head of us. I counted 'em.... Some have been in line
since last night I'm told. They're up near the front and holding places
for others ... getting $20 cash for their time."

Broderick and Benito decided not to wait. They made another journey
round the town, watching Chinese builders erecting long rows of
habitations that had come in sections from Cathay. Everywhere was hasty,
feverish construction--flimsy houses going up like mushrooms over night
to meet the needs of San Francisco's swiftly augmenting populace.

"It's like a house of cards," said Broderick, who had been a fireman in
New York. "Lord help us if it ever starts to burn. Even our drinking
water comes from Sausalito across the Bay."

CHAPTER XXV

RETRIEVING A BIRTHRIGHT

Benito Windham stole from his dwelling, closing the door softly after
him so Alice, his wife, might not wake. A faint rose dawn colored the
Contra Costa ridge. From a few of the huts and larger buildings which
sprinkled San Francisco's hills and hollows so haphazardly, curls of
blue white wood smoke rose into the windless air. Here and there some
belated roisterer staggered toward his habitation. But otherwise all was
still, quicscent. San Francisco slept.

It was the morning of December 24, 1849--the first Christmas eve
following the gold rush. Windham, who had lain awake since midnight,
pondered upon this and other things. Events had succeeded each other
with such riotous activity of late that life seemed more like a dream
than a reality. His turbulent months at the mines, his high preliminary
hopes of fortune, their gradual waning to a slow despair; the advent of
James Burthen and his daughter; then love, his partner's murder and the
girl's abduction; his pursuit and illness. Alice's rescue and their
marriage; his return to find the claim covered with snow; finally a
clerical post in San Francisco.

A sudden distaste for the feverish, riotous town assailed him--a longing
for the peace and beauty of those broad paternal acres he had lost upon
the gaming table wrenched his heart.

He pictured Alice in the old rose patio, where his American father had
wooed his Spanish mother.

Involuntarily his steps turned eastward. At Sacramento and Leidesdorff
streets he left solid ground to tread a four-foot board above the water,
to the theoretical line of Sansome street; thence south upon a similar
foothold to the solid ground of Bush street, where an immense sand-*hill
with a hollow in