Treasure and Trouble Therewith by Geraldine Bonner (top e book reader .txt) 📕

knew he was safe, and, her fingers in the bend of his arm, he pulled her after him through the press. Gaining clearer spaces, they ran, side by side, their faces curiously alike, stamped by the same exalted expression as they fronted the rising sun.

She heard him say something about taking her away, having a horse and cart. She made no answer; with his presence all sensations but thankfulness seemed to have died in her. And then, upon her temporary peace, came thronging strange and dreadful impressions, waking her up, telling her the world had claims beyond the circle of her own consciousness. She caught them as she ran--a shifting series of sinister pictures: a house down in a tumbled heap of brick and stone, a sick woman on a couch on the sidewalk, a family dragging furniture through a blocked doorway, pillars, window ledges, cornices scattered along the road. Over all, delicately pervasive, adding a last ominous suggestion, was a faint, acrid odor of burning wood.

"Fire!" she said. "I can smell it."

"Oh, there'll be fires. That's bound to come."

"Where are we going?" she panted.

"Right round here--the place where I was stayin'. There's a widder woman keeps it, Mrs. Meeker. She's got a horse and cart that'll get you out of this. I guess all the car lines is bust, and I guess we'll have to move out quick. Look!"

He pointed over the roofs to where glassy films of smoke rose against the morning sky.

"Everyone of 'em's a fire and the wind's fresh. I hope to God this shake up ain't done any harm to the mains."

They had reached Mrs. Meeker's gate. He swung it open and she followed him across the garden to where a worn, grassy path, once a carriage drive, led past the house to the back yard. Here stood Mrs. Meeker, a hatchet in her hand, trying to pry open the stable door.

"Oh, Lord!" she cried, turning at his step, "I'm glad you've come back. Every other soul in the place has run off, and I can't get the stable door open."

Her glance here caught Pancha, her nightgown showing below the man's overcoat.

"Who's she?" she asked, a gleam of curiosity breaking through the larger urgencies.

"My daughter. She lives right round here. I run for her as soon as I felt the first quake. You got to take her along in the cart, and will you give her some clothes?"

"Sure," said Mrs. Meeker, and the flicker of curiosity extinguished, she returned to the jammed door that shut her out from the means of flight. "Upstairs in my room. Anything you want." Then to Garland, who had moved to her assistance, "I'm goin' to get out of here--go uptown to my cousin's. But I wouldn't leave Prince, not if the whole city was down in the dust."

Prince was Mrs. Meeker's horse, which, hearing its name, whinnied plaintively from the stable. Pancha disappeared into the house, and the man and woman attacked the door with the hatchet and a poker. As they worked she panted out disjointed bits of information:

"There's a man just come in here tellin' me there's fires, a lot of 'em, all started together. And he says there's houses down over on Minna and Tehama streets and people under them. Did you know the back wall's out of that new hotel? Fell clear across the court. I saw it go from my room--just a smash and a cloud of dust."

"Umph," grunted the man. "Anybody hurt?"

"I don't think so, but I don't know. I went out in front first off and saw the people pourin' out of it into the street--a whole gang in their nightgowns."

A soldier appeared walking smartly up the carriage drive, sweeping the yard with a glance of sharp command.

"Say. What are you fooling round that stable for?"

Mrs. Meeker, poker in hand, was on the defensive.

"I'm gettin' a horse out--my horse."

"Well, you want to be quick about it. You got to clear out of here. Anybody in the house?"

"No. What are you puttin' us out for?"

"Fire. You don't want to lose any time. We've orders to get the people on the move. I just been in that hotel next door and rooted out the last of 'em--running round packing their duds as if they'd hours to waste. Had to threaten some of 'em with the bayonet. Get busy now and get out."

He turned and walked off, meeting Pancha as she came from the house. A skirt and blouse of Mrs. Meeker's hung loose on her lithe thinness, their amplitude confined about her middle by a black crochet shawl which she had crossed over her chest and tied in the back.

"A lot of that big building's down," she cried, as she ran up. "I could see it from the window, all scattered across the open space behind it."

Engrossed in their task neither answered her, and she moved round the corner of the stable to better see the debris of the fallen wall. Standing thus, a voice dropped on her from a window in the house that rose beyond Mrs. Meeker's back fence.

"Do you know if all the people are out of that hotel?"

She looked up; standing in a third story window was a young man in his shirt sleeves. He appeared to have been occupied in tying his cravat, his hands still holding the ends of it. His face was keen and fresh, and was one of the first faces she had seen that morning that had retained its color and a look of lively intelligence.

"I don't know," she answered. "I've only just got here. Why?"

"Because it looks to me as if there was someone in one of the rooms--someone on the floor."

The stable door gave with a wrench and swung open. Garland jerked it wide and stepped back to where he could command the man in the window.

"What's that about someone in the hotel?" he said.

The young man leaned over the sill and completed the tying of his cravat.

"I can see from here right into one of those rooms, and I'm pretty sure there's a person lying on the floor--dead maybe. The electric light fixture's down and may have got them."

Garland turned to Mrs. Meeker:

"You get out Prince and put him in the cart." Then to the man in the window: "I'll go in and see. A soldier's just been here who says they've cleaned the place out. There's maybe somebody hurt that they ain't seen."

"Hold on a minute and I'll go with you," called the other. "I'm a doctor and I might come in handy. I'll be there in a jiff."

He vanished from the window, and before Prince was backed into the shafts, walked up the carriage drive, neatly clad, cool and alert, his doctor's bag in his hand.

"I was just looking at the place as I dressed. Queer sight--looks like a doll's house. Bedding flung back over the footboards, the way they'd thrown it when they jumped. Clothes neatly folded over the chairs. And then in that third-story room I saw something long and solid-looking on the floor. Seems to be tangled up in the coverlets. The electric light thing's sprinkled all over it. That's what makes me pretty sure--hit 'em as they made a break. Come on."

He and Garland made off as Pancha and Mrs. Meeker set to work on the harnessing of Prince.

The soldiers had done their work. The hotel was empty--a congeries of rooms left in wild disorder, opened trunks in the passages, clothes tossed and trampled on the floors. As the men ran up the stairs, its walls gave back the sound of their feet like a place long deserted and abandoned to decay. The recurring shocks that shook its dislocated frame sent plaster down, and called forth creaking protests from the wrenched girders. The rear was flooded with light, streaming in where the wall had been, and through open doors they saw the houses opposite filling in the background like the drop scene at a theater.

The third floor had suffered more than those below, and they made their way down a hall where mortar lay heaped over the wreckage of glass, pictures and chairs. The bedroom that was their goal was tragic in its signs of intimate habitation strewn and dust-covered, as if years had passed since they had been set forth by an arranging feminine hand. The place looked as untenanted as a tomb. Anyone glancing over its blurred ruin, no voice responding to a summons, might have missed the figure that lay concealed by the bed and partly enwrapped in its coverings.

The doctor, kneeling beside it, pushed them off and swept away the litter of glass and metal that had evidently fallen from the ceiling and struck the woman down. She was lying on her face, one hand still gripping the clothes, a pink wrapper twisted about her, her blonde hair stained with the ooze of blood from a wound in her head. He felt of her pulse and heart and twitching up her eyelids looked into her set and lifeless eyes.

"Is she dead?" Garland asked.

"No," He snapped his bag open with businesslike briskness. "Concussion. Got a glancing blow from the light fixture. Seems as if she'd been trying to wrap herself up in the bedclothes and got in the worst place she could--just under it."

"Can you do anything for her?"

"Not much. Rest and quiet is what she ought to have, and I don't see how she's going to get it the way things are now."

"We got a cart. We can take her along with us."

"Good work. I'll fix her up as well as I can and turn her over to you." He had taken scissors from his bag and with deft speed began to cut away the tangled hair from the torn flesh. "I'll put in a stitch or two and bind her up. Looks like a person of means." He gave a side glance at her hand, white and beringed. "You might get off the mattress while I'm doing this. We can put her on it and carry her down. She's a big woman; must be five feet nine or ten."

Garland dragged the mattress to the floor, while the doctor rose and made a dive for the bathroom. He emerged from it a moment later, his brow corrugated.

"No water!" he said, as he stepped over the strewn floor to his patient. "That's a cheerful complication."

He bent over her, engrossed in his task, every now and then, as the building quivered to the earth throes, stopping to mutter in irritated impatience. Garland went to the window and called down to Pancha and Mrs. Meeker that they'd found a woman, alive but unconscious, and space must be left for her in the cart. He stood for a moment watching them as they pulled out the up-piled household goods with which Mrs. Meeker had been filling it. Then the doctor, snapping his bag shut and jumping to his feet, called him back:

"That's done. It's all I can do for her now. Come on--lend a hand. Take her shoulders; she's a good solid weight."

Her head was covered with bandages close and tight as a nun's coif. They framed a face hardly less white and set in a stony insensibility.

"Lord, she looks like a dead one," Garland said, as he lowered the wounded head on the