ond thought, any shelter was better than a night spent on
the streets. He had had two months of buffeting and he was ready for
even an indifferent comfort.

He ended by going with his new-found friend. They trotted south along
the Embarcadero, hugging the shadows close. This street, once noisy
with a coarse, guzzling gayety, was silent. A few disconsolate men
hung about the emasculated bars trying to rouse their sluggish spirits
on colicky draughts of near beer and grape juice, but the effect was
dismal and forbidding. Fred felt a great depression overwhelm him.

He had grown accustomed to the silence of the open spaces, but this
silence of the city had a portentous quality which frightened him. It
reminded him of that ominous quiet that had settled down on Fairview
after that heartbreaking celebration on Christmas Eve. What were men
doing with their idle moments? How were they escaping from the drab
to-day? Did the crowded lobbies of the sailors' lodging houses spell
the final word in the bleak entertainment that intolerance had left
them? Upon one of the street corners a Salvation Army lassie harangued
an indifferent handful. But there seemed nothing now from which to
save these men except monotony, and religion of the fife-and-drum
order was offering only a very dreary escape. Did the moral values of
negative virtue make men any more admirable? he found himself
wondering.

Storch led the way in silence. Finally they turned up toward the
slopes of Rincon Hill. A cluster of shacks, clinging crazily to the
tawny banks, loomed ahead in the darkness. Storch clambered along a
beaten trail and presently he leaped toward the broader confines of a
street which opened its arms abruptly to receive them. Fred followed.
The thoroughfare upon which he found himself standing was little more
than a lane, hedged on either side by crazy structures that nearly all
had sprung to rambling life from one-roomed refugee shacks which had
dotted the city after the fire and earthquake. Most of them were vine
clad and brightened with beds of scarlet geraniums, but the house
before which Storch halted rose uncompromisingly from the sun-baked
ground without the charity of a covering. Storch turned the key and
threw the door open, motioning Fred to enter. Fred did as he was
bidden and found himself in a cluttered room, showing harshly in the
light streaming in from a near-by street lamp. The air was foul with
stale tobacco, refuse, and imprison