It was a picture to impress one with its mystery and magnificence.  The two men gazed upon it with an oddly blended sense of awe and exultation.  And as they looked the sunlight triumphed, scattering the fog into queer floating shapes, luminous and fraught with weird suggestions of castle, dome, of turret, minaret and towering spire.  One might have thought a splendid city lay before them in the barren cove of sand-dunes, a city impalpable, yet triumphant, with its hint of destiny; translucent silver and gold, shifting and amazing—­gone in a flash as the sun’s full radiance burst forth through the vapor-screen.

“It was like a sign from Heaven!” Garvez breathed.

Ortega crossed himself.  The younger man went on, “Something like a voice within me seemed to say ’Here shall you find your home—­you and your children and their children’s children.’”

Ortega looked down at the dawn-gold on the waters and the tree-ringed cove.  Here and there small herds of deer drank from a stream or browsed upon the scant verdure of sandy meadows.  In a distant grove a score of Indian tepees raised their cone shapes to the sky; lazy plumes of blue-white smoke curled upward.  Canoes, rafts of tules, skillfully bound together, carried dark-skinned natives over wind-tossed waters, the ends of their double paddles flashing in the sun.

“One may not know the ways of God.”  Ortega spoke a trifle bruskly.  “What is plain to me is that we cannot journey farther.  This estero cuts our path in two.  And in three days we cannot circle it to reach the Contra Costa.  We must return and make report to the commander.”

He wheeled and shouted a command to his troopers.  The cavalcade rode south but young Francisco turning in the saddle cast a farewell glance toward the shining bay.  “Port O’ Gold!” he whispered raptly, “some day men shall know your fame around the world!”

PORT O’ GOLD

CHAPTER I

YERBA BUENA

It was 1845.  Three quarters of a century had passed since young Francisco Garvez, as he rode beside Portola’s chief of Scouts, glimpsed the mystic vision of a city rising from the sandy shores of San Francisco Bay.

Garvez, so tradition held, had taken for his spouse an Indian maiden educated by the mission padres of far San Diego.  For his service as soldado of old Spain he had been granted many acres near the Mission of Dolores and his son, through marriage, had combined this with another large estate.  There a second generation of the Garvez family had looked down from a palatial hacienda upon spreading grain-fields, wide-reaching pastures and corrals of blooded stock.  They had seen the Mission era wax and wane and Mexico cast off the governmental shackles of Madrid.  They had looked askance upon the coming of the “Gringo” and Francisco Garvez II, in the feebleness of age,