Her fingers were rigid, and curved.

As she reached the sidewalk, a squall caught and nearly carried her off
her feet. It bellied her skirts and loosened her hair. She lost her
breath and regained it with difficulty; she could hardly steer herself.
But the wind filled her with a sudden wild exaltation, not of the soul,
but of the worst of her passions,--those tangled, fighting, sternly
governed passions of the cross-breed.

She cursed aloud. She let fly all the maledictions, English and Spanish,
of which she had knowledge. The street was deserted. She raised her
voice and pierced the gale, the furious energy of her words hissing like
escaping steam. She raised her voice still higher and shrieked her
profane arraignment of all things mundane in a final ecstasy of nervous
abandonment.

When the passion and its voice were exhausted, her obsession had passed.
Her head felt lighter, the danger of congestion was over; but her
protest was the keener and bitterer. Her father's life was safe in her
hands, but she had no desire to return to his house. She determined to
walk until morning, and to drift, rudderless, in the great sea of the
night.

She caught her skirts close to her body and walked rapidly to the brow
of the hill. The twinkling lights were all below. The wrack of cloud
torn by the wind into a thousand flapping sails skurried across a sky
which the hidden moon patched with a hard angry silver. Far away and
high in the storm the great cross on Calvary seemed dancing an
inebriated jig above the ghostly tombs of Lone Mountain.

Magdalena walked rapidly down the hill. Once or twice she paused before
a house and stared at it. What secrets did it hold? What skeletons? Were
any within so desperate as she? Why did they not come out and shriek
with the storm? She pictured a sudden obsession of San Francisco: every
door simultaneously flung open, every wretched inmate rushing forth to
scream his protest against the injustice of life into the ecstatic fury
of the elements.

High on a terrace, or rather an unlevelled angle of the hill, and
reached by a long rickety flight of steps, was an old ugly wooden house.
It was unpainted; the shutters were shaking on their rusty hinges; the
chimneys had been blown off long since; but it had cost much gold in
its time. It had been the home of a "Forty-niner," and he was dead and
forgotten, his dust as easily accounted for as his winged gold.
Doubtless every room had its patient ske