Black Fire (29 page)

Outside in the darkness Simple Four was just responding from Happy Valley with their red and gold pumper. Donally was joined by three other officers. Collier House residents had earlier reported the taciturn lodger as suspicious and had mentioned his late-night trips. In half an hour Donally tracked the lodger to a four-story brick building with an iron balcony, the gilded El Dorado. Donally entered into the upper stories where miners, gamblers, and women of the halls held court. He looked around. Standing at a monte table to the right of the dealer was the lodger with both hands in his pockets. When he saw Donally, he rested his foot on a bench and put his right hand to his face.

Donally, not certain this was the man from the Collier House, did not want to identify himself as a policeman in such a crowded room. He took his badge off his coat and slipped it in his pocket. He moved closer and asked the man to walk down on Long Wharf with him for company. They walked in the cool night listening to the rushing water. “I was down on Long Wharf at the time of the cry of fire,” the lodger said. “Are
you not the man who stopped me on the stair?” Donally said nothing. “I was going up to bed and smelled the smoke and came away. At the alarm of fire I went downstairs and took a drink.” The lodger pretended to be drunk as they walked, but at times, forgetting his role, he walked perfectly straight. “I asked the proprietor and he said there must be some fire in the house. He knocked at my door, said there was fire in my room.”

“Why did you leave the scene?” Donally asked. “I was burnt out at the last fire and I did not want to be burnt out again,” the lodger said. “If you roomed in the house when the fire was discovered, why did you not stay there?” Donally asked. “I did not wish to get burnt,” the lodger replied. “I have no doubt now you are the man I first arrested,” Donally said and frog-marched his prisoner back to Stowell, who also identified him as the man. “What you spill some oil up in your room for?” Stowell said, looking above where it had come through and stained the cloth ceiling. The lodger looked up at the stain but said nothing. Stowell continued, “As for the other man, I know him as a boatman and that he came from Australia. Although they were on good terms they often fought.” From there Donally directed his prisoner toward the station house.

Ned Wakeman left shipping magnate Charles Minturn’s office at the foot of Geary Street and began walking in the dark along Powell Street. A month earlier he had raced his stolen steamboat
New World
down from Sacramento in five and a half hours dock to dock and set what seemed an unbreakable record. On his way he met bluff Sam Brannan, an old friend. Before they could speak, they saw torch boys leading Simple Four’s engine. It was jolting up the rutted street towed by exhausted firefighters headed back to their barn. A squad of frock-coated city policemen were running closely behind them jostling and shoving a tall, thin man in black with tousled hair. A trail of blood ran down his soot-blackened face. His eyes were wide and curiously pale. As the police squad advanced down Geary Street, Wakeman saw a dour-faced Scotsman, Captain Frederick W. Macondray, leading the volunteer police. Macondray, a mercantile, a Mexican War veteran, and an alderman who had been burned out in the last fire, had a stake in catching the arsonist. He looked plenty mad.

“It looks like they’re going to have it out with those brass-buttoned pickpockets at last,” Brannan cried with glee. Macondray’s men marched the prisoner past them and in the torchlight Brannan got a good look at
the lodger. “I recognize him; it’s Ben Lewis! He’s been questioned for half a dozen fires and turned loose every time.” Brannan called to the police, “What do you plan on doing with him this time, Captain Ben Ray? Pin a medal on him? It’s Ben Lewis!”

Historian H. H. Bancroft identified Ben Lewis as “a hardened ex-convict, a Sydney rascal” like English Jim Stuart, and number nine in the hierarchy of Stuart’s twenty-member gang of murderers and robbers. That placed Lewis very high in the ranks of villainy. To paraphrase Bancroft, Ben Lewis was a villain—a great villain, an audacious villain, and every inch a villain. He achieved villainy, and if villainy was not thrust upon him, he had no hesitation in thrusting it upon others.

In the flickering light, Brannan turned back to Wakeman. “Thugs, thieves and shysters, and the law have joined forces and the time has come for honest men to take the law into their own hands! Arson. Some poor devil’s store set on fire so the Ducks can move into the back door and move the loot while the owner’s running out the front. Four times in the last year the town’s been burned to the ground as a convenience to thieves and murderers. Not a single arsonist has been convicted.”

The strange caravan crossed through the dirty Square to the City Hotel. Brannan, temper rising, caught up with them and forced his way to the hotel door, crying to Ned Wakeman, “It’s time for action and I’m hoping we can count on you as one of us.” “I’m with you,” said Wakeman, a powerful, intimidating man who knew his Bible by heart and was ready to quote it. Twain characterized him as normally “hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured,” but now he was itching to string up Lewis and recite a few passages over his corpse. Brannan and Wakeman saw Lewis slumped in an ornate chair close to the entrance. Brannan grabbed the prisoner’s long hair, jerked his lean face into the light, and crowed, “Ben Lewis! I was right. He’s done a half-dozen fires, Captain, just as I said.” Brannan looked around angrily. “The police seem more concerned for Lewis’s safety than the burning of innocent people.”

Word of Lewis’s arrest reached Mayor Calhoun Benham. To the handsome, black-haired Mexican War vet, the expertness of the waterfront room fire suggested Lewis was an arsonist, possibly
the
arsonist they had sought. He studied the reports of the last city-destroying blaze, the anniversary fire, and found what he was looking for. A few minutes before eleven o’clock a man recognized as a habitué of Sydney Town had been seen running from the paint shop on the southern side
of the Square. It troubled Benham that simultaneously other fires were kindled at various points downtown. This suggested that Lewis had an unnamed partner, possibly the stealthy man who had helped him move his trunk from his hotel room and then vanished. He read Donally’s police report that night. According to the Collier House tenants, the two companions had openly boasted they would one day burn San Francisco to the ground. As in the earlier fires, the anniversary fire had been set on a night when the wind was blowing from the east and north—the so-called Lightkeeper’s Wind that carried the flames away from Sydney Town, the only section not burned. The Duck’s enclave suffered damage only when the wind unexpectedly changed direction.

That evening the Council convened to figure out how to approach Ben Lewis’s arrest and agreed to meet the next day. A hearing was held in the Recorder’s Court. At first there was little interest, but in late morning witnesses from the lodging house entered the court. Brushing rain from their drab pantaloons and dark green coats, they stomped mud from their short boots and were sworn in. Their testimony produced a strong implication of Lewis’s guilt in setting fire to the house on Long Wharf. The case against Lewis, an ex-convict, was strong. More information was gathered. Lewis was now suspected of starting four of the major conflagrations that had razed the entire city. The hunt for the second and unseen man began quietly.

Colonel James was the defendant’s counsel. “Who is present to prosecute?” Judge Waller asked. “No one is,” said Colonel Stevenson, who owned the house on Long Wharf that Lewis had set fire to. The judge appointed the Honorable T. B. Van Buren of San Joaquin as prosecuting attorney. With few people in court, Van Buren summed up the case by noon. “A fire alarm was raised in the upper rooms of a lodging house on Long Wharf,” he began. “This man, Lewis, was caught in the act of stealing a trunk from a room, and his room was found to be on fire.” Lewis offered no evidence at all. News of the hearing circulated. By 1:00
P.M.
Lewis had become the threatening symbol of lawlessness in San Francisco. In minutes a crowd gathered around the City Hall. At 2:00
P.M.
, while Lewis was still being arraigned, four thousand people rushed to Portsmouth Square. A cry swept the city: “Judge Lynch is holding court! They’re going to hang a Sydney Covey!” Newsboys called on corners: “Come out and see the hanging.”

Brannan recirculated an old handbill:

As a protective measure, police surrounded City Hall. Now eight thousand angry citizens jammed the square. Brannan pulled up a crate and began to speak. “I’m very much surprised,” he told the mob mockingly, “to hear people talk of grand juries, or recorders, or mayors. I’m tired of such claptrap myself. Fires, murders, beatings—Sydney Town is a growing hellhole. A decent woman won’t live here—an honest man is doomed. These men are murderers, I say, as well as thieves. I know it, and I will die or see them hung by the neck. The laws and courts never yet hung a man in California and every morning we read fresh accounts of murder and robbery.
I want no technicalities!
Such things are devices to shield the guilty. Who will help return order?”

“We will,” roared the mob.

“Who’ll enlist?”

“We will!”

“Five hundred murders since gold was discovered and not one man punished yet.” This was not true. “Not one man!” Brannan, having roused the rabble like a summer storm, jumped down and went up to Mayor Benham, whom he had seen monitoring the situation from his window. “There’s a real crowd out there, three thousand and more and some with ropes,” the mayor said, wiping his brow. “They want action, Mr. Mayor,” Brannan said. “You better go out and tell them what you plan to do with Mr. Lewis before they decide for you. Lewis the arsonist should be turned over to the volunteer police, who would see to it that he is held in custody until he is made to answer for his crimes.”

At 4:00
P.M.
, Lewis’s defense attorney reviewed the evidence and declared it insufficient to justify a committal of the prisoner. “It is purely circumstantial,” Colonel James said, “and does not in any manner
charge the prisoner with anything that could not be accounted for as an accident.”

Van Buren leaped to his feet to reply, but a scream of “Fire!” interrupted him. The spectators in the courtroom tried to rush out just as others rushed in, creating a gridlock at the entrance. As a fire engine noisily rattled past the court, Sheriff “Coffee Jack” Hays instantly concluded that Lewis’s friends at Clarke’s Point had set a fire as a diversion and intended to free Lewis in the confusion. He was right. The Ducks had torched a house on the corner of Front Street and Long Wharf. “Hold that man fast!” he said. “Quickly, men, see to the prisoner and look for his friends—they will attempt to rescue him, mark my words.” Dozens of guards ringed the suspect. Though Lewis glared menacingly, his face was pallid with fear. When some of the crowd broke in and grabbed him, police sprang forward and took his arm in a brief tug-of-war. Lewis was thoroughly roughed up and half his clothes were torn off before the cops closed ranks around him. In the fierce struggle they hustled him into the clerk’s room, an inner room. Sheriff Hays hustled Lewis to the station house and locked him up.

“On the evidence [of the rooming house arson],” Judge Waller said, “I feel I should feel bound to commit the prisoner.” He was afraid that the mob might break in again and attack Lewis but felt it only proper that the defendant be brought back to hear his ruling. “I will commit him and will not admit him on bail.” As the judge sent an officer to return Lewis to court, cries rose outside: “Hang him!” “Lynch the villain!” “Hang the fire-raising wretch!” “Bring him out—no mercy—no law delays!” Though the blaze had been swiftly extinguished, the alarm had drawn together an enormous crowd. The fierce tone of their chant broke up the court’s deliberations. Waller paused, then reconsidered. “It will be best not to introduce the prisoner after all,” he said as another rush was made on the courtroom. Had the impatient mob outside waited a few minutes more, Lewis would have been back in court and they easily could have laid their hands on him and gotten a rope around his neck.

From an adjacent building, Captain George Coffin observed Lewis and his police captors go up through a trapdoor onto the roof. He descended to the next floor and onto a balcony so he could watch the crowd encircling the courthouse. Below, a sea of excited faces cried, “Bring Lewis out! Bring Lewis out!” Speakers pro and con made appeals to the public. Colonel Jonathan Stevenson, the first speaker, urged prompt action and castigated the laxity of the law and the police.
“If the man is guilty, which I firmly believe, he should not be allowed to sleep but should be hung immediately.” As owner of the lodging house that Lewis had torched, Colonel Stevenson had a vested interest. As he left his podium he was loudly applauded. Excited cries for Lewis’s hanging rose louder than ever. Mayor Brenham appeared upon the upper platform to say he was astonished that any man could utter such sentiments. “The prisoner should have a fair trial,” he began, “and if found guilty, punished but until then be safely guarded.” The crowd’s roar interrupted him. “I call upon the police and all good citizens to support the law at the peril of their lives.” The mayor was drowned out again. Coffin observed a tall, pallid man at one end of the portico and a small red-faced man at the other end making speeches. Marshal Robert G. Crozier appeared upon the platform between the two. “The prisoner is no longer in the station house,” he said. “He has been removed by police and is in safe custody. I do not know where he is now. Lewis was delivered into the sheriff’s custody on Wednesday morning, June 4, and that is all I know.”