in the planking, as dangerous as the one from which he had escaped the
night before. He thought again of the warning he might have given to
the stranger; but he reflected that as a seafaring man he must have been
familiar with the locality where he had landed. But had he landed there?
To Randolph's astonishment, there was no sign or trace of any late
occupation of the wharf, and the ship whose crossyards he had seen dimly
through the darkness the night before was no longer there. She might
have "warped out" in the early morning, but there was no trace of her
in the stream or offing beyond. A bark and brig quite dismantled at an
adjacent wharf seemed to accent the loneliness. Beyond, the open channel
between him and Verba Buena Island was racing with white-maned seas and
sparkling in the shifting sunbeams. The scudding clouds above him drove
down the steel-blue sky. The lateen sails of the Italian fishing boats
were like shreds of cloud, too, blown over the blue and distant bay.
His ears sang, his eyes blinked, his pulses throbbed, with the untiring,
fierce activity of a San Francisco day.
With something of its restlessness he hurried back to the hotel. Still
the stranger was not there, and no one had called for him. The room had
been put in order; the portmanteau, that sole connecting link with his
last night's experience, was under the table. He drew it out again, and
again subjected it to a minute examination. A few toilet articles, not
of the best quality, which he had overlooked at first, the linen, the
buckskin purse, the memorandum book, and the suit of clothes he stood
in, still comprised all he knew of his benefactor. He counted the money
in the purse; it amounted, with the Bank of England notes, to about
seventy dollars, as he could roughly guess. There was a scrap of paper,
the torn-off margin of a newspaper, lying in the purse, with an address
hastily scribbled in pencil. It gave, however, no name, only a number:
"85 California Street." It might be a clue. He put it, with the purse,
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