A game of poker was started in a back room of one of the saloons on the Barbary Coast.  One of the players was a rancher named Toedt, a fellow-boarder at the Reno House, but the two other players were strangers; and there in that narrow, dirty room, sawdust on the floor, festoons of fly-specked red and blue tissue paper adorning the single swinging lamp, figures cut from bill-posters of the Black Crook pasted on the walls, there in the still hours after midnight, long after the barroom outside had been closed for the night, the last penny of Vandover’s estate was gambled away.

The game ended in a quarrel, Vandover, very drunk, and exasperated at his ill luck, accusing his friend Toedt, the rancher, of cheating.  Toedt kicked him in the stomach and made him abominably sick.  Then they went away and left Vandover alone in the little dirty room, racked with nausea, very drunk, fallen forward upon the table and crying into his folded arms.  After a little he went to sleep, but the nausea continued, nevertheless, and in a few moments he gagged and vomited.  He never moved.  He was too drunk to wake.  His hands and his coat-sleeves, the table all about him, were foul beyond words, but he slept on in the midst of it all, inert, stupefied, a great swarm of flies buzzing about his head and face.  It was the day after this that he had come to see Geary.

“Ah,” said Geary, as he came up, “it’s you, is it?  Well, I didn’t expect to see you again.  Sit down outside there in the hall and wait a few minutes.  I’m not ready to go yet—­or, wait; here, I tell you what to do.”  Geary wrote off a list of articles on a slip of paper and pushed it across the table toward Vandover, together with a little money.  “You get those at the nearest grocery and by the time you are back I’ll be ready to go.”

That day Geary took Vandover out to the Mission.  They went out in the cable-car, Geary sitting inside reading the morning’s paper, Vandover standing on the front platform, carrying the things that Geary had told him to buy:  a bar of soap, a scrubbing brush, some wiping cloths, a broom, and a pail.

Almost at the end of the car-line they got off and crossed over to where Geary’s property stood.  Vandover looked about him.  The ground on which his own block had once stood was now occupied by an immense red brick building with white stone trimmings; in front on either side of the main entrance were white stone medallions upon which were chiselled the head of a workman wearing the square paper cap that the workman never wears, and a bent-up forearm, the biceps enormous, the fist gripping the short hammer that the workman never uses.  An enormous round chimney sprouted from one corner; through the open windows came the vast purring of machinery.  It was a boot and shoe factory, built by the great concern who had bought the piece of property from Geary for fifteen thousand dollars, the same property Geary had bought from Vandover for eight.