nt ashore in the ship's yawl and landed in
the city on a literally perfect day in early November. It seemed many
years since he had been there. The drizzly morning upon which the _Santa
Rosa_ had cast off was already too long ago to be remembered. The city
itself as he walked up Market Street toward Kearney seemed to have taken
on a strange appearance.

It was Sunday, the downtown streets were deserted except for the
cable-cars and an occasional newsboy. The stores were closed and in
their vestibules one saw the peddlers who were never there on week-days,
venders of canes and peddlers of glue with heavy weights attached to
mended china plates.

Vandover had had no breakfast and was conscious of feeling desperately
hungry. He determined to breakfast downtown, as he would arrive home too
late for one meal and too early for the other.

Almost all of his money had been lost with the _Mazatlan_; he found he
had but a dollar left. He would have preferred breakfasting at the
Grillroom, but concluded he was too shabby in appearance, and he knew he
would get more for his money at the Imperial.

It was absolutely quiet in the Imperial at the hour when he arrived. The
single bartender was reading a paper, and in the passage between the
private rooms a Chinese with a clean napkin wound around his head was
polishing the brass and woodwork. In the passage he met Toby, the
red-eyed waiter, just going off night duty, without his usual apron or
white coat, dressed very carefully, wearing a brown felt hat.

"Why, how do you do, Mr. Vandover?" exclaimed Toby. "Haven't seen you
round here for some time." Vandover was about to answer when the other
interrupted:

"Well, what's happened to _you_? Look as though you'd been drawn through
hell backward and beaten with a cat!"

In fact Vandover's appearance was extraordinary. His hat was torn and
broken, and his clothes, stained with tar and dirt, shrunken and
wrinkled by sea-water. His shoes were fastened with bits of tarred rope;
he was wearing a red flannel shirt with bone buttons which the
boatkeeper on the pilot boat had given him, tied at the neck with a
purple handkerchief of pongee silk; his hair was long, and a week's
growth of beard was upon his lip and cheeks.

"That's a fact," he answered grimly. "I do look queer. I was in a wreck
down the coast," he added hastily.

"The _Mazatlan!_" exclaimed Toby. "That's a fact; the papers have been
full of it. That's so, you were one of