The Gray Dawn | Page 8

rose, and before
Sherwood could make a move to assist her, had poised on the rim of
the wheel and leaped lightly to the dock. Like a thistledown she floated
to the little group at the foot of the gangplank. The steward instantly
gave way to her evident intention. She passed her arm around the girl's
waist. The three moved slowly toward the buggy, Mrs. Sherwood, her
head bent charmingly forward, murmuring compassionate, broken,
little phrases, supporting the newcomer's reviving footsteps.
Sherwood, a faint, fond amusement lurking in the depths of his eyes,
quietly cramped the wheels of the buggy.

IV
A half hour later the two men, having deposited the women safely in
the Sherwoods' rooms at the Bella Union, and having been
unceremoniously dismissed by Mrs. Sherwood, strolled together to the
veranda. They had not, until now, had a chance to exchange six words.
The newcomer, who announced himself as Milton Keith from
Baltimore, proved to have a likable and engaging personality. He was
bubbling with interest and enthusiasm; and these qualities, provided
they are backed solidly, are always prepossessing. Sherwood, quietly
studying him, concluded that such was the case. His jaw and mouth

were set in firm lines; his eye, while dancing and mischievous, had
depths of capability and reserves of forcefulness. But Sherwood was,
by inclination and by the necessities of his profession, a close observer
of men. Another, less practised, might have seen here merely an eager,
rather talkative, apparently volatile, very friendly, quite unreserved
young man of twenty-five. Any one, analytical or otherwise, could not
have avoided feeling the attractive force of the youth's personality, the
friendly quality that is nine tenths individual magnetism and one tenth
the cast of mind that initially takes for granted the other man's
friendliness.
At the moment Keith was boyishly avid for the sights of the new city.
In these modern days of long journeys, a place so remote as San
Francisco, in the most commonplace of circumstances, gathers to its
reputation something of the fabulous. How much more true then of a
city built from sand dunes in four years; five times swept by fire, yet
rising again and better before its ashes were extinct; the resort of all the
picturesque, unknown races of the earth--the Chinese, the Chileño, the
Mexican, the Spanish, the Islander, the Moor, the Turk--not to speak of
ordinary foreigners from Russia, England, France, Belgium, Germany,
Italy, and the out-of-the-way corners of Europe; the haunt of the wild
and striking individuals of all these races. "Sydney ducks" from the
criminal colonies; "shoulder strikers" direct from the tough wards of
New York; long, lean, fever-haunted crackers from the Georgia
mountains or the Louisiana canebrakes; Pike County desperadoes;
long-haired men from the trapping countries; hard-fisted, sardonic state
of Maine men fresh from their rivers; and Indian fighters from the
Western Reserve; grasping, shrewd commercial Yankees; fire-eating
Southern politicians; lawyers, doctors, merchants, chiefs, and thiefs, the
well-educated and the ignorant, the high-minded and the scalawags, all
dumped down together on a sand hill to work out their destinies; a city
whose precedents, whose morals, whose laws, were made or adapted on
the spot; where might in some form or another--revolver, money,
influence--made its only right; whose history ranged in three years the
gamut of human passion, strife, and development; whose background
was the fabled El Dorado whence the gold in unending floods poured
through its sluices. To the outside world tales of these things had come.

They did not lose in the journey. The vast loom of actual occurrences
rose above the horizon like mirages. Names and events borrowed a
half-legendary quality from distances, as elsewhere from time. Keith
had heard of Coleman, of Terry, of Broderick, Brannan, Gwin, Geary,
as he had heard of the worthies of ancient history; he had visualized the
fabled splendours of San Francisco's great gambling houses, of the
excitements of her fervid, fevered life, as he might have visualized the
magnificences of pagan Rome; he had listened to tales of her street
brawls, her vast projects, the buccaneering raids of her big men, her
Vigilance Committee of the year before, as he would have listened to
the stories of one of Napoleon's veterans. Now, by the simple process
of a voyage that had seemed literally interminable but now was past, he
had landed in the very midst of fable. It was like dying, he told
Sherwood eagerly, like going irretrievably to a new planet. All his old
world now seemed as remote, as insubstantial, as phantomlike, as this
had seemed.
"Even yet I can't believe it's all so," he cried, walking excitedly back
and forth, and waving an extinct cigar. "I've got to see it, touch it! Why,
I know it all in advance. That must be where the Jenny Lind