San Francisco awoke to a famine in butcher-knives, pans and candles.  Knives at first were used to gouge out auriferous rock, and soon these common household appurtenances brought as high as twenty-five dollars each.  Candles ere long were the equivalent of dollars, and pans were cheap at five dollars each.

Still San Francisco waited, though a constant dribble of departures made at last perceptible inroads on its population.  Then, one May afternoon, the fat was in the fire.

Samuel Brannan, who had been at his store in New Helvetia, rode through the streets, holding a pint flask of gold-dust in one hand, swinging his hat with the other, and whooping like a madman: 

“Gold!  Gold!  Gold!  From the American River!”

As if he had applied a torch to the hayrick of popular interest, San Francisco flamed with fortune-seeking ardor.  Next morning many stores remained unopened.  There were neither clerks nor proprietors.  Soldiers fled from the garrison, and Lieutenant William T. Sherman was seen galloping northward with a provost guard to recapture a score of deserters.  Children found no teacher at the new schoolhouse and for months its doors were barred.  Cargoes, half-discharged, lay on the wharves, unwarehoused.  Crews left en masse for the mines, and ships floated unmanned at anchor.  Many of them never went to sea again.

On every road a hegira of the gold-mad swept northward, many afoot, with heavy burdens, the more fortunate with horses and pack animals.  Men, old, young, richly dressed and ragged—­men of all conditions, races, nations.

The end of May, in 1848, found San Francisco a manless Eden.  Stanley, struggling with a few elderly Indians and squaws to carry on his work, bemoaned the madcap folly bitterly.

[Illustration:  Samuel Brannan rode through the streets, holding a pint flask of gold-dust in one hand ... and whooping like a madman:  “Gold!  Gold!  Gold!  From the American River!”]

But Benito, with shining eyes, rode on to what seemed Destiny and Fortune.  Ward & Smith’s little shop lay far behind him.  Even his sister and her busy husband.  Before him beckoned Gold!  The lure, adventure, danger of it, like a smiling woman.  And his spirit stretched forth longing arms.

CHAPTER XVII

THE QUEST OF FORTUNE

By the end of June more than half of San Francisco’s population had departed for the mines.  They went by varied routes, mostly on horseback.  Rowboats, which a month ago had sold for $50, were now bringing ten times that sum, for many took the river route to the gold fields.  Others toiled their way through the hills and the Livermore Valley.  The ferry across Carquinez Straits at Benicia, was thronged to the danger of sinking.

Those who stayed at home awaited eagerly the irregular mails which straggled in from unsettled, unorganized, often inaccessible regions where men cut and slashed the bowels of the earth for precious metal, or waded knee-deep in icy torrents, washing their sands in shallow containers for golden residue.  No letter had come from Benito to Inez or Adrian.  But Robert Windham wrote from Monterey as follows: