HARDIN’S LUCK
TWO days later, there was a shock of earthquake, so slight that the
lapping of the water in Rickard’s bath was his intimation of the
earth’s uneasiness. In the dining-room, later, he found every one
discussing it. “Who could remember an earthquake in that desert?” “The
first shake!”
“The Indians might have something to say about that,” thought Rickard.
His pompadoured waitress was ready to fall into hysteria. “Several
dishes fell off the pantry shelves. Give me a Kansas cyclone to an
earthquake, I say, every time. For there is always a cyclone cellar.
But the earth under your feet! Me for Kansas, every time!”
After he had placed his breakfast order, while waiting for his
eggs--“Ten minutes in boiling water, off the stove, mind!”--Rickard
got the Crossing on the telephone. Matt Hamlin answered the call. He
insisted on describing the exact place he had stood when the shock
came. It wasn’t anything of a quake. A baby to the shake of ’67. No
harm done out there. While he was on the line, Rickard heard the sound
of other voices. “It’s Silent just in from the Heading.” “Hello,
there,” cried Rickard. “Don’t hang up. Ask him about the gate. Any
damage done?”
Silent, himself, came on the wire. The gate was all right. “That was
nothing of a quake.” Rickard then got Grant’s Heading. The temblor had
been felt more there, but no serious damage had been done. Rickard went
back to his boiled eggs. The earthquake was forgotten.
During the morning, unfathered, as rumors are born, the whisper of
disaster somewhere spread. Their own slight shock was the edge of the
convulsion which had been serious elsewhere, no one knew quite where,
or why they knew it at all. The men who were shoveling earth on the
levee began to talk of San Francisco. Some one said, that morning, that
the city was badly hurt. No one could confirm the rumor, but it grew
with the day.
Rickard met it at the office late in the afternoon. The word was
growing in definiteness. There was trouble up North. A terrible
disaster; people had been killed; towns were burning. There was a
report of a tidal wave which had swept San Francisco. Another quoted
that San Jose had telegraphed all the wires from San Francisco down;
that San Francisco was burning. He went direct to the telegraph
operator’s desk.
“Get Los Angeles, the O. P. office. And be quick about it.”
In ten minutes, he was talking to Babcock. That human clock confirmed
some of the ugly rumors. The wires between San Francisco and the rest
of the world _were_ down; impossible to get any word from there.
“Any relative there?” he inquired with sympathy on tap. Such messages
had been coming in all day.
“Oh, no. How much do you know? How do you know it?” persisted Rickard.
Babcock said that the damage by earthquake to that city was not known,
but it was afire. San Jose had confirmed it. Oakland had reported
the flames creeping up the residence hills of that gay western city.
Cinders were already falling in the transbay town.
Rickard dropped the receiver. “Where’s Hardin?”
Tom Hardin emerged from a knot of men who were talking in a corner by
the door.
“Where’s that machinery?”
“What machinery?”
Rickard saw the answer to his question in the other’s face.
“The dredge machinery. Did you attend to that? Did you send for it?”
“Oh, yes, that’s all right. It’s all right.”
“Is it here?”
Hardin attempted jocularity. “I didn’t know as you wanted it here. I
ordered it sent to Yuma.”
“Is it at Yuma?”
Hardin admitted that it was not yet at Yuma; it would be there soon; he
had written; oh, it was all right.
“When did you write?”
Hardin reddened under the catechism of questions. He resented being
held up before his men. The others felt the electricity in the air.
Hardin and his successor were glaring at each other like belligerents.
“I asked when did you write?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday!” Rickard ripped out an oath. “Yesterday. Why at all, I’d
like to know? Did you understand that you were ordered to get that
here? Now, it’s gone.”
“Gone?” The others crowded up.
“San Francisco’s burning.” He walked into his inner office, mad clear
through. The group around Hardin were tearing his wisp of news. San
Francisco on fire. The city of their fun gone.
He was not thinking of the ruin of the gay young city; not a thought
yet did he have of the human tragedies enacting there; of homes, lives,
fortunes swept into that huge bonfire. As it affected the work at the
river, the first block to his campaign, the catastrophe came home to
him. He had a picture of tortured, twisted iron, of ruined machinery,
the machinery for his dredge. He saw it lying like a spent Laocoön,
writhing in its last struggle. He blamed himself for leaving even such
a small detail as the hastening of the parts to Hardin’s care, for
Hardin wasn’t fit to be trusted for anything. No one could tell him
now the man was unlucky; he was a fool. A month wasted, and days were
precious. A month? Months. Hardin’s luck. Oh, hell!
Then he began to speculate, as he cooled, over the trouble up yonder.
A whole city burning? They would surely get it under control. He began
to think of the isolation; the telegraph wires all down. That might
happen anywhere! He walked to the door and looked thoughtfully at the
company’s big water-tower. That wasn’t such a bad idea! He picked up
his hat, and went out.