Broderick and Benito decided not to wait. They made another journey round the town, watching Chinese builders erecting long rows of habitations that had come in sections from Cathay. Everywhere was hasty, feverish construction--flimsy houses going up like mushrooms over night to meet the needs of San Francisco's swiftly augmenting populace. "It's like a house of cards," said Broderick, who had been a fireman in New York. "Lord help us if it ever starts to burn. Even our drinking water comes from Sausalito across the Bay." CHAPTER XXV RETRIEVING A BIRTHRIGHT Benito Windham stole from his dwelling, closing the door softly after him so Alice, his wife, might not wake. A faint rose dawn colored the Contra Costa ridge. From a few of the huts and larger buildings which sprinkled San Francisco's hills and hollows so haphazardly, curls of blue white wood smoke rose into the windless air. Here and there some belated roisterer staggered toward his habitation. But otherwise all was still, quicscent. San Francisco slept. It was the morning of December 24, 1849--the first Christmas eve following the gold rush. Windham, who had lain awake since midnight, pondered upon this and other things. Events had succeeded each other with such riotous activity of late that life seemed more like a dream than a reality. His turbulent months at the mines, his high preliminary hopes of fortune, their gradual waning to a slow despair; the advent of James Burthen and his daughter; then love, his partner's murder and the girl's abduction; his pursuit and illness. Alice's rescue and their marriage; his return to find the claim covered with snow; finally a clerical post in San Francisco. A sudden distaste for the feverish, riotous town assailed him--a longing for the peace and beauty of those broad paternal acres he had lost upon the gaming table wrenched his heart. He pictured Alice in the old rose patio, where his American father had wooed his Spanish mother. Involuntarily his steps turned eastward. At Sacramento and Leidesdorff streets he left solid ground to tread a four-foot board above the water, to the theoretical line of Sansome street; thence south upon a similar foothold to the solid ground of Bush street, where an immense sand-*hill with a hollow in its middle, like a crater, struck across the path. Some called this depression Thieves Hollow, for in it deserting sailors, ticket-of-leave men from Botany Bay prison colony and all manner of human riff-raff consorted for nefarious intrigue.