It was Sunday, the downtown streets were deserted except for the cable-cars and an occasional newsboy. The stores were closed and in their vestibules one saw the peddlers who were never there on week-days, venders of canes and peddlers of glue with heavy weights attached to mended china plates. Vandover had had no breakfast and was conscious of feeling desperately hungry. He determined to breakfast downtown, as he would arrive home too late for one meal and too early for the other. Almost all of his money had been lost with the _Mazatlan_; he found he had but a dollar left. He would have preferred breakfasting at the Grillroom, but concluded he was too shabby in appearance, and he knew he would get more for his money at the Imperial. It was absolutely quiet in the Imperial at the hour when he arrived. The single bartender was reading a paper, and in the passage between the private rooms a Chinese with a clean napkin wound around his head was polishing the brass and woodwork. In the passage he met Toby, the red-eyed waiter, just going off night duty, without his usual apron or white coat, dressed very carefully, wearing a brown felt hat. "Why, how do you do, Mr. Vandover?" exclaimed Toby. "Haven't seen you round here for some time." Vandover was about to answer when the other interrupted: "Well, what's happened to _you_? Look as though you'd been drawn through hell backward and beaten with a cat!" In fact Vandover's appearance was extraordinary. His hat was torn and broken, and his clothes, stained with tar and dirt, shrunken and wrinkled by sea-water. His shoes were fastened with bits of tarred rope; he was wearing a red flannel shirt with bone buttons which the boatkeeper on the pilot boat had given him, tied at the neck with a purple handkerchief of pongee silk; his hair was long, and a week's growth of beard was upon his lip and cheeks. "That's a fact," he answered grimly. "I do look queer. I was in a wreck down the coast," he added hastily. "The _Mazatlan!_" exclaimed Toby. "That's a fact; the papers have been full of it. That's so, you were one of the survivors." "The survivors!" echoed Vandover with wondering curiosity. "Tell me--you know I haven't heard a word yet--were there many lives lost?" He marvelled at the strangeness of the situation, that this bar waiter should know more of the wreck than he himself who had been upon it. "You bet there were!" answered Toby. "Twenty-three altogether; one boat capsized; Kelly, 'Bug' Kelly, son of that fellow that runs the Crystal Grotto, _he_ was drowned, and one of Hocheimer's--Hocheimer, the jeweller, you know--one of his travelling salesmen was drowned; a little Jew named Brann, a diamond expert; he jumped overboard and--" "Don't!" said Vandover with a sharp gesture. "I saw him drown--it was sickening."