Then, in another moment, understanding began to flood in upon him.  He felt a great weakness ... but he managed to make a trumpet with his hands, calling in a voice that sounded remote: 

“Come out!  For God’s sake, come out!”

He saw the woman start back in a movement of quick confusion, and heard himself call again, this time with muffled agony: 

“Ginger!”

There was a tremendous roar ... he felt a shower of stones hitting him sharply in the face ...  He pressed forward ... sheets of flame were leaping greedily toward the sky and a string of people poured out into the sun-baked street.

At midnight Fred Starratt, making his way from the outlying districts toward the center of the town, came out of a mental turmoil that had flung him about all day in a series of blind impulses.  The air was raucous with the shrill cry of newsboys announcing the details of the morning’s sensation.  He knew how the journalistic tale would run without bothering to glimpse the headlines.  At this time it would be made up for the most part of vague speculations as to who was the prime mover of the enterprise.

The moments following the disaster were now fathomless, but he fancied that he had been outwardly cool, chilled into subconscious calculation by the very violence of the shock ...  The frenzy had come later when he found himself aboard a ferryboat bound for Oakland.  He could not disentangle the mixed impulses which had sent him upon this irrational errand, but he remembered now that a consuming desire to see Hilmer had possessed him.  Perhaps an itching for revenge again had sprung into life, perhaps a fury to release a measure of his scorn and contempt, perhaps a mere curiosity to glimpse once more this man whose armor of arrogance remained unpierced ...  Whatever the urge, it had keyed him to a quivering determination.  He had wondered what stupidity possessed him to send Ginger in warning to a man like Hilmer. ...  With almost psychic power he had created for himself the scene at the depot with Ginger pouring her tremulous message into contemptuous ears.  For it was certain that Hilmer had been contemptuous. ...  Afterward, standing before the north gate of Hilmer’s shipyards, a man at his side confirmed his intuitions between irritating puffs from a blackened pipe: 

“Nobody can double-cross Hilmer ... and they’d better give up trying ...  He said a launching at noon and it was at noon, you can bet your life on that! ...  They say a woman tried to scare the old man this morning ...  He just laughed in her face and came on over.”

Almost as the man had finished speaking the crowd surged forward.  And in a twinkling Hilmer’s machine had swept past, leaving Fred, trembling from head to foot, staring stupidly into a cloud of dust ...  He had not even glimpsed the occupants!  But his failure to achieve whatever vague plan was buffeting him about drove him back to San Francisco.  His confused mind had worked with the rational capacity for details which characterizes madness.  He knew that Hilmer must wait for the automobile ferry...that the regular passenger boat would reach the other side at least a half hour in advance.