hrough. I helped them wrap themselves in
quilts and half led, half carried them to the street.

"While passing through a narrow street in the rear of the Emporium I
came upon a tragedy. A rough fellow, evidently a south of Market
street thug, was bending over the unconscious form of a woman. She was
clothed in a kimono and lay upon the sidewalk near the curb. His back
was toward me. He was trying to wrench a ring from her finger and he
held her right wrist in his left hand. A soldier suddenly approached.
He held a rifle thrust forward and his eyes were on the wretch.

"Involuntarily I stopped and involuntarily my hand went to my hip
pocket. I remember only this, that it seemed in that moment a good
thing to me to take a life. The soldier's rifle came to his shoulder.
There was a sharp report and I saw the smoke spurt from the muzzle.
The thug straightened up with a wrench, he shot his right arm above
his head and pitched forward across the body of the woman. He died
with her wrist in his grasp. It may sound murderous, but the feeling I
experienced was one of disappointment. I wanted to kill him myself.

"Along in the afternoon in my walking I came upon a great hulking
fellow in the act of wresting food from an old woman and a young girl
who evidently had joined their fortunes. No soldiers were about and I
had the satisfaction of laying him out with the butt of my pistol. He
went down in a heap. I did not stay to see whether or not he came to."

"Strange is the scene where San Francisco's Chinatown stood," said
W. W. Overton, after reaching Los Angeles among the refugees. "No heap
of smoking ruins marks the site of the wooden warrens where the
slant-eyed men of the orient dwelt in thousands. The place is pitted
with deep holes and seared with dark passageways, from whose depths
come smoke wreaths. All the wood has gone and the winds are streaking
the ashes.

"Men, white men, never knew the depth of Chinatown's underground
city. They often talked of these subterranean runways. And many of
them had gone beneath the street levels, two and three stories. But
now that Chinatown has been unmasked, for the destroyed buildings were
only a mask, men from the hillside have looked on where its inner
secrets lay. In places they can see passages 100 feet deep.

"The fire swept this Mongolian section clean. It left no shred of the
painted wooden fabric. It ate down to the bare ground and this lies
stark, for the breezes have tak