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 glass 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 participating. 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....
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. [Frederick] 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. I met men who claimed to have seen men shot down by the soldiers for defying orders for unlicensed looting.....
I saw very little unlicensed looting. Many grocery stores which did not seem to be in immediate danger, were thrown open; one very oddly. The proprietor nailed up one window with slats about four inches wide. He made the refugees line up, and each was privileged to take all he could reach through the window slats.
Some grocers and tradesmen were not so charitable. In other places I saw them demanding from people in danger of starving, 75 cents a loaf for bread.
Bread was the scarcest article except [for] water.
The last of the tragedy that I witnessed was not only the most dramatic but the most tremendous.
It should be called the "Exodus," for it was a Biblical scene. It was the headlong flight of those who were most terror-stricken to get out of the doomed city.
All day long a procession of almost countless thousands was to be seen hurrying with all the possessions they could carry. There were people with bundles, packs, laden express wagons, hacks bulging with plunder, brewery wagons pressed into service, automobiles, push carts, even fire hose wagons.
I happened along at a crucial moment. One of the lieutenants whose peculiar and melancholy function seemed to be to pronounce the doom of one section after another, had just sent warning to Nob HilI, the center of fashion in San Francisco.
For hours I had been working my way toward the Oakland ferries. As a last hope, some one told me I might get there by going over these hills and following the line of the water front.
I got there after the warning had been given. It was San Francisco's wealthiest and most exclusive society who had to pack and sling their bundles over their shoulders.
And they did it with just as good grace and courage as the others. All were making a frantic attempt to hire expressmen with any kind of vehicle that would move, and most of them were failing.
During the first of the fire, some young society women with very poor taste, went autoing around the stricken districts as though it were a circus. They were stopped by a sentry and were made to get out of their ear and hand it over to a posse of special officers being hurried to some district in new peril.
As I gained the top of Nob Hill and turned to look back, it was clear why the warning had been given. In one direction, hospitals were burning south of Market Street.
In the center distance the big car barns were on fire and roaring with flames. Ordinarily this would have been a sensation of a week. Now it wasn't even considered worth while to send fire engines and nobody stopped to look as they walked by.
The main streets, where the business part of the city had been, were black with an immense throng of people who were walking up and down among the ruins.
Looking toward the ferries, I could count nine big skyscrapers, all crowned with fire, outlined in a lurid row against the sky line. The flames were creeping slowly, but with deadly persistence, toward Nob Hill, with several lesser fires blazing in between. It was high time Nob Hill was moving.
One old man had chartered an express wagon, and was on top of the wagon frantically interfering with the work of removing the goods from a big, aristocratic-looking house.
"The books !" he shrieked, "Why in heaven's sake don't you bring the books!
A swagger young woman came to the door with a handsome mantel clock and walked cahnly down the stairs. "Please put this in some especially safe place, please," she said, as composedly as though this were nothing more than any ordinary moving day.
Down the street I saw a woman with the bearing of a patrician shoving at tile rear of a push cart, loaded with all of the few things she could save; a servant was drawing it.
Behind came a young girl, who half turned for a last look at the house, and burst out crying. Her mother left the load for a moment and comforted her. "Never mind, dear," she said. "Don't cry! See, mamma isn't crying."
"Mamma" knew that in a few minutes her home and all the property she had in the world would die in the fire just as her husband's business had already done; but mamma wasn't crying.
On the corner of Van Ness avenue and Broadway, I saw a girl well dressed, who had evidently been driven out from there. All she had saved was a bed tick filled with something. As it was very hot, and she was very tired, she had spread it on the pavement, and was watching the throng from under her parasol.
I saw another girl in a trig outing suit and little patent-leather shoes, toss a bundle, done up in a sheet, over her shoulder and walk away in the procession with the most fascinating nonchalance.
One woman I saw going away in an elegantly-fitted private carriage. It was drawn by two horses with tails about two inches long and soaring; so she must have been near the top of the Upper Crust.
She, too, joined in the flight. Just as she got to the bottom of the hill she had the driver stop. I saw her turn and take a last wistful look from her carriage window at her doomed home. She was not attempting to take anything with her. Like many others, she had simply locked her door and gone.
What I call the Exodus fled down Van Ness avenue to the water front, thence along the Barbary Coast and tough water front by an enormously long detour to the ferries; it was the only Way, the town streets being on fire and closed by the military.
The farther you went along the more conglomerate the throng became. The inhabitants of the foreign quarters began pouring out to join the flight.
I was so tired with a long day spent walking about the burning city that it seemed an impossibility that I should keep on. Every step was actual physical pain.
Twenty passing cabs, returning from the ferries, I stopped and tried to charter. The drivers, after bigger game, would wave me aside and say "Nothin' doin'."
One cabby said that he had to hurry out to the other end of the city to rescue his own family who were in danger. Another young autocrat on the cabby's box took a long puff on his cigarette before he replied to my appeal.
"Fellow, you couldn't hire this hack for a million dollars," he said.
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