THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE
BY WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1913, by
WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY
Copyright, 1913, by
EDWARD J. CLODE
THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE
CHAPTER I
The general steamship agency on The Bund was a hive of bustlingtravelers, their faces alight with the eagerness with which they desiredto be gone their many ways up and down the world. A stranger might haveimagined that most of Yokohama's European or "white" population had beenpossessed of a sudden desire to flee beyond the seas.
It was a scene common enough, however, for that season in the gatewaysof the Far East. Spring, with its heart call to distant homelands, hadcome again to break the spell of the Orient for many and to stir anunutterable longing in the breasts of others—the men and women whodream always of the day they will "go back," but who never do.
The crowd was a conglomerate, as crowds go, and not lacking inpicturesque touches—here where a Chinese of mandarin rank went with asilky retinue; there where a pair of turbaned Sikhs stood near twobegoggled Korean priests, muttering in gutturals over their tickets forthe South. The placidity and impenetrable calm of these few Orientalfaces served but to accentuate the mobile expressiveness of the dominantCaucasian countenance.
Still there was one white man whose features betrayed no expression ofinterest in the scene. He stood head and shoulders over those around himin a line of applicants at a booking desk toward the rear. There was anair of detachment about him. Apparently he was untouched of the spiritof mystic restlessness and excitement which pervaded the place—thatresistless, undeniable spirit which takes hold of even the mostunimaginative and lackadaisical in railway depots or wherever else menin numbers set out upon journeys. There was no gleam of thehomeward-bounder in his eye—that gleam which is more like the light oflove than anything else; there was no expectancy; no sign of eagerness.
At a first glance this man's face seemed no more than a mask. At asecond one realized that the features were those of one who must havewon unto the priceless possession of self-control. The nose was largeand yet as sensitively formed as the freshly shaven lips and chin. Theears were perfectly lobed—the ears of a thoroughbred. The jaw was thatof the natural fighter, not heavy and jowly, but cut in a sharp,straight line from the hinge to the point. Tiny wrinkles in the outercorners of the eyelids, which come from facing long distances on sea orland, kept forming and reforming as his gray eyes wandered idly over theheads of the crowd. It is thus that the tribes of the earth's big spacesare marked.
Several times he pushed his small gray felt hat back from his brow andthen as absently pulled it down again. When he did this one saw the seamof a jagged scar, still pink from recent healing, which traversed theleft temple and disappeared in the dark-brown hair over the ear.Although the forelock and the temples were quite gray, he was not morethan thirty-five years old.
His blue serge suit fitted well and the trimness of his setting-up—hiswhole hearing, in fact—spoke of one of military training. Perhaps itwas this suggestion of the soldier that made the Sikhs turn and lookback at him as they passed out on The Bund. Yet it was not as a soldierthat the port of Yok