The Avalanche | Page 3

for at least ten years
if he would maintain the business he had rescued from the disaster of
1906 at the level where he had, by the severest application of his life,
placed it by the end of 1908. Meanwhile he had grown to like San
Francisco better than he would have believed possible when he arrived
in the wrecked city, still smoking, and haunted with the subtle odors of
fires that had consumed more than products of the vegetable kingdom.
The vast ruin with its tottering arches and broken columns, its lonely
walls looking as if bitten by prehistoric monsters that must haunt this
ancient coast, the soft pastel colors the great fire had given as sole
compensation for all it had taken, the grotesque twisted masses of steel
and the aged gray hills that had looked down on so many fires, had
appealed powerfully to his imagination, and made him feel, when
wandering alone at night, as if his brain cells were haunted by old
memories of Antioch when Nature had annihilated in an instant what
man had lavished upon her for centuries. Nowhere, not even in what
was left of ancient Rome, had he ever received such an impression of
the age of the world and of the nothingness of man as among the ruins
of this ridiculously modern city of San Francisco. It fascinated him, but
he told himself then that he should leave it without a pang. He was a
New Yorker of the seventh generation of his house, and the rest of the
United States of America was merely incidental.
The business, a branch of the great New York firm founded in 1840 by
an ancestor grown weary of watching the broad acres of Ruyler Manor
automatically transmute themselves into the yearly rent-roll, and
reverting to the energy and merchant instincts of his Dutch ancestors,
had been conducted skillfully for the thirty years preceding the disaster
by Price's uncle, Dryden Ruyler. But the earthquake and fire in which
so many uninsured millions had vanished, had also wrecked men past

the rebounding age, and Dryden Ruyler was one of them. He might
have borne the destruction of the old business building down on Front
Street, or even the temporary stagnation of trade, but when the Pacific
Union Club disappeared in the raging furnace, and, like many of his old
cronies who had no home either in the country or out in the Western
Addition, he was driven over to Oakland for lodgings, this ghastly
climax of horrors--he escaped in a milk wagon after sleeping for two
nights without shelter on the bare hills behind San Francisco, while the
fire roared its defiance to the futile detonations of dynamite, and his
sciatica was as fiery as the atmosphere--had broken the old man's spirit,
and he had announced his determination to return to Ruyler-on-Hudson
and die as a gentleman should.
There was no question of Price's father, Morgan Ruyler, leaving New
York, even if he had contemplated the sacrifice for a moment; that his
second son and general manager of the several branches of the great
business of Ruyler and Sons--as integral a part of the ancient history of
San Francisco as of the comparatively modern history of New
York--should go, was so much a matter of course that Price had taken
the first Overland train that left New York after the receipt of his
uncle's despairing telegram.
In spite of the fortune behind him and his own expert training, the
struggle to rebuild the old business to its former standard had been
unintermittent. The terrific shock to the city's energies was followed by
a general depression, and the insane spending of a certain class of San
Franciscans when their insurance money was paid, was like a brief last
crackling in a cold stove, and, moreover, was of no help to the
wholesale houses.
But Price Ruyler, like so many of his new associates in like case, had
emerged triumphant; and with the unqualified approval and respect of
the substantial citizens of San Francisco.
It was this position he had won in a community where he had
experienced the unique sensation of being a pioneer in at the rebirth of
a great city, as well as the outdoor sports that kept him fit, that had
endeared California to Ruyler, and in time caused him whimsically to

visualize New York as a sternly accusing instead of a beckoning finger.
Long before he found time to play polo at Burlingame he had
conceived a deep respect for a climate where a man might ride
horseback, shoot, drive a racing car, or tramp, for at least eight months
of the year with no menace of sudden downpour, and hardly a change
in the weight of his clothes.
To-day the rain was dashing