l cotton to. I'll have my home sweet home dance with the
missus--" he fell again to musing.

"A man up a tree," said Mark Heath, "would say you were in love."

"I'll be damned--I wonder if that ain't the matter?" said Bertram
Chester.

CHAPTER VII

The Ferry, doorway to San Francisco, wore its holiday Sunday aspect as
Bertram Chester approached it. A Schuetzen Park picnic was gathering
itself under the arches, to the syncopated tune of a brass band. The
crowd blazed with bright color. The young men, in white caps, yellow
sashes of their mysterious fraternity, and tinted neckties like the
flowers of spring, lolled and larked and smoked about the pillars. Fat
mothers and stodgy fathers fussed over baskets and progeny. Young
girls, in white dresses and much trimming of ribbons, coquetted in
groups as yet unbroken by the larking young men. Over these ceremonial
white dresses of the Sunday picnic, they wore coats and even furs
against the damp, penetrating morning--rather late in the season it
was for picnics. In the rests of the ragtime, rose the aggressive
crackle of that flat, hard accent, with its curious stress on the "r,"
which would denote to a Californian in Tibet the native of South of
Market, San Francisco.

Bertram Chester, had he been accustomed to spare any of his powers for
introspective imagination, might have beheld his crossroads, his
turning point, in this passage through the South of Market picnic to
the little group waiting, by the Sausalito Ferry, to take him to the
Masters ranch. But a month ago, he himself had whistled up that
infatuated little milliner's apprentice who was his temporary light of
love, and had taken her over to Schuetzen Park of a Sunday. He had
drunk his beer and shaken for his round of drinks with the boys, had
taken the girl away from a young butcher, had fought and conquered the
bookmaker's clerk who tried to take away the milliner's apprentice
from him, and had gone home, when the day was done, with his head
buried on that soft curve of the feminine shoulder which was made to
receive tired male heads.

Now, without a backward look, he was walking toward Sydney Masters,
Mrs. Masters, the sprightly and dainty Kate Waddington, and those
others, grouped about them, who might be guides and companions on his
new way.

Kate Waddington had acquainted him in advance with the party, so that
the introductions brought no surprises. That young-old man with the
sharp little fa