Burned Bridges

For reasons of economy Thompson put himself up at a cheap rooming-house

well out Market Street. His window looked out upon that thoroughfare

which is to San Francisco what the aorta is to the arterial system.

Gazing down from a height of four stories he could see a never-ending

stir, hear the roar of vehicular traffic which swelled from a midnight

murmur to a deep-mouthed roar in the daylight hours. And on either side

the traffic lane there swept a stream of people like the current of the

Stikine River.

He was not a stranger to cities, no rustic gazing open-mouthed at

throngs and tall buildings. His native city of Toronto was a fair-sized

place as American and Canadian cities go. But it was not a seaport. It

was insular rather than cosmopolitan; it took its character from its

locale rather than from a population gathered from the four quarters of

the globe. San Francisco--is San Francisco--a melting-pot of peoples,

blown through with airs from far countries, not wholly rid of the aura

of Drake and the conquistadores of Spain even in these latter days of

commercial expansion. And all of San Francisco's greatness and color and

wealth is crowded upon a peninsula, built upon rolling hills. What the

city lacks of spaciousness is compensated by action. Life goes at a

great pace.

It made a profound impression on Thompson, since he had reached the

stage where he was keenly susceptible to external impressions from any

source whatever. Those hurrying multitudes, that unending stir, the

kaleidoscopic shifts of this human antheap made him at first profoundly

lonely, immeasurably insignificant, just as the North had made him feel

when he was new to it. But just as he had shaped himself to that

environment, so he felt--as he had not at first felt in the North--that

in time, with effort, he would become an integral part of this. Here the

big game was played. It was the antithesis of the North inasmuch as all

this activity had a purely human source and was therefore in some

measure akin to himself. The barriers to be overcome and the problems to

be solved were social and monetary. It was less a case of adapting

himself by painful degrees to a hostile primitive environment than a

forthright competitive struggle to make himself a master in this sort of

environment.

How he should go about it he had no definite idea. He would have to be

an opportunist, he foresaw. He had no illusions about his funds in hand

being a prime lever to success. That four hundred dollars would not last

forever, nor would it be replenished by any effort save his own. It

afforded him a breathing spell, a chance to look about, to discover

where and how he should begin at the task of proving himself upon the

world.