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.
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