ry street that converged to the water-front.
Those dust wracks, broken and narrowed by the buildings, lifted from the
outlying sand-dunes, and following a law that had driven them eastward
since California had risen from the deeps, had a curiously baffled,
stolidly persistent expression, as if the old sand-dunes knew their
rights and were determined to assert themselves so long as man left a
yard of them free.

Gwynne, in his solitary moments, when even his law-books were closed,
had recalled the stories of San Francisco, past and present, told him by
Isabel, and they had given rise to many whimsies. California, he still
all but disliked, but he wondered at the haunting memory of the city he
had seen so briefly, and the odd almost pathetic appeal it had made to
his sympathies. He had concluded that it was the pioneer taint in his
English blood, and had blinked in sudden wonder before the fact of his
close kinship, not only to that old romantic Spanish element, but to the
brilliant adventurous lawless race of men that had made the city great
and famous, then passed on into the kingdom of darkness leaving their
moral rottenness in its foundations, and, pulsing above, all their old
brave indomitable and progressive spirit. Although he had found it no
rival to his studies and his ranch, still he had given it more thought
than he was aware, and not only to its picturesque psychology, but as
the seat of a possible business adventure. To raise a large sum of money
on the San Francisco real estate--the common property of his mother and
himself--and erect a great office building of steel and reinforced
concrete, would add enormously to his own and his mother's incomes, but
on the other hand it would stand in the midst of acres of wooden
buildings and shanties, and the risk of a great fire--whose momentum
would sweep through any fireproof building--was one forgotten neither by
the insurance agents nor the chief of the fire department, who was said
to keep thousands of tons of dynamite in the city with which to
segregate the always expected conflagration. It was possible that no
insurance company would take the risk on an expensive building in such a
quarter. On the other hand it was as certain as the present wealth of
the city, that such a building would have hundreds of companions in the
next ten years, and the undesirable, immoral, and generally drunken
element, so largely responsible for the continual fires of the district,
wo