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Page 19
For desolate it was beyond description. The Presidio, with its
voiceless, dismounted cannon and empty embrasures hidden in a
hollow, and the Mission Dolores, with its crumbling walls and
belfry tower lost in another, made the ultima thule of all San
Francisco wandering. The Cliff house and Fort Point did not then
exist; from Black Point the curving line of shore of "Yerba Buena"--
or San Francisco--showed only a stretch of glittering wind-swept
sand dunes, interspersed with straggling gullies of half-buried
black "scrub oak." The long six months' summer sun fiercely beat
upon it from the cloudless sky above; the long six months' trade
winds fiercely beat upon it from the west; the monotonous roll-call
of the long Pacific surges regularly beat upon it from the sea.
Almost impossible to face by day through sliding sands and
buffeting winds, at night it was impracticable through the dense
sea-fog that stole softly through the Golden Gate at sunset.
Thence, until morning, sea and shore were a trackless waste,
bounded only by the warning thunders of the unseen sea. The
station itself, a rudely built cabin, with two windows,--one
furnished with a telescope,--looked like a heap of driftwood, or a
stranded wreck left by the retiring sea; the semaphore--the only
object for leagues--lifted above the undulating dunes, took upon
itself various shapes, more or less gloomy, according to the hour
or weather,--a blasted tree, the masts and clinging spars of a
beached ship, a dismantled gallows; or, with the background of a
golden sunset across the Gate, and its arms extended at right
angles, to a more hopeful fancy it might have seemed the missionary
Cross, which the enthusiast Portala lifted on that heathen shore a
hundred years before.
Not that Dick Jarman--the solitary station keeper--ever indulged
this fancy. An escaped convict from one of her Britannic Majesty's
penal colonies, a "stowaway" in the hold of an Australian ship, he
had landed penniless in San Francisco, fearful of contact with his
more honest countrymen already there, and liable to detection at
any moment. Luckily for him, the English immigration consisted
mainly of gold-seekers en route to Sacramento and the southern
mines. He was prudent enough to resist the temptation to follow
them, and accepted the post of semaphore keeper,--the first work
offered him,--which the meanest immigrant, filled with dreams of
gold, would have scorned. His employers asked him no questions,
and demanded no references; his post could be scarcely deemed one
of trust,--there was no property for him to abscond with but the
telescope; he was removed from temptation and evil company in his
lonely waste; his duties were as mechanical as the instrument he
worked, and interruption of them would be instantly known at San
Francisco. For this he would receive his board and lodging and
seventy-five dollars a month,--a sum to be ridiculed in those
"flush days," but which seemed to the broken-spirited and half-
famished stowaway a princely independence.
And then there was rest and security! He was free from that
torturing anxiety and fear of detection which had haunted him night
and day for three months. The ceaseless vigilance and watchful
dread he had known since his escape, he could lay aside now. The
rude cabin on the sand dune was to him as the long-sought cave to
some hunted animal. It seemed impossible that any one would seek
him there. He was spared alike the contact of his enemies or the
shame of recognizing even a friendly face, until by each he would
be forgotten. From his coign of vantage on that desolate waste,
and with the aid of his telescope, no stranger could approach
within two or three miles of his cabin without undergoing his
scrutiny. And at the worst, if he was pursued here, before him was
the trackless shore and the boundless sea!
And at times there was a certain satisfaction in watching, unseen
and in perfect security, the decks of passing ships. With the aid
of his glass he could mingle again with the world from which he was
debarred, and gloomily wonder who among those passengers knew their
solitary watcher, or had heard of his deeds; it might have made him
gloomier had he known that in those eager faces turned towards the
golden haven there was little thought of anything but themselves.
He tried to read in faces on board the few outgoing ships the
record of their success with a strange envy. They were returning
home! HOME! For sometimes--but seldom--he thought of his own home
and his past. It was a miserable past of forgery and embezzlement
that had culminated a career of youthful dissipation and self-
indulgence, and shut him out, forever, from the staid old English
cathedral town where he was born. He knew that his relations
believed and wished him dead. He thought of this past with little
pleasure, but with little remorse. Like most of his stamp, he
believed it was ill-luck, chance, somebody else's fault, but never
his own responsible action. He would not repent; he would be wiser
only. And he would not be retaken--alive!
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