Leader I should be there. There will be many
children to look after, too. The parents, the best of them, won't be up
to much."

"Perhaps I will go down later. But I shall wait at the house until I
have seen Mr. Gwynne--he may need food, or be hurt in any of a dozen
ways. If you see him--and no doubt you will, if you are to be at the
fort--tell him that I have not gone to the country and have no intention
of going."

XIV

They had passed members of the Citizens' Patrol on every block, and they
found one pacing the plank walk on Russian Hill. He told them that the
edict had gone forth that not so much as a candle should be lit in a
house that night and that all cooking must be done out-of-doors. The
spectacled Jap was boiling soup on one of the oil stoves, which he had
carried into the garden and half surrounded by a screen. Beside him was
what looked like an open newly-dug grave, and the girls, startled,
demanded what it meant.

Sugihara, apparently, never smiled, but his eyes flickered. "Before
Cusha and Kuranaga went I made them dig a hole for the silver," he said.
"It is too heavy for the launch. If we are driven away, I will cut your
ancestors from their frames and take them with us."

"Well, you are a treasure," said Isabel, with a sigh. "You shall do
nothing but read when you get to the ranch."

Lady Victoria was pacing slowly up and down the porch, her eyes seldom
wandering from the fire. When dinner was ready, she merely shook her
head impatiently, and Isabel and her guest sat down in the little
tower-room, which was brilliantly illuminated from below. Sugihara
had made a very good soup of canned corn and tomatoes and had fried
bits of meat and potato. There was little conversation. The dynamiting
was now something more than sporadic. The detonations were so terrific
that it was not difficult for the San Franciscans to imagine
themselves--supposing they had a grain of imagination left--in a
besieged city. Isabel suggested, and Anne agreed with her, that they
might have been far worse off than they were; nature at her extremest is
never so pitiless as the human brute when the lust to kill is on him.

Isabel prepared the remains of the feast for Mr. Clatt, and asked
Sugihara if he would object to relieving the watch, that the wharfinger
might snatch a few hours' sleep. There was no longer any danger of fire
except from the conflagration itself, and now that the dynamiting had
begun in earnest it wa