The Sisters-In-Law. Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
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Gora went into the kitchen and made him a cup of coffee over a spirit lamp. He drank it gratefully, then followed her up to the attic as she feared their voices might be overheard from the lower room. There he took the easy chair and the cigarette she offered him and told his story.
The young girl was his sister and they were English. She had been visiting a relative in Santa Barbara when a sudden illness revealed the fact that she had a serious heart affection. He had come out to take her home and they had been staying at the Palace Hotel waiting for suitable accommodations before crossing the continent.
His sister—Marian—had been terrified into unconsciousness by the earthquake and he had carried her down the stairs and out into Market Street, where she had revived. She had even seemed to be better than usual, for the people in their extraordinary costumes, particularly the opera singers, had amused her, and she had returned to the court of the hotel and listened with interest to the various "experiences." Finally they had climbed the four flights of stairs to their rooms and he had helped her to dress—her maid had disappeared. They had remained until the afternoon when the uncontrolled fires in the region behind the hotel alarmed them, and with what belongings they could carry they had gone up to the St. Francis Hotel, where they engaged rooms and left their portmanteaux, intending to climb to the top of the hill, if Marian were able, and watch the fire.
Half way up the hill she had fainted and he had carried her into a house whose door stood open. There was no one in the house, and after a futile attempt to revive her, he had run back to the hotel to find a doctor. But among the few people that had the courage to remain so close to the fire there was no doctor. The hotel clerk gave him an address but told him not to be too sure of finding his man at home as all the physicians were probably attending the injured, helping to clear the threatened hospitals, or at work among the refugees, any number of women having embraced the inopportune occasion to become mothers.
The doctor whose address was given him not only was out but his house was deserted; and, distracted, he returned to his sister.
He knew at once that she was dead.
He sat beside her for hours, too stunned to think. … It was some time during the night that the roar of the fire seemed to grow louder, the smoke in the street denser. Then it occurred to him that the inhabitants of this house as well as of the doctor's, which was close by, would not have abandoned their homes if they had not believed that some time during the night they would be in the path of the flames. And he had heard that the pipes of the one water system had been broken by the earthquake.
He had caught up the body of his sister and walked westward until, worn out, he had entered the basement of another empty house, and there he had fallen asleep. When he awakened he was under the impression for a moment that he was in the crater of a volcano in eruption. Dynamite was going off in all directions, he could hear the loud crackling of flames behind his refuge; and as he took the body in his arms once more and ran out, the fire was sweeping up the hill not a block below.
In spite of the smoke he inferred that the way was clear to the west, and he had run on and on, once narrowly escaping a dynamiting area where he saw men like dark shadows prowling and then rushing off madly in an automobile … dodging the fire, losing his way, once finding himself confronting a wall of flames, finally crossing a wide avenue … stumbling on … and on. …
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