he could not contain
her impatience. We all saw it--I was visiting the Pachecos in the
Presidio of Santa Barbara. She grew so thin. Her eyes were never still.
We knew. And then!--how many times she climbed to the fortress--it was
on that high bluff beside the channel--and stared out to sea--when 1808
and the Spring had come--for hours together: Rezanov was to return by
way of Mexico. Then, when I went back to San Francisco soon after, she
went with me, and again she would watch the sea from the summit of Lone
Mountain, as we call it now. In spite of her reason she hoped, I
suppose; for that is the way of women. Or perhaps she only longed for
the word from Sitka that would tell her the worst and have done with it.
Who knows? She never said, and we dared not speak of it. She was always
very sweet, our Concha, but there never was a time when you could take a
liberty with her.

[Illustration: "SHE WAS ALWAYS VERY SWEET OUR CONCHA,
BUT THERE NEVER WAS A TIME WHEN YOU COULD TAKE A LIBERTY WITH HER."
FROM A PAINTING BY LILLIE V. O'RYAN.]

"No ship came, but something else did--an earthquake! Ay yi, what an
earthquake that was! Not a _temblor_ but a _terremoto_. The whole
Presidio came down. I do not know now how we saved all the babies,
but we always flew to the open with a baby under each arm the moment an
earthquake began, and in the first seconds even this was not so bad. The
wall about the Presidio was fourteen feet high and seven feet thick and
there were solid trunks of trees crossed inside the adobe. It looked
like a heap of dirt, nothing more. Luis was riding up from the Battery
of Yerba Buena and his horse was flung down and he saw the sand-dunes
heaving toward him like waves in a storm and shiver like quicksilver.
And there was a roar as if the earth had dropped and the sea gone after.
Ay California! And to think that when Luis wrote a bitter letter to
Governor Arillaga in Monterey, the old Mexican wrote back that he had
felt earthquakes himself and sent him a box of dates for consolation!
Well--we slept on the ground for two months and cooked out-of-doors, for
we would not go even into the Mission--which had not suffered--until the
earthquakes were over; and if the worst comes first there are plenty
after--and, somehow, harder to bear. Perhaps to Concha that terrible
time was a God-send, for she thought no more of Rezanov for a while. If
the earthquake does not swallow your body it swallows your little self.
You a