Overflowing with gratitude at a hospitality so like that of his reckless brethren of the mines, Randolph picked up the portmanteau and started for the hotel.  He walked warily now, with a new interest in life, and then, suddenly thinking of his own miraculous escape, he paused, wondering if he ought not to warn his benefactor of the perils of the rotten wharf; but he had already disappeared.  The bag was not heavy, but he found that in his exhausted state this new exertion was telling, and he was glad when he reached the hotel.  Equally glad was he in his dripping clothes to slip by the porter, and with the key in his pocket ascend unnoticed to 74.

Yet had his experience been larger he might have spared himself that sensitiveness.  For the hotel was one of those great caravansaries popular with the returning miner.  It received him and his gold dust in his worn-out and bedraggled working clothes, and returned him the next day as a well-dressed citizen on Montgomery Street.  It was hard indeed to recognize the unshaven, unwashed, and unkempt “arrival” one met on the principal staircase at night in the scrupulously neat stranger one sat opposite to at breakfast the next morning.  In this daily whirl of mutation all identity was swamped, as Randolph learned to know.

At present, finding himself in a comfortable bedroom, his first act was to change his wet clothes, which in the warmer temperature and the decline of his feverishness now began to chill him.  He opened the portmanteau and found a complete suit of clothing, evidently a foreign make, well preserved, as if for “shore-going.”  His pride would have preferred a humbler suit as lessening his obligation, but there was no other.  He discovered the purse, a chamois leather bag such as miners and travelers carried, which contained a dozen gold pieces and some paper notes.  Taking from it a single coin to defray the expenses of a meal, he restrapped the bag, and leaving the key in the door lock for the benefit of his returning host, made his way to the dining room.

For a moment he was embarrassed when the waiter approached him inquisitively, but it was only to learn the number of his room to “charge” the meal.  He ate it quickly, but not voraciously, for his appetite had not yet returned, and he was eager to get back to the room and see the stranger again and return to him the coin which was no longer necessary.

But the stranger had not yet arrived when he reached the room.  Over an hour had elapsed since their strange meeting.  A new fear came upon him:  was it possible he had mistaken the hotel, and his benefactor was awaiting him elsewhere, perhaps even beginning to suspect not only his gratitude but his honesty!  The thought made him hot again, but he was helpless.  Not knowing the stranger’s name, he could not inquire without exposing his situation to the landlord.  But again, there was the key, and it was scarcely possible that it fitted another