Into the Firestorm Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nick stumbled over the unfamiliar word. “It’s that beautiful, fancy writing, like art, like what the Chinese people do with their…designs.”
    At last, Nick ran out of breath. The man walked over and stared down at him. Nick couldn’t read the expression on his face.
    “Characters.”
    “Pardon me, sir?”
    “They are called characters, not designs. Chinese characters.”
    The man went to a table in the corner, took out a journal, and began to make some notes. Nick stood quietly, waiting, trying not to breathe too loudly.
    “Quite a salesman, aren’t you?” the man said after a moment. “What are you, kid, about ten years old?”
    Nick drew himself up taller. “I’ll be twelve this month—April twenty-third.”
    “Hmmm…Today’s Monday, the sixteenth. That’s next week. I’d say you don’t have a very pleasant birthday coming up. No, it’s not my idea of how to spend a birthday at all, sleeping in an alley and so forth. Which, I gather from the look and smell of you, is what you have been doing.”
    The man put down his pen, turned around, and folded his arms. He leaned back against the table, crossing his shiny shoes, and considered Nick. “Run away from home? South of the Slot somewhere?”
    “I didn’t run away from home, exactly. I…I came from the fields,” Nick sputtered. He supposed a county poor farm was the fields.
    “You came from the fields?” Mr. Pat Patterson turned toward his dog. “Did you hear that, boy? He came from the fields!”
    Nick tried again. “From a county poor farm in Texas. An orphanage, really. I was sent there after I lost my gran. But I’ve wanted to come here for a long time. So I ran away.”
    “Why here?” Mr. Pat Patterson spread his hands wide.
    “I just…I had a feeling about it. Like the city was a bright light that I needed to get to…Like I belong here.”
    When he tried to put it into words, it sounded silly. But Nick went on anyway. “I want to live in San Francisco because it’s the Paris of the Pacific.”
    The man threw his head back and laughed out loud, a bright sharp guffaw, his brown eyes twinkling. Shake barked along with him, a wide grin lighting his face. “So, you came from the fields to live here, in the Paris of the Pacific. Let me ask you, then: how
do
we know where we belong?”
    Nick stared at the floor, his mind a blank. No one had ever asked him such a question. At first he couldn’t imagine that the man actually expected an answer. But when he looked up, Mr. Pat Patterson was still staring at him, eyebrows raised.
    “Well, sir. I think maybe people are like plants, at least a little.” Nick struggled to find the words. “Different plants need different places. Like cotton. Cotton needs warm weather. It wouldn’t grow in a chilly, foggy place like San Francisco. Today, this morning, anyway, it’s been nice. But there’ve been some days when a cold, chill mist seems to settle over everything.”
    Nick shivered a little, thinking about how hard it had been to get warm on those mornings. “Cotton wouldn’t like that kind of weather at all. It wouldn’t grow. So, maybe…maybe people are like that, too. Some places just fit us better than others.”
    Mr. Pat Patterson didn’t laugh this time. He looked Nick up and down. “At this moment, it doesn’t appear that this glittering city where you think you belong is treating you so well. We’re right near Gold Street, you know,” he went on. “Lots of people have come here looking for gold. But they haven’t always found it.”
    Nick shifted his feet and looked down at his hands. They were dirty, with dark ridges under his fingernails. He should have tried to clean himself up better. This wasn’t going to work. Mr. Pat Patterson was toying with him, like a cat with a field mouse. Nick twisted his hat hard.
    “Have you ever worked, young fellow?”
    “Yes, sir, I’ve worked.” Nick looked up then. He squared his shoulders and looked straight into the man’s eyes.