A fine looking young fellow in khaki trousers and a fashionable coat was packing an enormous clothes bundle. His young wife was clinging to his arm. It was everything they had left in the world, probably out of years of hard saving, but they were both almost going along with good spirits.
A little further up the street, I saw a refined looking young girl cooking breakfast in the gutter. She wore a handsomely made but badly torn skirt and had a remarkably fine bracelet on one wrist. Her oven was made of two bricks and a toasting grill. A young man was bringing her bits of fire wood and they were consulting together over the frying of bacon.
Further on were two other women doing the same thing and having fun out of it between themselves.
"Is it so very much farther?" was the only complaint that came from one tired little woman who looked ready to faint. She was staggering under the weight of a huge bundle. She looked unused to work and her lips were white and trembling with exhaustion. She rested just a minute, then staggered on without another word of complaint.
Men spoke kindly to her, but none offered to help her, because Woe was the great leveler and all were on the same footing. All the day I spent in San Francisco, I only heard one person speak unkindly to another. I wish I had that young man"s name, just as a curiosity. He had been hired by a woman to drag a big Roman chair filled with treasures up the street.
"There," he said, insolently, "I have earned all the money I got for that; now take it along yourself."
Without a word, the woman took the chair from him and wheeled it on herself.
One rather amusing group was wheeling an immense and very handsome dining-room table. The young man who was pulling from the front was protesting vigorously; but the two young girls who shoved from behind, digging their stubby fashionable little oxford ties in the dirt for foothold, urged him peremptorily on. Following them was a half-grown hobbledehoy boy, strong enough to have packed an ox, who was doing his heavy share by carrying a little gla.s.s vase.
In a doorway half way up the hill, I saw an old Chinaman sitting with his bundle, which was all he had been able to save. He was just saying, "Oh, oh, oh," in a curious, half-sobbing moan that never seemed to cease.
The young tailor with me said the Chinaman had lost his laundry and was terror-stricken lest the white people should make him pay for their clothes.
While his own tailor shop was burning, the young tailor said that he was out trying to rescue the trapped victims in the burning Hotel Brunswick.
He could only get hold of one living man. He seemed to be caught in the wreckage, the smoke being too thick to permit one to see just how.
Strong hands caught his feet and pulled desperately. When they dragged him out at last, they found that he had been caught under the chin. In pulling him out they cut his throat almost from ear to ear.
As we gained the top of the hill on Steiner street, a San Francisco man who came in with me on the train stopped dead still. "My G.o.d; look there!" he said, his voice catching with a sob.
Through the rift of the buildings we caught our first glimpse of the dying city.
"That was Market street," said the San Francisco man, softly.
He pointed across a vast black plain, hundreds of acres in extent, to a row of haggard, gaunt specters that did seem to be in two lines like a street.
"There"s the City Hall," he said, tremulously, pointing to a large dome surmounting a pile of ruins and surrounded like some h.e.l.lish island with vast stretches of smouldering ashes and twisted iron girders.
The San Francisco man found a tottering, blackened pile of wall that he said was Mechanic"s Pavilion, and a sort of thin peak of brick that he said was the new Bell Theater. He would go over the town from the top of the hill and torture himself trying to locate San Francisco"s splendid landmarks in these acres of ash heaps.
Down in the middle of the city I found two young men in a violent argument over the location of Market street in the ashes.
At the pretty little park, Fell and Steiner streets, we came upon one of the strange little cities of refugees. I should p.r.o.nounce this one of the most select residence districts of San Francisco now. It is the only home of hundreds upon hundreds of once well-to-do San Francisco people now ruined.
It was heart-rending to see the women tidying things up and trying to invent new ideas for attractive homes--trying to make their homes look better than their neighbors", just as they did before.
Some women made odd little bowers of two blankets and a sheet tent.
I pa.s.sed one tent where a young mother was lying at ease with her little girl, under a parasol. Just as I was going by, the little girl demanded "another." The mother laughed happily and began, "Well, once upon a time----"
As though one of the stories of all the ages was not going on down the hill below her!
To one of the groups on the lawn came a young man grinning all over and positively swaggering. He was received with shrieks of joy. He had six cans of sardines. He brought them to people who would have been insulted at the idea two days ago.
The San Francisco man invited me into his house, where we saw the wreck of his cut gla.s.s and library. But he forgot it all over a rare piece of good fortune that had befallen. The maid had managed to get a whole tea kettle of water. It was vile and muddy; but it was water.
The young tailor told me that he had gone from daylight until 11:30, parching for a drink. The saloons were closed by order of Gen.
Funston, but he managed to get beer from a saloon man.
In some parts of the city there is plenty of water. But I saw people rushing eagerly with buckets to catch the water out of gutters where it had leaked from a fire hose. In the first terrible water famine, the firemen broke into sewers and threw sewer water on the fires.
The dramatic moments came as one neighborhood after another was told to pack up and move out. It was the sounding of doom. I saw several of these sorrowful dramas.
One was in an old-fashioned street where old southern houses with iron dogs planted about the lawns had been pressed in upon by lodging-houses and corner groceries. It seemed mockery to think how the people in the aristocratic old houses must have raged at the intrusion of the corner stores. How futile it seemed now!
Came a dapper young cavalry lieutenant into the street. From their porches people watched him with pathetic anxiety. They could see the sentry"s heels click together and his carbine snap down to a present.
With a few words the officer would hurry on.
Making a megaphone of his hands, the sentry would turn and bawl these words up the otherwise silent street: "This street is going to be dynamited; if you want anything in the grocery store, go to it!"
The balance of his remarks, if there were any, would be lost in a shout of applause from the crowds that seemed to smell such things. A rush for the grocery store would follow.
Men would come out laden to staggering with loot--canned goods, flour, bacon, hams, coffee--as much as they could possibly pack.
I saw one little girl not over four. This was the day she always had been dreaming of. Hugged to her heart was an enormous jar of stick candy, big enough to give her stomach-ache for the rest of her life.
She could hardly lift it; but she put it down to rest, then went panting on.
At the warning of the sentry, the whole family in each house would rush back through the front door to rescue whatever treasure lay nearest their hearts. They only had four or five minutes. Men would come dragging bureaus and lounges. Often a man would be pulling along the family pride, the woman shoving from behind.
In one thrilling rescue I had the distinction of partic.i.p.ating. An elderly woman grabbed me excitedly by the arms and gasped, "Catch it."
She pointed to a dejected canary perched on a window sill. I shinned gallantly up the side of a dead wall; just touched the canary bird with the tips of my fingers. It flew and a lady caught it triumphantly like a baseball as it came down. She went away "mothering" it.
Presently, the sentry would shout another warning and the people would scurry away, peeking out from behind safe corners. As if by magic, the streets would be thick with soldiers. The engineers would place the dynamite and they would all hurry out of danger.
Bang! And the grocery store would go scattering into the air.
It must be confessed that the dynamiting did very little good. It seemed to provide fine splintered timber as kindling for fiercer flames which jumped the gap supposed to check them.
The sound of the explosions was to be heard all day long almost like minute guns.
Let a word be interjected here about those splendid boys in blue uniform hurried into the city from the forts about San Francisco. They make one proud of the army. No more superbly policed city ever existed than the burning and stricken San Francisco.
Soldiers seemed to be everywhere. Almost at every street corner with fixed bayonet and ominous cartridge belt. Infantry, cavalry (some mounted infantry) and engineers, all doing sentry duty.
Gen. Funston was in personal command--not from his office, either. He went plowing around the most perilous streets soaked to the skin from the fire engines.
San Francisco in this time of panic and distress was more quiet and orderly than ever before. I saw not a single disturbance of the peace.
With it all, the soldiers were polite, and seemed to try in every way to show courtesy and consideration. When they had to order people back, they did it in a quiet and gentlemanly way.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright 1906 by Tom M. Phillips.