The winter rains had come.But so plenteously and persistently,and with such fateful preparation of circumstance,that the long looked for blessing presently became a wonder,an anxiety,and at last a slowly widening terror.Before a month had passed every mountain,stream,and watercourse,surcharged with the melted snows of the Sierras,had become a great tributary;every tributary a great river,until,pouring their great volume into the engorged channels of the American and Sacramento rivers,they overleaped their banks and became as one vast inland sea.Even to a country already familiar with broad and striking catastrophe,the flood was a phenomenal one.For days the sullen overflow lay in the valley of the Sacramento,enormous,silent,currentless--except where the surplus waters rolled through Carquinez Straits,San Francisco Bay,and the Golden Gate,and reappeared as the vanished Sacramento River,in an outflowing stream of fresh and turbid water fifty miles at sea.
Across the vast inland expanse,brooded over by a leaden sky,leaden rain fell,dimpling like shot the sluggish pools of the flood;a cloudy chaos of fallen trees,drifting barns and outhouses,wagons and agricultural implements moved over the surface of the waters,or circled slowly around the outskirts of forests that stood ankle deep in ooze and the current,which in serried phalanx they resisted still.As night fell these forms became still more vague and chaotic,and were interspersed with the scattered lanterns and flaming torches of relief-boats,or occasionally the high terraced gleaming windows of the great steamboats,feeling their way along the lost channel.At times the opening of a furnace-door shot broad bars of light across the sluggish stream and into the branches of dripping and drift-encumbered trees;at times the looming smoke-stacks sent out a pent-up breath of sparks that illuminated the inky chaos for a moment,and then fell as black and dripping rain.Or perhaps a hoarse shout from some faintly outlined hulk on either side brought a quick response from the relief-boats,and the detaching of a canoe with a blazing pine-knot in its bow into the outer darkness.
It was late in the afternoon when Lawrence Grant,from the deck of one of the larger tugs,sighted what had been once the estuary of Sidon Creek.The leader of a party of scientific observation and relief,he had kept a tireless watch of eighteen hours,keenly noticing the work of devastation,the changes in the channel,the prospects of abatement,and the danger that still threatened.He had passed down the length of the submerged Sacramento valley,through the Straits of Carquinez,and was now steaming along the shores of the upper reaches of San Francisco Bay.Everywhere the same scene of desolation,--vast stretches of tule land,once broken up by cultivation and dotted with dwellings,now clearly erased on that watery chart;long lines of symmetrical perspective,breaking the monotonous level,showing orchards buried in the flood;Indian mounds and natural eminences covered with cattle or hastily erected camps;half submerged houses,whose solitary chimneys,however,still gave signs of an undaunted life within;isolated groups of trees,with their lower branches heavy with the unwholesome fruit of the flood,in wisps of hay and straw,rakes and pitchforks,or pathetically sheltering some shivering and forgotten household pet.
But everywhere the same dull,expressionless,placid tranquillity of destruction,--a horrible leveling of all things in one bland smiling equality of surface,beneath which agony,despair,and ruin were deeply buried and forgotten;a catastrophe without convulsion,--a devastation voiceless,passionless,and supine.
The boat had slowed up before what seemed to be a collection of disarranged houses with the current flowing between lines that indicated the existence of thoroughfares and streets.Many of the lighter wooden buildings were huddled together on the street corners with their gables to the flow;some appeared as if they had fallen on their knees,and others lay complacently on their sides,like the houses of a child's toy village.An elevator still lifted itself above the other warehouses;from the centre of an enormous square pond,once the plaza,still arose a "Liberty pole,"or flagstaff,which now supported a swinging lantern,and in the distance appeared the glittering dome of some public building.
Grant recognized the scene at once.It was all that was left of the invincible youth of Tasajara!
As this was an objective point of the scheme of survey and relief for the district,the boat was made fast to the second story of one of the warehouses.It was now used as a general store and depot,and bore a singular resemblance in its interior to Harcourt's grocery at Sidon.This suggestion was the more fatefully indicated by the fact that half a dozen men were seated around a stove in the centre,more or less given up to a kind of philosophical and lazy enjoyment of their enforced idleness.And when to this was added the more surprising coincidence that the party consisted of Billings,Peters,and Wingate,--former residents of Sidon and first citizens of Tasajara,--the resemblance was complete.