
purple—to the west, across the waters, the hills were silhouetted in
splendid grandeur against a magnificent sunset. The whole range seemed
clothed in a robe of finest tapestry. The sun was rapidly approaching
the rim of the western horizon.
The afterglow of the red sunset marked paths of rippling gold on the
waters. Vague violet shadows of dusk were merging over all. Nature was
singing the lyric of its soul into things—crooning lake and mountains
and forest-clad slopes to slumber.
It was Gail who at last broke the spell.
“Oh, how beautiful, how supremely beautiful,” she murmured.
“Well, it is the earthquake that has wrought all this wonderful
change,” explained Roderick’. “And now, dear Gail, I have a story
to tell you.”
And, seating her on the turf by his side, under the big pine, where
the waters lapped at their very feet, he proceeded to relate the whole
romantic story of his father’s lost find—his own lost claim. By the
time the narrative was ended the sun had set behind the hills. Roderick
rose, and giving his hands, helped Gail to her feet.
“So all this wonderful treasure of Hidden Valley lies beneath these
waters,” she exclaimed.
“Yes, but for me the real treasure is here by my side.”
As he spoke these words his arm stole around her waist. She did not
appear to notice his half timid embrace as together they stood viewing
the panorama of a dying day. Presently he drew her closer.
“The day and the night blend,” he whispered softly as if fearful
of disturbing the picture. “Shall not our lives, sweetheart,” asked
Roderick with vibrant voice, “likewise blend forever and forever?”
Gail half turning lifted her slender hands to Roderick’s cheeks and he
quickly clasped her tightly in his strong arms and kissed her madly on
lips, eyes and silken hair.
“Roderick, my lover—my king,” said Gail through pearly tears of
joy.
“My little Gail,” whispered Roderick, exultantly, “my
sweetheart—my queen.”
Slowly the light of day vanished. The sounds of night began walking
abroad in the world. Dusk wrapped these lovers in its mantle. The day
slept and night brooded over forest, lake and hills.
In a little while they lifted the bridle reins of their mounts and
turning walked arm in arm down the old timber road toward Conchshell
ranch.
They halted in the darkness and Roderick said: “Do you mind, dear, if
I smoke?”
“Certainly not,” was her cheery reply.
He bit the cigar and struck a match. The fight reflected on Gail’s
radiant face. “Wonderful,” he ejaculated as he tossed the match
away, laughing softly. He had quite forgotten to light his cigar.
“Why, what did you see, Roderick, you silly fellow, that is so
wonderful?”
“I saw,” said Roderick, “the dearest little woman in the wide,
wide world—my mountain song girl—who is going to be kissed with all
the pent-up passion of a ‘grizzly’ in just one-half second.”
AFTERWORD
Into the warp and woof of my story of the West, “The Treasure of
Hidden Valley,” there have been woven a few incidents of the great
calamity that some years ago befell the city of San Francisco. Perhaps
some of my readers will care to peruse a more detailed description of
that tragic happening. W. G. E.
IT was on April 18, 1906, that San Francisco was shaken by a terrible
earthquake which in its final effects resulted in the city being
cremated into cinders and gray ashes.
The trembling, gyrating, shaking and swaying vibrations, the swiftly
following outbursts of fire, the cries of those pinned beneath fallen
débris and of the thousands who were seeking to escape by fleeing into
the parks and toward the open country, produced the wildest pandemonium.
While there was no wind, yet a hundred fires originating at different
points quickly grew into sheets of towering flame and spread to adjacent
buildings, burning with demoniacal fierceness as if possessed by some
unseen mysterious power, pouring forth red hot smoke until the prostrate
city was melted into ruin by the intense heat of a veritable hell.
The night of April 17 and 18 had almost ended in San Francisco. It had
been like many another night in that cosmopolitan city. Pleasure-seekers
were legion,—negligent, care-free, wrapped in the outward show of
things—part of it good—part of it not so good—some of it downright
wicked as in Ancient Pompeii. Yet the hour was late—or early,
whichever you will—even for San Francisco. The clock in the city hall
had resounded forth five strokes. Peaceful folk were in the realm of
dreams that precede awakening. The roistering hundreds of a drunken
night had gathered in places of vice and were sleeping away the liquor
fumes. The streets were almost deserted.
The great printing presses that had been reverberating with the thunders
of a Jove, gathering and recording the news from the four quarters of
the earth, had paused and all was still. Here and there morning papers
were on the streets and the preliminary work was in progress of sending
them forth to the front doorsteps of the homes of rich and poor, from
one end of the city to the other. Then, without warning, just eighteen
minutes after the city clock had tolled its five strokes, one of the
greatest news items and tragedies of the world’s history was enacted.
An historical milestone of the centuries was on that eventful morning
chiseled on the shore line of the Pacific Coast.
Suddenly from the womb of sleeping silence, from far below the earth’s
crust, just as the dawn of a new day began purpling the eastern sky,
there came forth a rumbling and muttering of unearthly noises like the
collapsing of palaces of glass or the clanking of giant chains. It came
from beneath the entire city and was borne upward and abroad on the
startled wings of a mysterious fear. It was a shrieking, grinding
confusion of subterranean thunder, like the booming of heavy artillery
in battle. It was deafening in its dreadfulness, and drove terror to
the heart of the hardiest. It sounded to the affrighted people as if two
mighty armies of lusty giants of the underworld were grappling in
mortal combat and in their ferocious anger were unwittingly breaking the
earth’s fragile shell into yawning cracks and criss-cross fissures.
Mount Tamalpais was fluttering like the wings of a snared pigeon.
In the space of seconds, the whole populace awoke, excepting those who
had answered the last call; for some there were, pinned under falling
walls, who were overtaken by swift death in the very act of awakening.
The uncounted number that were crushed to death and had life’s door
closed to them forever, no one will ever know. In the forty-eight
seconds that followed the beginning of the deep guttural bellowing of
hideous noises from somewhere below the earth’s surface, buildings
rocked and heaved and twisted, while heavy objects of household
furniture were tumbled across rooms from one corner to the other and the
occupants helplessly tossed from their beds.
Such an awakening, such lamentations, such cursing, such prayers, and
then into the debris-littered streets the multitude began pouring forth,
half-clothed, wild and panic-stricken.
The stunning shock, like a succession of startled heart-beats, lasted
twelve seconds less than one minute, but those who experienced the
ordeal say it seemed an eternity—forty-eight seconds—terrible
seconds—of sickening, swaying suspense. A heaving earth, jerking,
pulsing to and fro in mad frenzy, while countless buildings were swaying
and keeping time to a wild hissing noise like the noise of boiling,
blubbering fat in a rendering caldron.
It was the dawn of a new day abounding in hideous noises—detonations
of falling masonry, the crash of crumbling, crushing walls, the shrieks
of maimed and helpless victims—and all the people stupefied with a
terrible fear, women weeping in hysterical fright and everyone expectant
of they knew not what, unable to think coherently or reason, yet their
voices filling the stricken city with cries and moans of heart-rending
terror and lamentation. And all the while there came up from somewhere
an unearthly threatening roar that awed the multitude into unnatural
submissive bewilderment.
At the end of eight and forty seconds the frantically tossed earth
quieted—became normal and was still. Some of the buildings righted and
were quiescent, and a moment of silence followed, except for the crowing
of cocks, the whinnying of frightened horses and the whining of cowering
dogs. This condition, however, was only of momentary duration.
Almost immediately the streets became a wild scene of turmoil as the
half-clothed, half-crazed men, women and children went rushing up and
down in every direction, they knew not why nor where. Doors were broken
open to allow egress, shutters were slammed, windows were hastily
raised, and like a myriad of ants the rest of the people who until now
had been penned up, struggled forth into open ways—thinly clad, some
almost naked, trembling, gazing about awe-stricken, looking each at his
fellow, indifferent to the destruction going on about them, each filled
with prayerful thankfulness for life. Then, like a rehearsed orchestra
of many voices, there arose, seemingly in unison, a chorus of
heart-piercing wails and calls from thousands of throats for loved
ernes—loved ones lost who could not answer.
In the pale light of that April dawn, this vast army of survivors, while
chilled with outward cold, shivered also with an unspeakable inward
dread.
Along the streets of proud San Francisco in every direction were huge
masses of bricks, cornices, fallen ragged chimneys and walls, tumbled
together in complex dykes of débris like the winrows of a hay field
and interspersed with the dead and dying bodies of man and horse alike,
vanquished in life’s uneven contest.
A little later in the vicinity of the ten-million-dollar courthouse,
crowds of frightened people gathered, attracted perhaps by the terrific
thundering of the mammoth stone slabs and concrete sides and columns of
the structure, as, in their loosened condition from the steel skeleton,
they kept crashing down upon the street in riotous disorder.
Every block in the city held its tragedy, its silent evidence of a
mighty internal upheaving of Goliath strength. There were hundreds
of dead, while others lay maimed in tortured suffering, buried under
wreckage, pinned down by the giant hands of the Angel of Destruction.
The unfortunates still living were fastened like insects caught in
traps, helpless, but hoping for relief, awaiting the unwritten chapter
that was yet to come.
The great earthquake of San Francisco had spent its force—its rude
results lay in careless disheveled evidence on every hand—and now the
nerve-strained, half-crazed and bewildered people caught the sound of
fire bells clanging hurriedly into nearer distances.
The fire hose and the corps of hook and ladder men came rushing with
all speed, drawn by frenzied horses, hastily turning street corners and
dashing around fallen walls while the automatic fire bells were cutting
the air in metallic, staccato beats of wildest alarm. Soon the throbbing
of the fire engines began and false hope sprung rife in the hearts of
the people. Those running south on Market Street paused in bewilderment,
not knowing which way to go, for fire calls and flames were evident,
not in one location nor two, but in hundreds at widely separated places
throughout the erstwhile magnificent metropolis of the Occident.
Black columns of smoke began rising from ominous red furnace flames
beneath, and curled lazily into the balm of the upper air, indifferent
to the wails of the helpless unfortunates maimed and pinned beneath the
wrecked buildings of a demolished and burning city.
The murky smoke like mourning crape hung mutely above, while beneath its
canopy life’s sacrificial offering lay prostrate, the dying and
the dead. The consuming flames spread quickly, and the horror of the
hopeless condition of the injured was soon apparent, while the sobs
and cries of the doomed victims became maddening because of the very
impotency to succor them.
The suddenness of it all did not give time for the rescuers. Then too,
the smoke-blinded and half-choked people in the crowded, congested
streets were stampeding toward the open country—to Golden Gate Park
and the Presidio. Many of the trapped victims, well and strong, might
have escaped but could not exert normal power to shake off the fetters
that held them down under fallen wreckage too heavy for their hampered
strength. It was a veritable bedlam, some cursing, some praying, most
all crying loudly as if in crazed pain for assistance.
The first paroxysm passed, the poor unfortunates seemingly became more
patient, believing that relief would surely come. The crackling flames
mounted higher and came alarmingly nearer. Finally, as the conflagration
with a hurried sweep began to envelop these pinioned human beings, they
shrieked in agony like lost souls in terrible anguish at a most horrible
and certain death. Their voices rose with the rising of the flames until
at last the piteous cries were hushed perforce, and only the crackling
sound of burning wood and the forked tongues of raging red fire greeted
the sun, that morning of April 18, as it climbed above the eastern
mountains and looked upon the scene of woeful destruction.
Is it any wonder that strong men wept? Is it to be marveled at that
those separated from friends and relatives grew bewildered, frantic and
crazed with grief and fear, and that chaos reigned supreme?
Gradually amid the whirl of emotions there stepped forth men who until
now had been stunned into silence and temporarily bereft of reason. The
first staggering shock passed, they became possessed in a measure with
calmness and courage. They girded their belts afresh and although many
of them began by cursing the heartless, cruel fire and the terribleness
of it all, they quickly and determinedly turned to the stupendous work
of endeavoring to subdue its ravages.
Then a new terror raised its ghostly head and held the people in a grip
of deepest despair. The earthquake had broken the supplying water mains,
and presently the city was without water and the fire engines and other
fire-fighting apparatus were worthless junk. It was a grievous blow to
momentarily raised hopes and courageous resolution.
The flames raged on with the fleetness of race horses, eating out the
heart of the city, burning it into cinders, and cremating the flesh and
bone of fallen victims.
Dynamite was brought into use, gunny sacks and bedding of all sorts were
saturated with water from barrels and tanks. Grappling hooks and human
hands made up the armament of puny defense against the over-powering and
masterful flames of annihilation.
Against these feeble weapons, the grim demon of fire planned an attack
of certain devastation. It was as if his Satanic Majesty with all his
imps were in their ruthless cunning directing a fiendish work that would
permit no record but death to the unfortunate, no record to the proud
city but gaunt-ribbed skeleton buildings, red hot cinders and blackened
ash heaps.
Overturned stoves in a thousand houses throughout the residential
districts had early started a multitude of fires and split the
fire-fighters into many divisions, and therefore into less effective
units in their futile efforts even partially to check the mighty
master—the devouring tempest of fire that crackled and sported in its
insatiable greed.
There was still to follow yet another misfortune, an execrable
crime—that of wicked inhuman incendiarism. At places flames burst
forth kindled by the hands of a coterie of merciless ghouls. These
inhuman devils added to the calamities heaped upon their fellows by
setting fire to unburned dwellings whose owners had fled. There was
neither necessity nor reason for their dastardly acts. With sponges
soaked in kerosene, they did this damnable work—indulging dreams
perhaps of greater loot, greed and avarice in their cruel eyes, blackest
hell in their debauched hearts.
In the beginning of this losing fight with terrors of the fire king,
seemingly unconquerable, only one ray of hope was discernible—there
was no wind from ocean or bay in San Francisco that April morning. The
clouds that filled the heavens with ominous blackness were only stifling
smoke from the burning buildings below.
High above the crimson snake-tongued flames the black smoke hung like a
pall, silent and motionless, while fringing it around far away in every
direction was the clear blue sky, serene, unfathomable.
As the heroic work of fighting the fire demon progressed, it was soon
discovered that the police were insufficient. Crowds of ghouls were
pressing the firemen, while robbery, rapine and murder ran riot. Human
blood that day was easily spilled. For the sake of pelf and plunder,
life was cheap.
The boldness of this lawless condition brought about its own remedy.
Strong men arose in their might. Under able leadership they quickly
formed a committee of safety. The National Guard was sent to help them.
General Fred Funston of the U. S. Army telegraphed to the Secretary of
War for authority, and within three hours was hurrying United States
troops into the burning city, and immediately placed it under martial
law. The crowds were quickly driven back by the soldiers, fire lines
were established, government troops, guards and police all bent nobly to
the task of endeavoring to subdue the flames. Buildings were dynamited
to shut off the fire’s progress, insubordinate as well as predatory
ruffians were shot down without mercy, and thus was order brought out of
chaos. But as the hours went by, despite all efforts, the gormandizing
flames consumed acres and acres of buildings.
Every wandering automobile was pressed into service and loaded with
dynamite. Thus for hour after hour the losing fight with the merciless
flames went on.
As the fire burnt its way south on Market Street, the isolated centers
crept toward each other with ever widening circles of flame. While there
was no breeze to fan them on, yet the flames seemed possessed of some
invisible means of progression—an unseen spirit of continued expansion
lurked within. The buildings were like so much dry timber, igniting
without direct contact of spark or flame, only from the tremendous heat
that was generated. Sweeping on and on the different conflagrations at
last came together—joined in greater strength, flared up hundreds of
feet high, until it looked as if the entire city was one vast molten
lake of undulating waves of fire.
The roar of the flames could be heard far beyond the confines of the
city—the immense columns and clouds of black smoke continued to sweep
upward, until high aloft they spread out into the great canopy as if in
shame they fain would hide from angels above the terrible destruction
being wrought in this fiery pit below.
As the hours went by, the exodus of people continued. The fascination of
it all held the multitudes spell-bound. They for a time were forgetful
of hunger, but moved on, this way and that as the burning districts
compelled them to go. The public parks began to fill with refugees. The
Presidio and the hills overlooking the city were blackened with throngs
of people shivering from cold and beginning to suffer the pangs of
hunger, the rich and the poor touching shoulders, condoling one with
the other in lamentations. This surging mass of famishing humanity were
clothed, or partially clothed, in strange and ridiculous costumes.
Household goods littered the outlying streets. Most of the wayfarers who
reached the country had little luggage. Many had carried some useless
article nearest at hand, selected in their hurry without thought of its
value or utility.
One woman held a bird cage under her arm—empty, with the door swinging
open. Another carried a carving knife in one hand and a feather-bedecked
hat of gaudiness in the other. One man was seen dragging an old
leather-bound trunk by a rope—investigation proved the trunk to be
without contents.
Notwithstanding the people had lost their all, and in most cases were
famishing, yet the great mass were good-natured and tolerant, the strong
helping the weak. The chivalry of the West and its rugged manhood abided
in their midst There was a common brotherhood in the ranks of these
homeless human beings. Distinctions between rich and poor were
obliterated—they were all fellow refugees.
No street cars were running in the city. Market Street, into which the
greater number of street car railroad tracks converged, was littered
with fallen buildings, useless hose and fire fighting apparatus, twisted
beams, cinders, heaps of hot ashes and charred bodies of the dead.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning of the first day of this
terrible devastation that the famous Palace Hotel had finally been
emptied of its last guest. The rooms throughout were bestrewn with
fallen plaster from ceiling and walls, but otherwise, strange to
narrate, the structure had suffered but little damage from the
earthquake while all around were collapsed and fallen buildings.
At the Mission Street side of the building and on the roof the employees
had fought bravely to save this noted hostelry. But as the noon hour
approached they gave up all hope. Hurrying through the rooms of the
departed guests in an endeavor to save, if possible, abandoned luggage,
they gossiped about the “yellow streak,” as they called it, of a
world-noted singer—a guest of the hotel—who had been frightened
almost to death by the earthquake and developed evidence of rankest
selfishness in his mad efforts to save himself.
Then in sadder tones they talked of the impending and inevitable
destruction of the magnificent hotel, where most of them had been
employed for years. As the heat from the on-sweeping flames began to be
unbearable, they hurried away one by one until the famous caravansary
was finally deserted by man and in full possession of the ruthless
devouring flames.
Great crowds stood on Montgomery Street near the site of the Union Trust
Building and watched the burning of the Palace Hotel. Held back by
the soldiers in mournful silence, the mass of people watched the angry
flames leaping from roof and windows. Soon the fire spread to the Grand
Hotel across the street. The flames shot up higher, and then when their
task of destruction was finally finished, gradually sank down until
nothing but roofless, windowless, bare bleak walls, gaunt, blackened
and charred, were left—a grim ghost of the old hotel that boasted of a
million guests during its gorgeous days of usefulness, and around
which twined a thousand memories of the golden days of the Argonauts of
California.
Half a block away a newspaper building had been blown up by dynamite—a
similar attempt with the Monadnock Building failed of its purpose.
When night finally fell, those on the north side of Market Street
rejoiced greatly, for it seemed that the fire, at least in the down-town
business district, had burned itself into submission. So said a
well-known milliner for men, as he ate a huge steak at a famous resort
on the ocean shore and indulged heavily in champagne in celebration of
the saving of his premises. He celebrated a day too soon—the following
morning his business house was in ashes.
To the few who were care-free in the sense that they had not lost
relatives or friends, the panorama of the fire when darkness came
on will never be forgotten because of the wonderful pyrotechnic
display—the magnificent yet appalling splendor and beauty of the
burning city.
The scene was set as by a wonder-hand of stagecraft. The fire was raging
fiercely in an immense pit—topographically the lowest part of the
city. Around this pit the rising ground, like a Greek amphitheatre,
stretched up toward the Sutro Estate and Ricon Hill on the one side and
toward California Street, Nob and Telegraph Hills on the other. To the
east was Alcatraz like a sentinel in the waters; across the Bay the
cities of Alameda, Oakland and Berkeley. On every vantage point the
people gathered—on the heights of Alcatraz and on the roofs of
buildings in the trans-bay cities. In silence they gazed at the
awe-inspiring drama of destruction that was being enacted before them.
With the advance of night, the towering flames in this vast sweep
of many miles of a circular fire line presented a scene that defies
description. The general color effect was of a deep blood red, while
the smoke as a background to the picture belched up in rolling black
volumes, with here and there long forks of flashing fire shooting above
the deep crimson glow of the mighty furnace.
Before the roaring billows of flame the tallest buildings were as tinder
wood in their helplessness. The Call Building, lifting its head high
above its neighbors, was like an ignited match-box set on end. The
living flaming wall behind overtopped it as a giant does a pigmy.
Nine o’clock! Ten o’clock! Midnight!—and those who watched and
waited and slept not, with nothing but excitement to stay their
hunger, saw in the lurid light that by a flank movement the fire had
unexpectedly crept far up Montgomery Street from the Ferry. The trade
winds were stirring. The fire, in its pulsing undulations, presented the
lure and the sensuous poetry of death. It barred all trespassing on the
one side and burnt its way through on the other. It was seen that the
entire banking district was doomed. Alas, the feeble protests of feeble
men! It was a wild outlaw, untamed and untamable fire, that defied all
human interference.
And Chinatown—the world-noted Chinatown of San Francisco—what of
that? It too had gone the way of annihilation. They say brutality was
practiced, and it is whispered to this day that those in charge of
dynamiting the Chinatown section of the city were careless and did not
warn the inmates of opium dens—it is said they blew up many buildings
that held within them, or in the grottoes beneath, innumerable inmates.
Whether or not this is true no one can positively say. If true, there
is some excuse. The Chinese dwellings were honey-combed underground with
dark and devious passages, and it was perhaps impossible, for lack of
time and dearth of knowledge how to penetrate these hidden recesses, to
warn the drugged dreamers.
In this district the fire raged as if possessed by a million devils.
Over the city’s tenderloin on the edge of Chinatown, it swept with a
flame of reckless wrath and purification. Buildings whose very timbers
were steeped in vice and immorality burned into ashes of cleanliness.
The haunts of the lustful, the wine-bibber and the dope-fiend were
consumed in a fashion horrible, terrible, pitiless and final.
The city was burned into scrap iron of contortioned steel beams, ragged
chimneys half broken and heaps of blackened cinder. As the hours went
by it seemed the fire continually found new fuel to feed upon in its
savagery and madness. The accumulation of days and years of human labor
crumbled into nothingness. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then
millions, until the enormous total reached $600,000,000 of wealth that
was melted away in this fiery crucible!
Egypt, cursed by Moses and weeping for its firstborn, was in no more
pitiable plight than this calamity-visited city of San Francisco shaken
by earthquake shock, then swept by fire.
Four and one-half miles one way the fire travelled, then four and
one-half miles the other it burned its devastating way. Behind it in
its path of ruin were only cracked granite walls, twisted steel girders,
crumbling and broken cornices; before it, a scattering field of a few
untouched buildings yet to conquer.
A Nero with an evil eye on a city’s undoing, and the power of a wicked
tyrant to fulfill his sordid wish, could have been no more ruthless in
his dastardly heartless methods of destruction.
When the fire was finally ended the buildings that had been burned, if
placed in a row, would have extended for two hundred miles in a straight
line.
Never in the world’s history has there been such a fire. The burning
of ancient London was child’s play beside it. Chicago’s fire was a
mere bagatelle. Never has the world read, never had the world dreamed,
of such a conflagration. In days to come, grandfathers will tell of it
to their grandchildren, nodding their sage old heads to emphasize the
horror of it all, relating to the young people who gather about their
knees, how great buildings supposed to be fire-proof crumpled up before
the swirling sheets of melting flame and the entire city became a prey
to the all-devouring conqueror. And this is the tragic story of proud
San Francisco, cosmic-tossed and fire-beleaguered capital of the
Occident.