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cloud.
    Perhaps I expected some ceremony, or an announcement from the captain.
    The wind had been growing colder, but the sun was still pleasantly warm as we steamed along a coast of distant cliffs and trees. Men had been whispering, checking and rechecking their mining equipment, shovels brought out and then packed again with the picks and hoes and other tools the shipping companies had sold at a premium.
    One minute we were churning north.
    The next the vessel was heading eastward, the side wheel churning, bits of charcoal falling all the more thickly from the smokestack. We made our way into the waters of a large inlet, tall hills to the north, and a low, sandy shore to the south. Men crowded the starboard rail, already laden with their traveling bags.
    Ben turned to find me in the pack of people against the rail, his eyes ablaze with excitement.
    We had reached the Golden Gate and we were moment by moment closer to San Francisco.

PART TWO
    BLOOD

CHAPTER 18
    A year or two before, this city had been a sleepy outpost, a Franciscan mission and a sparse village with a view of empty bay and distant hills. Since the days of the conquistadors, California had been a remote Spanish territory, and then, with Mexican independence in the 1820s, a peaceful province of vast rancheros and poppy fields belonging to Mexico.
    Now San Francisco’s harbor was a crowded tangle of sailing ships, two or three hundred vessels. The skeletons of naked masts and spars resembled a wintry wood. No sailors worked these ships and, save for the creaking grind of hull against hull, nearly all were dead quiet.
    â€œThey are all abandoned,” said a ship’s boy, spitting tobacco juice over the side. “Their crews are off striking it rich.”
    A small steamer, spewing sulfuric smoke, towed us toward the dock, bits of coal grit raining down on us from the diminutive pilot boat. I realized that this was where the California had received the since-repainted scratches along her hull, forcing her way through the abandoned fleet.
    The wharf was a bustling maze of coffee sacks and wooden crates. I had a glimpse through the crowd the gangway disgorged onto the docks of Mr. Gill and Mr. Sweetland, Aaron carrying one arm in a dirty yellow sling and smiling, Mr. Kerr and Mr. Cowden half buried under baggage.
    Then we were lost in the flood of new arrivals. A longshoreman looked right through me—I was invisible. I tried to give him a look right back, unsteady on my legs because of our voyage. A man in a top hat, the first such headgear I had seen in a long while, introduced himself as a hotel agent, and said he could supply “accommodations of every variety.”
    Neither Ben nor I spoke to the gentleman, not because we were discourteous, but because we were momentarily stunned at the scene. The top-hatted gent abandoned us with a tip of his hat, and his business offer was repeated to one disembarking passenger after another.
    I was so accustomed to the dependable, if crowded, nature of shipboard life that the stewing noise of the street bewildered me. I put out a hand to steady my frame on Ben’s shoulder. The buildings along the street were brick, with balconies overlooking a scene hectic with men in a hurry, calling out to each other, clutching papers or valises, no one simply walking along, every individual in a rush. Even the men who labored under loads of sea trunks, helping passengers who had come to an agreement with a hotel agent, went quickly, bent under their loads.
    I made an effort to appear unimpressed, making our way down the middle of the street, each of us carrying one end of our sea-trunk. But this wasn’t an easygoing sort of town, and it was hard to appear carefree holding up one end of a steamer trunk.
    A violent crash froze us.

CHAPTER 19
    One wagon collided with another, so close to us that a splinter hit Ben’s hat and stuck there.
    The iron wheels locked, and the wooden fellies—the rims just under