desperadoes; long-haired men from the trapping countries; hard-fisted,
sardonic state of Maine men fresh from their rivers; and Indian fighters
from the Western Reserve; grasping, shrewd commercial Yankees; fire-eating
Southern politicians; lawyers, doctors, merchants, chiefs, and thiefs, the
well-educated and the ignorant, the high-minded and the scalawags, all
dumped down together on a sand hill to work out their destinies; a city
whose precedents, whose morals, whose laws, were made or adapted on the
spot; where might in some form or another--revolver, money, influence--made
its only right; whose history ranged in three years the gamut of human
passion, strife, and development; whose background was the fabled El Dorado
whence the gold in unending floods poured through its sluices. To the
outside world tales of these things had come. They did not lose in the
journey. The vast loom of actual occurrences rose above the horizon like
mirages. Names and events borrowed a half-legendary quality from distances,
as elsewhere from time. Keith had heard of Coleman, of Terry, of Broderick,
Brannan, Gwin, Geary, as he had heard of the worthies of ancient history;
he had visualized the fabled splendours of San Francisco's great gambling
houses, of the excitements of her fervid, fevered life, as he might have
visualized the magnificences of pagan Rome; he had listened to tales of her
street brawls, her vast projects, the buccaneering raids of her big men,
her Vigilance Committee of the year before, as he would have listened to
the stories of one of Napoleon's veterans. Now, by the simple process of a
voyage that had seemed literally interminable but now was past, he had
landed in the very midst of fable. It was like dying, he told Sherwood
eagerly, like going irretrievably to a new planet. All his old world now
seemed as remote, as insubstantial, as phantomlike, as this had seemed.

"Even yet I can't believe it's all so," he cried, walking excitedly back
and forth, and waving an extinct cigar. "I've got to see it, touch it! Why,
I know it all in advance. That must be where the Jenny Lind Theatre stood--