There was a faint diffused light when he reached the corner of Pancha's street, the first gleam of the coming day. Like one who sees temptation placed before him in living form and hesitates, reluctant yet impelled, he stood and gazed at the front of the Vallejo Hotel. The lamps showed up a pinkish orange, two spheres, concrete and solid, in a swimming, silvery unreality. Beyond the steps a man's figure moved, walking up the street, his back to Mayer. It was very quiet; the hush before the city, turning in its sleep, stretched, breathed deeply, and awakened. Mayer went forward toward the lamps. He had no definite intention; was actuated by no formed resolution; was, for the moment, a being filled to the skin by a single passion. He felt light, as if his body weighed nothing, or as if he might have been carried by a powerful current buoyant and beyond his control. It took him up the steps to the door. Through a clear space in the ground glass panel he looked in and saw that the hall was empty. His heart rose stranglingly and then contracted; his hand closed on the knob, turned it and the door opened. That unexpected opening, the vacant hall and stairway stretching before him like an invitation, ended his lack of purpose. Despair and hate combined into the will to act, propelled him to a recognized goal. He entered and mounted the stairs. Cushing, having found the long vigil at the Vallejo exhausting, had contracted the habit of slipping out in the first reaches of the dawn to a saloon down the street. It was a safe habit, for even the few night-roving tenants the Vallejo had were housed at that hour, and if a belated reveler should stray in, the door was always left on the latch. Moreover he only stayed a few minutes; a warming gulp and he was back again, wide-awake for the call of the day. His was the figure Mayer had seen walking down the street. Pancha was asleep and dreaming. It was a childish dream, but it was impregnated with that imminent, hovering terror that often is associated with the simple visions of sleep. She was back in the old shack in Inyo where her mother had died, and it was raining. Juana was sitting on the side of the bed, her dark hair parted, a shawl over her head framing her face. From the side of the bed she watched Pancha, who was sweeping, sweeping with urgent haste, haunted by some obscure necessity to finish and continually retarded by obstacles. Against the door the rain fell, loud, and then louder. It grew so loud that it ceased to be like rain, became a shower of blows, a fearful noise, never before made by water. Horror fell upon them, a horror of some sinister fate beyond the door. Juana held out her arms and Pancha, dropping the broom, ran to her, and clinging close listened to the sound with a freezing heart.