When he began that upward march through the state he had no purpose, his mind was empty as a dried nut, the terrible lethargy of the tramp was invading him. From down-drawn brows he looked, morose, at a world which refused him entrance, and across whose surface he would drift aimless as a leaf on the wind. Then, the strength regained by exercise and air, the few dollars made by fruit picking, gave a fillip to his languishing spirit and an objective point rose on his vision. He would go to San Francisco--something might turn up there--and with his hoarded money buy cleanliness and one good meal. It grew before him, desirable, dreamed of, longed for--the bath, the restaurant, the delicate food, the bottle of wine. He was obsessed by it; the deluge could follow.
The wind, blowing through the open casement, brought him back to the present. The night had fallen, the street below a misty rift, its lights smothered in swimming vapor. There was brightness about it, blotted and obscured but gayly intentioned, even the sheds on the gore sending out golden gushes that suffused the milky currents with a clouded glow. He lighted the gas and looked at his watch--nearly seven. He would go out and dine--that dinner at last--and afterward drop in at the Albion and see Pancha Lopez, "the bandit's girl."
The Alstons were finishing dinner. From over the table, set with the glass and silver that George Alston had bought when he came down from Virginia City, the high, hard light of the chandelier fell on the three females who made up the family. It was devastating to Aunt Ellen Tisdale's gnarled old visage--she was over seventy and for several years now had given up all tiresome thought processes--but the girls were so smoothly skinned and firmly modeled that it only served to bring out the rounded freshness of their youthful faces.
The Alstons were conservative, clung to the ways of their parents. This was partly due to inheritance--mother and father were New Englanders--and partly to a reserved quality, a timid shyness, that marked Lorry who, as Aunt Ellen ceased to exert her thought processes and relapsed into a peaceful torpor, had assumed the reins of government. They conformed to none of those innovations which had come from a freer intercourse with the sophisticated East. The house remained as it had been in their mother's lifetime, the furniture was the same and stood in the same places, the table knew no modern enhancement of its solidly handsome fittings. Fong, the Chinese cook--he had been with George Alston before he married--ruled the kitchen and the two "second boys." No women servants were employed; women servants had not been a feature of domestic life in Bonanza days.