der
across his chest. It in turn was weighted down by a mass of wreckage
that could not be moved. He could not be saved from the flames that
were sweeping toward him, and begged a policeman to shoot him.

"The officer fired at him and missed him, and then an old man crawled
through the debris and cut the arteries in the man's wrists. The crowd
hurried on and left him to die alone."

CHAPTER IX.

THROUGH LANES OF MISERY.

=A Graphic Pen Picture of San Francisco in Flames and
in Ruins--Scenes and Stories of Human Interest where
Millionaires and Paupers Mingled in a Common
Brotherhood--A Harrowing Trip in an Automobile.=

Among the most graphic and interesting pen pictures of scenes within
and without the stricken city were those of Harry C. Carr, a newspaper
photographer and correspondent of Los Angeles. This is his personal
narrative:

I started from Los Angeles for the stricken city on that pitiful first
train whose passengers were nearly all San Francisco men trying
frantically to get back to their wives and children, whose fate they
could only imagine.

All one terrible day I walked about through the lanes of the charred
ruins that had once been San Francisco. I was one of the hungry who
robbed grocery stores for their food; one of the parched thousands who
eagerly drank water out of the gutter leakage of the fire engines.

After hours of discouraging failure, of being turned back by the
sentries, with the sound of dynamited houses ringing in my ears, I
managed at last to join the long caravan of homeless families carrying
all the property left to them in the world in sheets.

Sometimes I walked with the daughter of a Van Ness avenue millionaire
lugging a bundle over her shoulder, and again with a Chinaman moaning
piteously over the loss of his laundry.

I came out of San Francisco on that broken-hearted first train
carrying refugees, whose faces streamed with tears as they took the
last look from the Pullman windows at the weirdly beautiful red fringe
of fire creeping along the ridges of the distant hills, burning the
remnants of San Francisco.

An hour after the first word reached Los Angeles on that fateful
Wednesday morning our train pulled out of the depot. There was an
ominous number of reservations for Santa Barbara on the chair car.
Most of the San Francisco men came on board there.

Beyond San Luis Obispo, two big freight trains were stalled by a
cave-in caused by the