encroached upon. He restrapped the portmanteau and replaced it under the
table, locked the door, gave the key to the office clerk, saying that
any one who called upon him was to await his return, and sallied forth.
A fresh wind and a blue sky of scudding clouds were all that remained
of last night's storm. As he made his way to the fateful wharf, still
deserted except by an occasional "wharf-rat,"--as the longshore vagrant
or petty thief was called,--he wondered at his own temerity of last
night, and the trustfulness of his friend in yielding up his portmanteau
to a stranger in such a place. A low drinking saloon, feebly disguised
as a junk shop, stood at the corner, with slimy green steps leading to
the water.

The wharf was slowly decaying, and here and there were occasional gaps
in the planking, as dangerous as the one from which he had escaped the
night before. He thought again of the warning he might have given to
the stranger; but he reflected that as a seafaring man he must have been
familiar with the locality where he had landed. But had he landed there?
To Randolph's astonishment, there was no sign or trace of any late
occupation of the wharf, and the ship whose crossyards he had seen dimly
through the darkness the night before was no longer there. She might
have "warped out" in the early morning, but there was no trace of her
in the stream or offing beyond. A bark and brig quite dismantled at an
adjacent wharf seemed to accent the loneliness. Beyond, the open channel
between him and Verba Buena Island was racing with white-maned seas and
sparkling in the shifting sunbeams. The scudding clouds above him drove
down the steel-blue sky. The lateen sails of the Italian fishing boats
were like shreds of cloud, too, blown over the blue and distant bay.
His ears sang, his eyes blinked, his pulses throbbed, with the untiring,
fierce activity of a San Francisco day.