The next question was shelter.
After prowling around the partially quake-wrecked gas works, I found
some pieces of timber out of which I constructed a sort of framework for
a large A tent. I borrowed a hatchet from another refugee, a stranger in
adversity. The disaster had broken down the barriers of formality and we
all lent a willing hand each to the other. I secured some spare rope and
got up my framework. This was covered to windward with some Indian
blankets sewn together by those we were trying to make comfortable.
Under that hastily erected rude shelter nineteen people slept on
mattresses that night. I did not have the good fortune to sleep. Sleep
would not come to "knit up the ravelled sleeve of care," and through the
long hours I watched the intermittent flashes, heard the noises and in
the darkness went through the added suffering of overstrained nerves.
A neighbor, J. F. D. Curtis, since dead, but at that time and for years
after the manager of the "Providence Washington Insurance Company,"
passed the silent watches of the night with me, each of us smoking
ourselves blind and watching - talking but little, although thinking
and feeling a whole lot. We were a mile from the fire, nevertheless it
was so light that a newspaper could easily have been read by its glow
from the time when the sun set on the ruins to the hour when it rose on
the next day of horror.
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