and passed close by a huge Cape Horner,
a great deep-sea tramp, all sails set and drawing, rolling slowly and
leisurely in seas that made the schooner dance.

At last the Farallones looked over the ocean's edge to the north; then
came the whistling-buoy, the Seal Rocks, the Heads, Point Reyes, the
Golden Gate flanked with the old red Presidio, Lime Point with its
watching cannon; and by noon of a gray and boisterous day, under a lusty
wind and a slant of rain, just five months after her departure, the
"Bertha Millner" let go her anchor in San Francisco Bay some few hundred
yards off the Lifeboat Station.

In this berth the schooner was still three or four miles from the
city and the water-front. But Moran detested any nearer approach to
civilization, and Wilbur himself was willing to avoid, at least for one
day, the publicity which he believed the "Bertha's" reappearance was
sure to attract. He remembered, too, that the little boat carried with
her a fortune of $100,000, and decided that until it could be safely
landed and stored it was not desirable that its existence should be
known along "the Front."

For days, weeks even, Wilbur had looked eagerly forward to this return
to his home. He had seen himself again in his former haunts, in his
club, and in the houses along Pacific avenue where he was received;
but no sooner had the anchor-chain ceased rattling in the "Bertha's"
hawse-pipe than a strange revulsion came upon him. The new man that
seemed to have so suddenly sprung to life within him, the Wilbur who
was the mate of the "Bertha Millner," the Wilbur who belonged to Moran,
believed that he could see nothing to be desired in city life. For
him was the unsteady deck of a schooner, and the great winds and the
tremendous wheel of the ocean's rim, and the horizon that ever fled
before his following prow; so he told himself, so he believed. What
attractions could the city offer him? What amusements? what excitements?
He had been flung off the smoothly spinning circumference of
well-ordered life out into the void.

He had known romance, and the spell of the great, simple, and primitive
emotions; he had sat down to eat with buccaneers; he had seen the
fierce, quick leap of unleashed passions, and had felt death swoop close
at his nape and pass like a swift spurt of cold air. City life, his old
life, had no charm for him now. Wilbur honestly believed that he
was changed to his heart's core. He thought that, like Mora