r both, and it was through him that Martin learned the refinements of
food, drank his first champagne, and made acquaintance with Rhenish
wines.

But Brissenden was always an enigma. With the face of an ascetic, he
was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary. He was
unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living; and yet,
dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it. He was possessed by a
madness to live, to thrill, "to squirm my little space in the cosmic dust
whence I came," as he phrased it once himself. He had tampered with
drugs and done many strange things in quest of new thrills, new
sensations. As he told Martin, he had once gone three days without
water, had done so voluntarily, in order to experience the exquisite
delight of such a thirst assuaged. Who or what he was, Martin never
learned. He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent
grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Martin was steadily losing his battle. Economize as he would, the
earnings from hack-work did not balance expenses. Thanksgiving found him
with his black suit in pawn and unable to accept the Morses' invitation
to dinner. Ruth was not made happy by his reason for not coming, and the
corresponding effect on him was one of desperation. He told her that he
would come, after all; that he would go over to San Francisco, to the
Transcontinental office, collect the five dollars due him, and with it
redeem his suit of clothes.

In the morning he borrowed ten cents from Maria. He would have borrowed
it, by preference, from Brissenden, but that erratic individual had
disappeared. Two weeks had passed since Martin had seen him, and he
vainly cudgelled his brains for some cause of offence. The ten cents
carried Martin across the ferry to San Francisco, and as he walked up
Market Street he speculated upon his predicament in case he failed to
collect the money. There would then be no way for him to return to
Oakland, and he knew no one in San Francisco from whom to borrow another
ten cents.

The door to the Transcontinental office was ajar, and Martin, in the act
of opening it, was brought to a sudden pause by a loud voice from within,
which exclaimed:- "But that is not the question, Mr. Ford." (Ford,
Martin knew, from his correspondence, to be the editor's name.) "The
question is, are you prepared to pay?--cash, and cash down, I mean? I am
not interes