"What is it?" he demanded as he paid his money. "Dunno!" the boy replied, breathlessly--"'Xpect everybody's dead down California way!" Gwent unfolded the journal and stared at the great headlines, printed in fat black letters, still smelling strongly of printer's ink. Appalling Earthquake In California!--Mountain Upheaval!--Towns Wiped Out!--Plaza Hotel Engulfed!--Frightful Loss of Life! His eyes grew dim and dazzled--his brain swam,--he gazed up unseeingly at the blue sky, the tall "sky-scraper" houses, the sweep of human and vehicular traffic around him; and to his excited fancy the beautiful face of Manella came, like a phantom, between him and all else that was presented to his vision--that face warm and glowing with woman's tenderness--the splendid dark eyes aflame with love for a man whose indifference to her only strengthened her adoration and he seemed to hear the deep defiant voice of Roger Seaton ringing in his ears-- "Annihilation! A holocaust of microbes! I would--and could--wipe them off the face of the earth in twenty-four hours!" He could--and would! "And by Heaven," said Gwent, within himself--"He's done it!" CHAPTER XXIII Struck by the hand of God! So men say when, after denying God's existence ail their lives, the seeming solid earth heaves up like a ship on a storm-billow, dragging down in its deep recoil their lives and habitations. An earthquake! Its irresistible rise and fall makes human beings more powerless than insects,--their houses and possessions have less stability than the spider's web which swings its frail threads across broken columns in greater safety than any man-made bridge of stone,--and terror, mad, hopeless, helpless terror, possesses every creature brought face to face with the dire cruelty of natural forces, which from the very beginning have played havoc with struggling mankind. Struck by the hand of God!--and with a merciless blow! All the sunny plains and undulating hills of the beautiful stretch of land in Southern California, in the centre of which the "Plaza" hotel and sanatorium had stood, were now unrecognisable,--the earth was torn asunder and thrown into vast heaps--great rocks and boulders were tumbled over each other pell-mell in appalling heights of confusion, and, for miles around, towns, camps and houses were laid in ruins. The scene was one of absolute horror,--there was no language to express or describe it--no word of hope or comfort that could be fitly used to lighten the blackness of despair and loss. Gangs of men were at relief work as soon as they could be summoned, and these busied themselves in extricating the dead, and rescuing the dying whose agonised cries and moans reproached the Power that made them for such an end,--and perhaps as terrible as any other sound was the savage roar and rush of a loosened torrent which came tearing furiously down from the cleft hills to the lower land, through the great canon beyond the site where the