the Golden
Gate with their numbers. From their crowded decks, swarms of men,
ministers of God and ministers of the devil--learned, ignorant,
murderers, thieves--women, traitors to their kind, pour forth and swarm
over the land. Mad with the lust of Gold, they burrow in the beds of
streams, tear and claw at mountain-gulch and slope. Tented towns rise
like night-grown fungi, and wither away, to spring again into existence,
lawless, in a land where law is not, in a land that no man owns. Through
days that are full of sweating toil and nights that cover vigils of lust
and death, the ferment of hell grows in the blood of human beings who
have left their God with their country._

_Another wave of the wand and God reclaims his own. The courthouse and
the gibbet, without mercy but full of stern justice, have taken the
place of the murderer's greed that sharpened the murderer's knife._

_From a thousand hills, a thousand streams have quickened the arid acres
of drifting sand into fruitful life. League on league are fields of
waving grain. League on league are green vineyards with their clustered
fruit blushing and sweetening in the sun. League on league happy homes
are all but hidden by dark-leaved trees, with fruit yellow as the golden
apples of the Hesperides._

_And this is California! For unknown ages more desolate and terrible
than Dante's wildest dream of the Inferno, in fifty years surpassing his
picture of Paradise. Barred from the world on one side by ten thousand
miles of stormy seas, on the other by tier on tier of mountains and
miles on miles of dreary desert, were the whole United States to fade as
did the cities of Nineveh and Babylon, California would still live in
song and story, more golden than the mines of Ophir, more beautiful than
the storied plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates._

The Vision of Elijah Berl

CHAPTER ONE

"But I know what I need. I need you."

There was a dogged tone in Elijah Berl's voice that was almost sullenly
insistent.

"I have given you all that I have to give, Elijah. You don't need me.
What you need is money, and that's what I haven't got."

"And I say again that I have thought of this for five years. Ever since
I left New England. I have not been alone, I have been guided. Step by
step I have gone over my ground up to this point. I have studied men as
carefully as I have my work. You are the man I have selected, and you
are the man I want."

Ralph Winsto