It was the morning of December 24, 1849—­the first Christmas eve following the gold rush.  Windham, who had lain awake since midnight, pondered upon this and other things.  Events had succeeded each other with such riotous activity of late that life seemed more like a dream than a reality.  His turbulent months at the mines, his high preliminary hopes of fortune, their gradual waning to a slow despair; the advent of James Burthen and his daughter; then love, his partner’s murder and the girl’s abduction; his pursuit and illness.  Alice’s rescue and their marriage; his return to find the claim covered with snow; finally a clerical post in San Francisco.

A sudden distaste for the feverish, riotous town assailed him—­a longing for the peace and beauty of those broad paternal acres he had lost upon the gaming table wrenched his heart.

He pictured Alice in the old rose patio, where his American father had wooed his Spanish mother.

Involuntarily his steps turned eastward.  At Sacramento and Leidesdorff streets he left solid ground to tread a four-foot board above the water, to the theoretical line of Sansome street; thence south upon a similar foothold to the solid ground of Bush street, where an immense sand-hill with a hollow in its middle, like a crater, struck across the path.  Some called this depression Thieves Hollow, for in it deserting sailors, ticket-of-leave men from Botany Bay prison colony and all manner of human riff-raff consorted for nefarious intrigue.

Benito, mounting the slope, looked down at a welter of tents, shacks, deck houses and galleys of wrecked ships.  He had expected their occupants to be asleep, for they were nighthawks who reversed man’s usual order in the prosecution of nocturnal and ill-favored trades.  He was astonished to note a general activity.  At the portholes of dwellings retrieved from the wreck of the sea, unkempt bearded faces stared; smoke leaped from a dozen rickety, unstable chimneys, and in the open several groups of men and women plied frying pans and coffee pots over driftwood fires.

Benito observed them with a covert interest.  A black-browed man with a shaggy beard and something leonine about him, seemed the master of the chief of this godless band.  He moved among them, giving orders, and with two companions finally ascended to the top.  Benito, concealing himself behind a scrub oak, watched them, animatedly conversing, as they descended and picked their way inland toward the Square.  So swift their movements and so low their tones he could not make out the tenor of their discourse.  He caught the words, “like tow,” but that was all.  Musingly, he went on.

Up the broad and muddy path to Market street, thence west again to Third, he made his way.  Now south to Mission and once more west, a favored route for caballeros.  Benito had never traveled it before afoot.  But his horse had succumbed to the rigors of that frantic ride in pursuit of Alice and McTurpin several months ago.  Mounts were a luxury now.