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.
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