“It seems as though the Seven Plagues of Egypt were being repeated,” remarked Frank to his uncle as they lunched together.  They had come to be rather good companions, with the memory of Bertha between them.  For Frank, within the past twelve months, had passed through much illuminating experience.

Robert Windham, too, was a changed man.  He cared less for money.  Frank knew that he had declined big fees to defend some of the “higher ups” against impending charges of the graft prosecution.  Windham smiled as he answered Frank’s comment about the Seven Plagues.

“We’ll come out of it with flying colors, my boy.  A city is a great composite heart that keeps beating, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but the healthy blood rules in the main; it conquers all passing distempers.”

* * * * *

Market street was queer and unnatural without its rushing trolley cars.  All sorts of horse-drawn vehicles rattled up and down, carrying passengers to and from the ferry.  Many of the strikers were acting as Jehus of improvised stages.  Autotrucks, too, were impressed into service.  They rumbled along, criss-crossed with “circus seats,” always crowded.

Frank made his way northward and east through the ruins.  Here and there little shops had opened; eating houses for the army of rehabilitation.  They seemed to Frank symbols of renewed life in the blackened waste, like tender, green shoots in a flame-ravaged forest.  Sightseers were beginning to swarm through the burned district, seeking relics.

A large touring car honked raucously almost in Frank’s ear as he was crossing Sutter street, and he sprinted out of its lordly course, turning just in time to see the occupant of the back seat, a large man, rather handsome, in a hard, iron-willed way.  He sat stiffly erect, unbending and aloof, with a kind of arrogance which just escaped being splendid.  This was Patrick Calhoun, president of the United Railroads, who had sworn to break the Carmen’s Union.  It was said that Calhoun had sworn, though less loudly, to break the graft prosecution as well.

* * * * *

On Montgomery street several financial institutions were doing business in reclaimed ruins.  One of these was the California Safe Deposit and Trust Company, which had made spectacular history of late.  It was said that spiritualism entered into its affairs.  Frank had been working on the story, which promised a sensation.

As he neared the corner of California and Montgomery streets, where the crumbled bank walls had been transformed into a temporary habitation, he saw a crowd evidently pressing toward it.  The bank doors were closed, though it was not yet three o’clock.  Now and then people broke from the throng and wandered disconsolately away.  One of these, a gray-haired woman, came in Frank’s direction.  He asked her what was wrong.

“They’re busted ... and they’ve got me money,” she wailed.