I

Randolph Trent stepped from the Stockton boat on the San Francisco
wharf, penniless, friendless, and unknown. Hunger might have been added
to his trials, for, having paid his last coin in passage money, he had
been a day and a half without food. Yet he knew it only by an occasional
lapse into weakness as much mental as physical. Nevertheless, he was
first on the gangplank to land, and hurried feverishly ashore, in that
vague desire for action and change of scene common to such irritation;
yet after mixing for a few moments with the departing passengers, each
selfishly hurrying to some rendezvous of rest or business, he insensibly
drew apart from them, with the instinct of a vagabond and outcast.
Although he was conscious that he was neither, but merely an
unsuccessful miner suddenly reduced to the point of soliciting work or
alms of any kind, he took advantage of the first crossing to plunge into
a side street, with a vague sense of hiding his shame.

A rising wind, which had rocked the boat for the last few hours, had now
developed into a strong sou'wester, with torrents of rain which swept
the roadway. His well-worn working clothes, fitted to the warmer
Southern mines, gave him more concern from their visible, absurd
contrast to the climate than from any actual sense of discomfort,
and his feverishness defied the chill of his soaking garments, as he
hurriedly faced the blast through the dimly lighted street. At the next
corner he paused; he had reached another, and, from its dilapidated
appearance, apparently an older wharf than that where he had landed,
but, like the first, it was still a straggling avenue leading toward the
higher and more animated part of the city. He again mechanically--for a
part of his trouble was a vague, undefined purpose--turned toward it.