Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [56]
“Damned fool,” Harmon said angrily, “almost ran me down. He should be more careful, driving a heavy dray like that, he might have killed me.”
“Looks like he killed himself instead, sir,” a shirtsleeved workman said bitterly.
“Killed himself?” Harmon shrugged. “You can be thankful there’s only one of us dead.”
A crowd had gathered and Harmon felt their eyes boring into him, taking in his smart automobile, his white tie and tails and his richness. He picked up the leather dog lead and said curtly, “I shall send my chauffeur to pick up the car. If any of you touch it you will have Harmon Harrison to deal with.”
Slapping the leather strap against his thigh as he strode away, he burned to take his revenge on all women. The street was full of drays on their way from the early-morning market and he cursed the drivers; it seemed none of them could control their horses, the beasts were rearing and whinnying, dancing sideways across the road as though they had gone mad. There was a sudden rumble and he glanced up, expecting thunder clouds, but the sky was blue and innocent. The noise grew louder like the roar of an express train, and he glanced around again, puzzled. Then suddenly the road was undulating toward him in a great wave—it rose under him and hurled him to the ground. He struggled to his feet and staggered to the doorway of an adjacent building, but the roar became even louder and the earth shook so violently he was thrown to the ground again. Steel girders shrieked as they were wrenched apart and bricks and masonry crashed past his terrified eyes into the street. Then with a final mighty heave the building collapsed, and bellowing with fear like a wild animal, Harmon was buried beneath a ton of bricks and masonry.
Francie jolted awake, filled with a sense of foreboding. Josh was sleeping peacefully, one arm flung protectively over her. She heard a great roaring noise and she pressed her hands over her ears and sat up. But the noise grew even louder and the room began to shake. The vase of daffodils crashed to the floor and Josh flung his arms around her, pulling her closer. The whole earth seemed to shake, the room trembled and shivered, and the window exploded into a thousand glittering fragments. With a scream of steel the whole building crumbled, and still in the bed in which they had so recently made love they plummeted from the fourth floor of the Barbary Saloon and Rooming House into the basement.
Part II
THE
MANDARIN
CHAPTER 12
1906
Lai Tsin was tall for a Chinese, pale-skinned and cleanshaven with narrow, piercing dark eyes and glossy black hair. He wore a blue high-necked smock, wide black cotton trousers, and black cotton shoes. He carried his worldly possessions in a straw pannier on his back and he clutched a small boy of maybe four years tightly by the hand.
They walked slowly up Stockton Street with the other Chinese refugees, hundreds of them fleeing the earthquake and the flames. Whole families walked together, the father at the head, his wife two steps behind and a stream of gaily clad children following in single file, each clutching the queue, or pigtail, of the child in front so they would not stray. Everyone carried or pushed or pulled something: prams and trunks crammed with ancestral scrolls and pictures, pots and dishes, bedding and bird cages, chairs and chests; they staggered under their heavy loads, hurrying to save what they could from the flames.
Lai Tsin paused at the top of the hill on the corner of California Street and looked back at what was left of San Francisco. A pall of gray smoke covered the city lit from beneath by a sinister orange glow. The fires had already devoured many of the important buildings, licking up masonry and marble as though it were wood and demolishing mere wood to instant ashes. Whole areas of the city were already gone and the firefighters were dynamiting buildings in the path of the flames in a desperate