For reasons of economy Thompson put himself up at a cheap rooming-house well out Market Street. His window looked out upon that thoroughfare which is to San Francisco what the aorta is to the arterial system. Gazing down from a height of four stories he could see a never-ending stir, hear the roar of vehicular traffic which swelled from a midnight murmur to a deep-mouthed roar in the daylight hours. And on either side the traffic lane there swept a stream of people like the current of the Stikine River.
He was not a stranger to cities, no rustic gazing open-mouthed at throngs and tall buildings. His native city of Toronto was a fair-sized place as American and Canadian cities go. But it was not a seaport. It was insular rather than cosmopolitan; it took its character from its locale rather than from a population gathered from the four quarters of the globe. San Francisco—is San Francisco—a melting-pot of peoples, blown through with airs from far countries, not wholly rid of the aura of Drake and the conquistadores of Spain even in these latter days of commercial expansion. And all of San Francisco's greatness and color and wealth is crowded upon a peninsula, built upon rolling hills. What the city lacks of spaciousness is compensated by action. Life goes at a great pace.
It made a profound impression on Thompson, since he had reached the stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any source whatever. Those hurrying multitudes, that unending stir, the kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that environment, so he felt—as he had not at first felt in the North—that in time, with effort, he would become an integral part of this. Here the big game was played. It was the antithesis of the North inasmuch as all this activity had a purely human source and was therefore in some measure akin to himself. The barriers to be overcome and the problems to be solved were social and monetary. It was less a case of adapting himself by painful degrees to a hostile primitive environment than a forthright competitive struggle to make himself a master in this sort of environment.
How he should go about it he had no definite idea. He would have to be an opportunist, he foresaw. He had no illusions about his funds in hand being a prime lever to success. That four hundred dollars would not last forever, nor would it be replenished by any effort save his own. It afforded him a breathing spell, a chance to look about, to discover where and how he should begin at the task of proving himself upon the world.
He had no misgivings about making a living. He could always fall back on common labor. But a common laborer is socially of little worth, financially of still less value. Thompson had to make money—using the phrase in its commonly accepted sense. He subscribed to that doctrine, because he was beginning to see that in a world where purchasing power is the prime requisite a man without money is the slave of every untoward circumstance. Money loomed before Thompson as the key to freedom, decent surroundings, a chance to pursue knowledge, to so shape his life that he could lend a hand or a dollar to the less fortunate.
He still had those stirrings of altruism, a ready sympathy, an instinct to help. Only he saw very clearly that he could not be of any benefit to even a limited circle of his fellow men when at every turn of his hand economic pressure bore so hard upon him as an individual. He began to see that getting on in the world called for complete concentration of his efforts upon his own well-being. A pauper cannot be a philanthropist. One cannot take nothing from nothing and make something. To be of use to others he must first grasp what he required for himself.
Once he was settled and familiar enough with San Francisco to get from the Ferry Building to the Mission and from the Marina to China Basin without the use of a map he began to cast about for an opening. To make an apprentice beginning in any of the professions required education. He had that, he considered. It did not occur to him by what devious routes men arrived at distinction in the professions. He thought of studying for the law until the reception he got in various offices where he went seeking for information discouraged him in that field. Law students were a drug on the market.
"My dear young man," one kindly, gray-haired attorney told him, "you'd be wasting your time. The law means a tremendous amount of intellectual drudgery, and a slim chance of any great success unless you are gifted with a special aptitude for certain branches of it. All the great opportunities for a young man nowadays lie in business and salesmanship."
Business and salesmanship being two things of which Thompson knew himself to be profoundly ignorant, he made little headway. A successful business operation, so far as he could observe, called for capital which he did not possess. Salesmanship, when he delved into the method of getting his foot on that rung of the ladder, required special training, knowledge of a technical sort. That is, really successful salesmanship. The other kind consisted of selling goods over a counter for ten dollars per—with an excellent chance of continuing in that unenviable situation until old age overtook him. This was an age of specialists—and he had no specialty. Moreover, every avenue that he investigated seemed to be jammed full of young men clamoring for a chance. The skilled trades had their unions, their fixed hours of labor, fixed rates of pay. The big men, the industrial managers, the men who stood out in the professions, they had their own orbit into which he could not come until he had made good. There were the two forces, the top and the bottom of the workaday world. And he was in between, like a fish out of water.
Wherefore Thompson continued looking about for a number of weeks. He looked for work, without finding it save in street gangs and at labor that was mostly done by Greeks and Italians fresh from Europe. A man had to begin at the bottom, he realized, but he did not desire to begin at the bottom of a ditch. He did not seek for such small clerical jobs as he knew himself able to fill. He did not mean to sit on a high stool and ruin his eyes over interminable rows of figures. That much at least the North had done for him—fixed him firmly in the resolve that if he had to sweat for a pittance it would not be within four walls, behind dusty windows. He could always go back to the woods. Sometimes he thought he would better do that out of hand, instead of wasting his time and money seeking in a city for the goose that was to lay him golden eggs.
When he was not hard on the trail of some definite opening sheer loneliness drove him out on the streets. His room was a cheerless place, a shelter for him when he slept and nothing more. Many a time, lacking any real objective, he covered miles of San Francisco's streets. He sought out parks, beaches, public buildings. At night he would drift, a silent, lonely spirit, among the crowds that ebbed and flowed in the downtown district that was a blaze of light.
That restless wandering brought him by chance one evening along a certain avenue which shall be nameless, because it is no longer the haunt of the soap-boxer. This curious thoroughfare lay upon the borderline between the smart shopping district and San Francisco's Chinatown. For a matter of two or three blocks the street was given over to an impromptu form of public assembly, a poor man's debating ground, an open forum where any citizen with a grievance, a theory, or even merely the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure of an audience. In the evening there was always a crowd. Street fakirs plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap, suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes and quarters from the crowd.
But the street fakirs were in the minority. The percentage of gullible ones was small. Mostly it was a place of oratory, the haunt of propagandists. Thompson listened to Social Democrats, Social Laborites, syndicalists, radicals, revolutionaries, philosophical anarchists, men with social and economic theories of the extremist type. But they talked well. They had a grasp of their subject. They had on tap tremendous quantities of all sorts of knowledge. The very extent of their vocabulary amazed Thompson. He heard scientific and historical authorities quoted and disputed, listened to arguments waged on every sort of ground—from biological complexities which he could not understand to agricultural statistics which he understood still less. A lot of it perplexed and irritated him, because the terminology was over his head. And the fact that he could not follow these men in full intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those things for himself. He got an inkling of the economic problems that afflict society. He found himself assenting offhand to the reasonable theorem that a man who produced wealth was entitled to what he produced. He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation. There was thus revived in him some of those troublesome perplexities which Sam and Sophie Carr had first aroused.
In the end, lacking profitable employment and growing dubious of obtaining it during the slack industrial season which then hovered over California, he turned to the serried shelves of the city library. Once started along this road he became an habitué, spending in a particular chair at a certain table anywhere from three to six hours a day, deep in a book, not to be deterred therefrom by the usual series of mental shocks which a man, full-fed all his life on conventions and dogmas and superficial thinking, gets when he first goes seriously and critically into the fields of scientific conclusions.
He was seated at a reading table one afternoon, nursing his chin in one hand, deep in a volume of Huxley's "Lectures and Essays" which was making a profound impression upon him through its twin merits of simple, concise language and breadth of vision. There was in it a rational explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious, the inexplicable. Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books. He began to perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was something more than a name in geology. And he was so immersed in what he read, in the printed page and the inevitable speculations that arose in his mind as he conned it, that he was only subconsciously aware of a woman passing his seat.
Slowly, as a man roused from deep sleep looks about him for the cause of dimly heard noises, so now Thompson's eyes lifted from his book, and, with his mind still half upon the last sentence read, his gaze followed the girl now some forty feet distant in the long, quiet room.
There was no valid reason why the rustle of a woman's skirt in passing, the faint suggestion of some delicate perfume, should have focussed his attention. He saw scores of women and girls in the library every day. He passed thousands on the streets. This one, now, upon whom he gazed with a detached interest, was like many others, a girl of medium height, slender, well-dressed.
That was all—until she paused at a desk to have speech with a library assistant. She turned then so that her face was in profile, so that a gleam of hair showed under a wide leghorn hat. And Thompson thought there could scarcely be two women in the world with quite so marvellous a similarity of face and figure and coloring, nor with quite the same contour of chin and cheek, nor the same thick hair, yellow like the husks of ripe corn or a willow leaf in the autumn. He was just as sure that by some strange chance Sophie Carr stood at that desk as he was sure of himself sitting in an oak chair at a reading table. And he rose impulsively to go to her.
She turned away in the same instant and walked quickly down a passage between the rows of shelved books. Thompson could not drive himself to hurry, nor to call. He was sure—yet not too sure. He hated to make himself appear ridiculous. Nor was he overconfident that if it were indeed Sophie Carr she would be either pleased or willing to renew their old intimacy. And so, lagging faint-heartedly, he lost her in the maze of books.
But he did not quite give up. He was on the second floor. The windows on a certain side overlooked the main entrance. He surmised that she would be leaving. So he crossed to a window that gave on the library entrance and waited for an eternity it seemed, but in reality a scant five minutes, before he caught sight of a mauve suit on the broad steps. Looking from above he could be less sure than when she stood at the desk. But the girl halted at the foot of the steps and standing by a red roadster turned to look up at the library building. The sun fell full upon her upturned face. The distance was one easily to be spanned by eyes as keen as his. Thompson was no longer uncertain. He was suddenly, acutely unhappy. The old ghosts which he had thought well laid were walking, rattling their dry bones forlornly in his ears.
Sophie got into the machine. The red roadster slid off with gears singing their metallic song as she shifted through to high. Thompson watched it turn a corner, and went back to his table with a mind past all possibility of concentrating upon anything between the covers of a book. He put the volume back on its shelf at last and went out to walk the streets in aimless, restless fashion, full of vivid, painful memories, troubled by a sudden flaring up of emotions which had lain so long dormant he had supposed them dead.
Here in San Francisco he had not expected to behold Sophie in the enjoyment of her good fortune. Yet there was no reason why she should not be here. Thompson damned under his breath the blind chance which had set him aboard the wrong steamer at Wrangel.
But, he said to himself after a time, what did it matter? In a city of half a million they were as far apart as if he were still at Lone Moose and she God only knew where. That powerful roadster, the sort of clothes she wore, the general air of well-being which he had begun to recognize as a characteristic of people whose social and financial position is impregnable—these things served to intensify the gulf between them which their radical differences of outlook had originally opened. No, Sophie Carr's presence in San Francisco could not possibly make any difference to him. He repeated this emphatically—with rather more emphasis than seemed necessary.
But he found it did make a difference, a profoundly disturbing difference. He had grown insulated against the memory of Sophie Carr tugging at his heartstrings as the magnetic north pulls on the compass needle. He had grown free of both thought and hope of her. There had been too many other vital things pressing upon him these months of adventure in toil, too many undeniable, everyday factors of living present at every turn, hourly insistent upon being coped with, for him to nurse old sad dreams and longings. So he had come at last to think of that passionate yearning as a disease which had run its course.
Now, to his dismay, it recurred in all its old virulence, at a mere glimpse of Sophie. The floodgates of memory loosed bitter waters upon him, to make his heart heavy and spoil his days of passive content. It angered him to be so hopelessly troubled. But he could not gainsay the fact.
It made San Francisco a dreary waste. Try as he would he could not keep Sophie Carr from being the sun around which the lesser nebulæ of his thought continually revolved. He could no more help a wistful lookout for her upon San Francisco's streets than he could help breathing. Upon the rolling phalanxes of motor cars his gaze would turn with watchful expectation, and he took to scanning the faces of the passing thousands, a lonely, shy man with a queer glow in his eyes. That, of course, was only in moments of forgetfulness. Then he would pull himself together with a resentful irritation and tax himself with being a weak fool and stalk along about his business.
But his business had lost its savor, just as his soul had lost its slowly-won serenity. His business had no importance to any save himself. It had been merely to winter decently and economically with an eye cocked for such opportunities of self-betterment as came his way, and failing material opportunity in this Bagdad of the Pacific coast to make the most of his enforced idleness.
And now the magic of the colorful city had departed along with the magic of the books. The downtown streets ceased to be a wonderful human panorama which he loved to watch. The hushed reading room where he had passed so many contented hours was haunted by a presence that obscured the printed page. He would find himself staring absently at an open book, the words blurred and overlaid with mental pictures of Lone Moose, of Sophie sitting on the creek bank, of his unfinished church, forlorn and gaunt in the winter snows and the summer silences, of Tommy Ashe trudging across the meadow, gun in hand, of old Sam Carr in his moosehide chair, of the Indians, the forest, of all that goes to make the northern wilderness—and of himself moving through it all, an unheroic figure, a man who had failed in his work, in his love, in everything.
That, chiefly, was what stirred him anew to action, a suddenly acute sense of failure, of a consciousness that he was drifting instead of doing. He found himself jarred out of the even tenor of his way. San Francisco filled him with dissatisfaction now, knowing that she was there. If the mere knowledge that Sophie Carr dwelt somewhere within the city boundaries had power to make a mooning idiot of him, he said to himself testily, then he had better get out, go somewhere, get down to work, be at his fixed purpose of proving his mettle upon an obdurate world, and get her out of his mind in the process. He couldn't tune his whole existence to a sentimental craving for any woman—even such a woman as Sophie. He would, in the moment of such emotional genuflexions, have dissented with cynical bitterness from the poetic dictum that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Spurred by this mood he acted instinctively rather than with reasoned purpose. He gave up his room, packed his clothes and betook himself upon a work-seeking pilgrimage among the small, interior towns.
He left San Francisco in March. By May he had circulated all through the lower San Joaquin and farther abroad to the San Juan, and had turned his face again toward San Francisco Bay. At various jobs he had tried his hand, making a living such as it was, acquiring in addition thereto a store of first-hand experience in the social and monetary values of itinerant labor. He conceded that such experience might somehow be of use to a man. But he had had enough of it. He had a feeling of having tested California for his purposes—and of finding it wanting.
He had made up his mind to double on his tracks, to go north again, specifically to British Columbia, partly because Tommy was there, chiefly because Vancouver was a growing place on the edge of a vast, newly opened interior. He knew that if no greater thing offered, from that center there was always the avenue of the woods. He could qualify in that line. And in the woods even a common axeman exacted and received more democratic treatment than in this older region where industry ran in fixed channels, where class lines were more rigidly drawn, where common labor was cheap and unprivileged.
He hadn't been getting on in those three months. He had less money than when he started out—about enough now to get him up North and leave a hundred dollars or so for emergencies. No, decidedly he wasn't getting on—he was going down, he told himself. It dismayed him a little. It wasn't enough to be big and strong and willing. A mule could be that. The race was not to the swift or the strong. Not in modern industry, with its bewildering complexities. No, it fell to the trained, the specialist in knowledge, the man who could do something more efficiently, with greater precision than his fellows.
He could not do that—not yet. And so there was nothing in California for him, he decided. A man could no longer go West and grow up with the country—but he could go North.
Thompson was sitting on the border of a road that runs between San Mateo and the city when he definitely committed himself to doubling on his tracks, to counteracting the trick of fate which had sent him to a place where he did not wish to go. He was looking between the trees and out over an undulating valley floored with emerald fields, studded with oaks, backed by the bare Hamiltons to the east, and westward by the redwood-clad ruggedness of the Santa Cruz range. And he was not seeing this loveliness of landscape at all. He was looking far beyond and his eyes were full of miles upon miles of untrodden forest, the sanctuary of silence and furtive living things, of mountains that lifted snowy spires to heaven high over the glaciers that scarred their sides. And the smells that for a moment rose strongly in his nostrils were not the smells of palm and gum and poppy-dotted fields, but odors of pine and spruce and the smell of birchwood burning in campfires. He came out of that queer projection of mind into great distance with a slight shake of his head and a feeling of wonder. It had been very vivid. And it dawned upon him that for a minute he had grown sentimentally lonely for that grim, unconquered region where he had first learned the pangs of loneliness, where he had suffered in body and spirit until he had learned a lesson he would never forget while he lived.
The road itself, abutting upon stately homes and modest bungalows behind a leafy screen of Australian gums, ran straight as an arrow down the peninsula toward the city and the bay, a broad, smoothly asphalted highway upon that road where the feet of the Franciscan priests had traced theCamino Real. And down this highway both north and south there passed many motor cars swiftly and silently or with less speed and more noise, according to their quality and each driver's mood.
Thompson rested, watching them from the grassy level beneath a tree. He rather regretted now the impulse which had made him ship his bag and blanket roll from the last town, and undertake this solitary hike. He had merely humored a whim to walk through orchards and green fields in a leisurely fashion, to be a careless trudger for a day. True, he was saving carfare, but he observed dryly that he was expending many dollars' worth of energy—to say nothing of shoe leather. The pleasure of walking, paradoxically, was best achieved by sitting still in the shade. A midday sun was softening the asphalt with its fierce blaze. He looked idly at passing machines and wondered what the occupants thereof would say if he halted one and demanded a ride. He smiled.
He stared after a passing sedan driven by a uniformed chauffeur, one half the rear seat occupied by a fat, complacent woman, the other half of the ten-inch upholstery given over to an equally fat and complacent bulldog. And while he reflected in some little amusement at the circumstance which gave a pampered animal the seat of honor in a six-thousand-dollar car and sent an able-bodied young man trudging down the road in the heat and the dust, another machine came humming up from the south.
It was a red car, crowding the state limit for speed, and it swept down on Thompson with a subdued purr like a great cat before a fire. When it was almost abreast of him there burst from it a crack like the report of a shotgun. There was just a perceptible wabble of the machine. Its hot pace slackened abruptly. It rolled past and came to a stop beside the road fifty yards along—a massive brute of a red roadster driven by a slim girl in a pongee suit, a girl whose bare head was bound about with heavy braids of corn-yellow hair.
Thompson half rose—then sank back in momentary indecision. Perhaps it were wiser to let sleeping dogs lie. Then he smiled at the incongruity of that proverb applied to Sophie Carr.
He sat watching the machine for a minute. The halting of its burst of speed was no mystery to Thompson. Miss Carr proceeded with calm deliberation. She first resurrected a Panama hat from somewhere in the seat beside her and pinned it atop of her head. Then she got out, walked around to the front wheel, poked it tentatively once or twice, and proceeded about the business of getting out a jack and a toolkit.
By the time Thompson decided that in common decency he should offer to lend a hand and thus was moved to rise and approach the disabled car she had the jack under the front axle and was applying a brace wrench to the rim bolts. But the rim bolts that hold on a five-inch tire are not designed to unscrew too easily. Sophie had started one with an earnest tug and was twisting stoutly at the second when he reached her. He knew by the impersonal glance she gave him that he was to her merely a casual stranger.
"May I help you?" he said politely. "A big tire is rather hard to handle."
Sophie bestowed another level look upon him as she straightened up from her task. A puzzled expression showed briefly in her gray eyes. But she handed him the wrench without parley.
"Thanks, if you will," she said. "These rim bolts are fearfully stiff. I daresay I could manage it though. I've done it on a lighter car. But it's a man's job, really."
Thompson laid off his coat and set to work silently, withholding speech for a double reason. He could not trust his tongue, and he was not given to inconsequential chatter. If she did not recognize him—well, there was no good reason why she should remember, if she chose not to remember. He could lend a hand and go his way, just as he would have been moved to lend a hand to any one in like difficulty.
He twisted out the bolt-heads, turned the lugs, pulled the rim clear of the wheel. He stood up to get the spare tire from its place behind. And he caught Sophie staring at him, astonishment, surprise, inquiry all blended in one frank stare. But still she did not speak.
He trundled the blow-out casing to the rear, took off the one ready inflated, and speedily had it fast in its appointed position on the wheel.
And still Sophie Carr did not speak. She leaned against the car body. He felt her eyes upon him, questioning, appraising, critical, while he released the jack, gathered up the tools, and tied them up in the roll on the running board.
"There you are," he found himself facing her, his tongue giving off commonplace statements, while his heart thumped heavily in his breast. "Ready for the road again."
"Do you remember what Donald Lachlan used to say?" Sophie answered irrelevantly. "Long time I see you no. Eh, Mr. Thompson?"
She held out one gloved hand with just the faintest suggestion of a smile hovering about her mouth. Thompson's work-roughened fingers closed over her small soft hand. He towered over her, looking down wistfully.
"I didn't think you knew me," he muttered.
Sophie laughed. The smile expanded roguishly. The old, quizzical twinkle flickered in her eyes.
"You must think my memory poor," she replied. "You're not one of the peas in a pod, you know. I knew you, and still I wasn't sure. It seemed scarcely possible. It's a long, long way from the Santa Clara Valley to Lone Moose."
"Yes," he answered calmly. "A long way—the way I came."
"In a purely geographical sense?"
Her voice was tinged with gentle raillery.
"Perhaps," he answered noncommittally.
It dawned upon him that for all his gladness to see her—and he was glad—he nursed a tiny flame of resentment. He had come a long way measured on the map, and a far greater distance measured in human experience, in spiritual reckoning. If the old narrow faith had failed him he felt that slowly and surely he was acquiring a faith that would not fail him, because it was based on a common need of mankind. But he was still sure there must be a wide divergence in their outlook. He was getting his worldly experience, his knowledge of material factors, of men's souls and faiths and follies and ideals and weaknesses in a rude school at first hand—and Sophie had got hers out of books and logical deductions from critically assembled fact. There was a difference in the two processes. He knew, because he had tried both. And where the world at large faced him, and must continue to face him, like an enemy position, something to be stormed, very likely with fierce fighting, for Sophie Carr it had all been made easy.
So he did not follow up that conversational lead. He was not going to bare his soul offhand to gratify any woman's curiosity. It would be very easy to make a blithering ass of himself again—with her—because of her. Already he was on his guard against that. His pride was alert.
Sophie stowed the canvas tool roll under the seat cushion. She climbed to her seat behind the steering column and turned to Thompson.
"Which way are you bound?" she asked. "I'll give you a lift, and we can talk."
"I'm on my way to San Francisco," he said. "But time is no object in my young life right now, or I'd take the Interurban instead of walking. It would be demoralizing to me, I'm afraid, to whiz down these roads in a machine like this."
Sophie shoved the opposite door open.
"Get in," she let a flavor of reproof creep into her tone. "Don't talk that sort of nonsense."
Thompson hesitated. He was suddenly uncomfortable, conscious of his dusty clothes somewhat the worse for wear, his shoes from which the pristine freshness had long vanished, the day-old stubble on his chin. There was a depressing contrast between his outward condition and that of the smartly dressed girl whose gray eyes were resting curiously on him now.
"Do you make a practice of picking up tramps along the road?" he parried with an effort at lightness. He wanted to refuse outright, yet could not utter the words. "I'm not very presentable."
"Get in. Don't be silly," she said impatiently. "You don't think I've become a snob just because chance has pitchforked me into the ranks of the idle rich, do you?"
Thompson laughed awkwardly. There was real feeling in her tone, as if she had read correctly his hesitation and resented it. After all, why not? It would merely be an incident to Sophie Carr, and it would save him some hot and dusty miles. He got in.
"I'm quite curious to know where you've been and what you've been doing for the last year," she said, when the red car was once more rolling toward the city at a sedate pace. "And by the way, where did you learn to change a tire so smartly?"
"My last job," Thompson told her truthfully, "was washing cars, greasing up, and changing tires in a country garage down in the San Juan." He paused for a moment. "Before that I was chaperon to a stable full of horses on a Salinas ranch. I've tried being a carpenter's helper, an assistant gardener, understudy to a suburban plumber—and other things too numerous to mention—in the last three months. I think the most satisfactory thing I've tackled was the woods up north, last fall."
"You must have acquired experience, at least, even if none of those things proved an efficient method of making money," she returned lightly.
"A man like me," he remarked, "has first to learn how to make a living before he can set about making money."
"Making money is relative. Quite often it merely means making a living with an extended horizon," she observed. "I know a man with a ten-thousand-dollar salary who finds it a living, no more."
"Poor devil," he drawled sardonically. "When I get into the ten-thousand-a-year class I rather think it will afford me a few trifles beyond bare subsistence."
She smiled.
"Have you set that for a mark to shoot at?"
"I haven't set any limit," he replied. "I haven't got my sights adjusted yet."
"I can scarcely assure myself that you are really you," she said after a momentary silence. "I can't seem to disassociate you with Lone Moose and a blundering optimism, a mystical faith that the Lord would make things come out right if you only leaned on Him hard enough. Now your talk is flavored with both egotism and the bitterness of the cynic."
"How should a man talk?" he demanded. "Like a worm if he chance to be trodden on a few times? Does a man necessarily become cynical when he realizes that plugging from the bottom up is no child's play? As for egotism—Heaven knows you knocked that out of me pretty effectually when you left Lone Moose. You made me feel like a whipped puppy for months. I chucked myself out of the church because of that—that abased, disheartened feeling. For a year and a half I've been learning and discovering that life isn't a parlor game. Do you remember that letter you left with Cloudy Moon for me? I need only to recall a phrase here and there in that as a cure for incipient egotism. What do you think I should have become?" he flung at her, unconscious of the passion in his voice, "A poor thing glad of a ride in your car? Or a confirmed optimist in overalls?"
Sophie gave him a queer sidelong glance.
"Can't you let the dead past bury its dead?" she asked quietly.
Thompson kept his eyes on the smooth, green-bordered road for a minute. The quick wave of feeling passed. He stifled it—indeed, felt ashamed for letting it briefly master him.
"Of course," he answered at last, and turned to her with a friendly quirk of his lips. "It is buried pretty deep one way and another, isn't it? And it would hardly be decent to exhume the remains. Shall we talk about the weather?"
"Don't be sarcastic," she reproved gently. "Save that to cope with dad. He'll relish it coming from you."
"I don't know," Thompson said thoughtfully. "I wouldn't mind a chat with your father. We wouldn't agree on many things, by a good way, although I've discovered that some of his philosophy is sound enough. But I've got to make a move, and I'm so situated that I must make it quickly or not at all. I'm going to take the first north-bound steamer out of San Francisco. So I don't imagine Mr. Carr will have a chance at me soon."
"Oh, yes, he will," Sophie asserted confidently. "In about twenty minutes."
Thompson looked at her, startled a little by this bland assertion.
"We'll be home in about twenty minutes," she explained.
"But I'm—why take the trouble?" he asked bluntly. "I'm out of your orbit entirely. Or do you want to exhibit me as a horrible example?"
"You're downright rude," she laughed. "Or you would be if you were serious. Do you mind coming to see dad? And I'd like to hear more about your trip across the mountains with Tommy Ashe."
Thompson pricked up his ears.
"Oh, you know about that, eh?" he remarked. "How—"
"Not as much as I'd like to," she interrupted. "Will you come?"
"Yes," he agreed. "But give a fellow a chance. Don't drag me into your home looking like this. I'm not vain, but I'd feel more comfortable in clean clothes. I shipped all my things into town. They should be in the express office now. I'll come this afternoon or this evening, whichever you say. Drop me off at the first carline."
"I'll do better than that," she declared. "I'll drive you downtown myself."
"But it isn't necessary," he persisted. "I don't want to take up all your time, and—"
"For the rest of this day," Sophie murmured, "I have absolutely nothing to do but kill time. I get restless, and being out in the car cures that feeling. Do you mind if I chauff you a few miles more or less? Don't be ungallant. I love to drive."
"Oh, well."
Thompson mentally threw up his hands. In that gracious mood Sophie was irresistible. He sank back in the thick, resilient upholstery and resolved to take what the gods provided—to dance as it were, and reckon with the piper when he presented his bill.
For the few minutes it took the red roadster to slip under the green summits of Twin Peaks and by a maze of boulevards debouch at length upon Valencia and so into the busy length of Market Street their talk ran to commonplaces. Thompson placed himself unreservedly in Sophie's hands. He had to reach an express office on lower Market, get his things, and proceed thence to the house where he had roomed all winter. Since it suited Miss Carr's book to convey him to the first point, he accepted the gift of her company gladly. So in the fullness of time they came into the downtown press of traffic, among which, he observed, Sophie steered her machine like a veteran.
At Third and Market the traffic whistle blocked them with the front wheels over the safety line that guided the flow of cross-street pedestrians, and the point man, crabbed perhaps from a long trick amidst that roaring maze of vehicles, motioned autocratically for her to back up.
Sophie muttered impatiently under her breath and went into reverse. Behind her the traffic was piling up, each machine stealing every inch of vantage for the go-ahead signal, crowding up wheel to wheel, the nose of one thrusting at the rear fender of the other. On one side of Sophie rose the base of a safety station for street-car boarders. Between her car and the curb a long-snouted gray touring-car was edging in. And as she backed under the imperative command of the traffic officer, one rear hub clinked against the hind fender of the other, jarring both cars a little, dinting the gray one's fender, marring the glossy finish.
A chauffeur in a peaked cap drove the gray machine. He looked across at Sophie, scowling. He was young and red-faced, a pugnacious-looking individual.
"Back to the country, Jane, an' practice on the farm wagon," he snarled out of one corner of his mouth. "Yuh drive like a hick, yuh do."
"Talk civil to a woman," Thompson snapped back at him, "or keep your mouth shut."
The chauffeur bestowed upon him a rancorous glare. His sharp, ferret eyes gleamed. Then he deliberately spat upon the impeccably shining red hood of Sophie's roadster.
A scant arm's length separated him from Thompson. Thompson bridged that gap with his feet still on the running-board of the roadster. He moved so quickly that the chauffeur had no chance. He did try to slide out from behind the wheel and his fist doubled and drew back, but Thompson's work-hardened fingers closed about his neck, and the powerful arms back of those clutching hands twisted the man out of all position to strike any sort of blow. He yanked the chauffeur's head out over the side of the car, struck him one open-handed slap that was like an earnest cluff from a sizable bear, lifted again and banged the man's face down on the controls on his wheels, then pushed him back into his seat, limp and disheveled, all the insolent defiance knocked out of him.
Thompson stood on the running board, panting a little, the blaze of a quick anger bright in his blue eyes, and he became aware of two men in the rear seat of the gray car, gazing at him in open-mouthed astonishment. One was fat and long past forty, well fed, well dressed, a prosperous citizen. The other was a slim youngster in the early twenties, astonishingly like his older companion as to feature.
Thompson looked at them, and back at the cowed driver who was feeling his neck and face with shaky fingers. Just then three things happened—simultaneously. The traffic whistle blew. The younger man opened his mouth and uttered, "I say—" Sophie plucked at Thompson's arm, crying "Sit down, sit down."
Thompson was still fumbling the catch on the door when they swept over the cross street and raced down the next block. He looked back. The gray car was hidden somewhere in a rolling phalanx of other motors. The traffic had split and flowed about and past it, stalled there doubtless while the red-faced chauffeur wiped the blood out of his eyes and wondered if a street car had struck him.
"Do you habitually reprove ill-bred persons in that vigorous manner?"
He became aware of Sophie speaking. He looked at her. So far as he could gather from her profile she was quite unperturbed, making her way among the traffic that is always like a troubled sea between Third and the Ferry Building.
"No," he replied diffidently. "I daresay I'd be in jail or the hospital most of the time if I did. Still, that was rather a rank case. I'm not sorry I bumped him. He'll be civil to the next woman he meets."
What he did not attempt to explain to Sophie, a matter he scarcely fathomed himself, was his precipitancy, this going off "half-cocked", as he put it. He wasn't given to quick bursts of temper. It was as if he had been holding himself in and the self-contained pressure had grown acute when the insolent chauffeur presented himself as a relief valve. He felt a little ashamed now.
Sophie swung the roadster in to the curb before the express office. Thompson got out.
"Good-by till this evening, then," he said. "I'll be there if the police don't get me."
"If they do," she smiled, "telephone and dad will come down and bail you out. Good-by, Mr. Thompson."
Ten minutes or so later he emerged from the express office with a suitcase, a canvas bag, and a roll of blankets. He had no false pride about people seeing him with his worldly goods upon his back, so to speak, wherefore he crossed the street and trudged half a block to a corner where he could catch a car that would carry him out Market to his old rooming place.
And, since this was a day in which events trod upon each other's heels to reach him, it befell that as he loitered on the curb a gray touring car rolled up, stopped, and a short, stout man emerging therefrom disappeared hurriedly within the portals of an office building. Thompson's gaze rested speculatively on the machine. Gray cars were common enough. But without a doubt this was the same vehicle. The chauffeur in the peaked cap was not among those present—but Thompson could take oath on the other two. The young man sat behind the steering wheel.
He, too, it presently transpired, was spurred by recognition. His roving eyes alighted upon Thompson with a reminiscent gleam. He edged over in his seat. Thompson stood almost at the front fender.
"I say," the man in the car addressed him bluntly, "weren't you in a red roadster back at Third and Market about fifteen or twenty minutes ago?"
"I was," Thompson admitted.
Was he to be arrested forthwith on a charge of assault and battery? Policemen were plentiful enough in that quarter. All one had to do was crook his finger. People could not be expected to take kindly to having their chauffeur mauled and disabled like that. But Thompson stood his ground indifferently.
"Well, I must say," the young man drawled, producing a cigarette case as he spoke, "you squashed Pebbles with neatness and despatch, and Pebbles was supposed to be some scrapper, too. What do you weigh?"
Thompson laughed outright. He had expected a complaint, perhaps prosecution. He was handed a compliment.
"I don't know," he smiled. "About a hundred and eighty-five, I think."
"You must be pretty fit to handle a man like that," the other observed. "The beggar had it coming, all right. He gets an overnight jag, and is surly all the next day. I was going to apologize to the lady, but you were too quick for me. By the way, are you a working-man—or a capitalist in disguise?"
Before Thompson quite decided how he should answer this astonishingly personal inquiry, the young man's companion strode out of the lobby and entered the car. At least he had his hand on the open door and one foot on the running board. And there he halted and turned about at something his son said—Thompson assumed they were father and son. The likeness of feature was too well-defined to permit of any lesser relation.
The older man took his foot off the running board, and made a deliberate survey of Thompson.
"Just a second, Fred," he muttered, and took a step toward Thompson. His eyes traveled swiftly from Thompson's face down over the suitcase and blanket roll, and came back to that deliberate matching of glances.
"Do you happen to be looking for a position that requires energy, ability, and a fair command of the English language?" he demanded abruptly.
"Yes," Thompson answered briefly.
He wondered what was coming. Were they going to offer him the chauffeur's job? Did they require a bruiser to drive the gray car?
"Know anything about motors?"
"Not the first principles, even." Thompson declared himself frankly. He did possess a little such knowledge, but held a little knowledge to be a dangerous admission.
"So much the better," the stout man commented.
He fished out a cardcase, and handed his card to Thompson.
"Call on me at ten o'clock to-morrow morning," he said briskly. "I'll make you a proposition."
He did not permit inquiry into his motive or anything else, in fact, for he got quickly into the car and it started off instantly, leaving Mr. Wesley Thompson, a little bewildered by the rapidity of these proceedings, staring at the card, which read:
John P. Henderson, Inc.Van Ness at Potter Groya Motors
A westbound street car bore down on the corner. Thompson gave over reflecting upon this latest turn of affairs, gathered up his things, boarded the car, and was set off a few minutes later near the Globe Rooms.
At precisely 8 p.m. he arrived at the address Sophie had given him and found it to be an apartment house covering half a block, an enormous structure clinging upon the slope which dips from Nob Hill down to the heart of the city. An elevator shot him silently aloft to the fifth floor. As silently the elevator man indicated the location of Apartment 509. The whole place seemed pitched to that subdued note, as if it were a sanctuary from the clash and clamor without its walls. Thompson walked down a hushed corridor over a velvet carpet that muffled his footfalls and so came at last to the proper door, where he pressed a black button in the center of a brass plate. The door opened almost upon the instant. A maid eyed him interrogatively. He mentioned his name.
"Oh yes," the maid answered. "This way, please."
She relieved him of his hat and led him down a short, dusky hall into a bright-windowed room, in which, from the depths of two capacious leather chairs, Sophie and her father rose to greet him.