Black Fire (2 page)

Charles P. “Dutch Charley” Duane:
the biggest, toughest brawler of the Gold Rush era;
Billy Mulligan:
a lethal, diminutive gunfighter with a chip on his shoulder;
James “Yankee” Sullivan:
former World Heavyweight Champ and the “Ugliest Man in San Francisco”

The Antagonists

Clockwise, from top left:
Sam Brannan:
the city’s first millionaire and one of the bad old town’s greediest men;
Davey Scannell:
“Prince of Rogues” and Sawyer’s rival;
The Lightkeeper:
an unknown serial arsonist who burns down San Francisco six times in eighteen months

An arsonist was loose in 1850 San Francisco
.

Whirlwinds of hot air spiraled around Tom Sawyer and the volunteer firefighters, then united to create a huge vortex. The giant ring rose above them. When directly overhead, the invisible ring of superheated air slowly began to turn clockwise. Gradually it took on the hue of the fire and became a golden ring. It spun faster until it created an updraft rising miles into the stratosphere. The center of the ring, hotter still, ate up all the oxygen to create a counterclockwise downdraft of sparks and lethal gases that was forced onto Sawyer and a ragtag group of boys, some as young as eight. As the inner ring rotated, it became a dark circle of smoke.

At the fire’s center a hailstorm of burning embers flurried clockwise on the superheated wind. Burning coals rained down on the men. Sparks rose in the shifting gale. Highly disciplined soldiers and sailors, covered with soot, hauled kegs of black powder to buildings standing in the fire’s path. Blasts more awful than the blaze shook the city and rose above the fire’s monotonous roar. Terrified animals fled along the streets before the explosions. Houses leaped skyward. Sawyer held a moistened finger aloft. “The wind is altering its course,” he called to the volunteers. “Yes, the gale’s moving northward. We might be spared yet. The main district might not be lost entirely. The next hour will tell.” But he knew the battle was hopeless.

Undeterred, the volunteers went on pulling down houses in the path of the fire to stay it. Tornadoes of flames and smoke columns walked alongside the haggard men, running clockwise and counterclockwise, creating additional whirlwinds that carried sparks miles away to start new fires. In the choking smoke the volunteers’ breathing came in gasps as they rushed blindly searching for safety. Washington, Bush, and Sansome streets were thundering furnaces. The Lightkeeper, as some had named the firebug because he always struck when the Lightkeeper’s Wind was rushing away from the encampment of ex-convicts on the slopes of Telegraph Hill, would burn San Francisco to the ground six times in eighteen months, the most disastrous and costly series
of fires ever experienced by any major American metropolis. As Sawyer fought the flames, he wondered what the Lightkeeper’s motive was. Surely he must have one, if only to watch their hopeless battle against black fire, the most dangerous kind, produced when a heavy mix of fire gases under great pressure accumulate within a fire-involved structure and erupt at high velocity into boiling mushrooms of superheated black smoke and rapidly advance toward a hot, rich flashover. Firemen say it’s “all the bad things come together at once.”

The city’s boundless hills, sand mountains, and valleys, its high, narrow streets filled with confusing echoes that carried for miles, made any fire impossible to find. During the volunteers’ urgent missions in the twisting ravines, they dared not become lost. Thus, when darkness fell, Sawyer led his ragtag corps of torch boys ahead of their hand-drawn engines to light the way over the hazardously pitted, unlit, and fogbound roadways. They carried fire to the fire, a very poetic occupation.

Sawyer studied the pumping and chopping firefighters of the company called Broderick One around him. It took rugged brawlers to haul a one-ton water-filled engine up the steep hills of Gold Rush San Francisco, including a senator, a lethal gunfighter, a master con man, the Ugliest Man in California, the World Heavyweight Champ, and fifty other street toughs and dandies, but it was left to Sawyer and his contingent of lightning-swift runners to unravel the Lightkeeper’s identity. As if to aid the arsonist, the townsfolk slathered every jammed-together card house of oilcloth walls, white muslin floors, and canvas roofs with inflammable paint; they thrust blow pipes through tarred roofs and pumped cinders through defective flues.

The blaze rumbled westward and northeastward at the same time. The wind changed and filled the fire with oxygen. The fire’s sound changed to that of a locomotive rumbling over broken tracks. Sawyer was amazed that smoke could roar. The torch boys led the men of Broderick One Company through shortcuts and down seldom-used alleyways. The blaze swept toward them—a momentary darkening, then a gush of sparks followed by superheated air, dense gases, and a broad column of fire that shrouded everything with red.

There was no escape.

Mark Twain at 30 years

Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer steaming

PROLOGUE
 

It
was the first time Tom Sawyer had ever seen Mark Twain looking glum. Sawyer studied the journalist—loose-jointed body; coarse tumble of fiery hair; long, black, lethal-looking cigar; and “soup-strainer” mustache. A rangy, lanky man, Twain did not really walk, but ambled and slouched his way through the muddy streets and back alleys of San Francisco. His normal dress was careless and disheveled. His clothes were unbrushed and freckled with tobacco, though at this moment he was nude, his chest a forest of matted hair, with one leg lolling from the arm of a chair. Twain’s eyes glared like an eagle’s beneath ranging, sopping brows.

On this rainy afternoon in June 1863, he was nursing a bad hangover inside Ed Stahle’s fashionable Montgomery Street steam rooms halfway through what was intended to be a two-month visit to San Francisco that would stretch to three years. The sleepwalking and melancholic journalist regularly went to the Turkish baths to sweat out any dark thoughts of suicidal temptation, which were not uncommon. At the baths he played penny ante with the proprietor, Ed Stahle, and Sawyer, the recently appointed customs inspector, volunteer fireman, special policeman, and bona fide local hero.