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and only a moment before, on the deck of the China boat, I had said good-by to her—forever.
I left the pier shed and stepped to the sidewalk outside. The air was heavy and wet with fog, the walk damp and slippery; liquid fog dripped down from telegraph wires overhead. I saw the blurred lights of the city, heard its ceaseless grumble, the clang of street-cars, the clatter of wheels on cobblestones. Weird mysterious figures slipped by me, stranger faces peered into mine and were gone. This was the Embarcadero, the old Barbary Coast famed round the world. Somewhere there in the mist were its dance-halls, where rovers of the broad Pacific had, in the vanished past, made merry after a sodden fashion. I stood, straining to see.
“Want a taxi, mister?” asked a dim figure at my side.
“If you can find one,” I answered. “Things seem a bit thick.”
