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It was raining in San Francisco.
Over that Bagdad of the West a thin drizzling mist swept like some fine seiner's net; over the Bay a fog hung.
A man stood alone on the crest of Telegraph Hill. Below him the city stretched with its square-checked habitations; its long, blurred lanes of lights; its trolley cars creeping like glow-worms up and down the slippery inclines.
That evening the man had watched the sun go down in yellow splendour. He had seen the shadow of night chase the sunlight in a mad frolic beyond the edge of the world. He had noted--for his eyes were sharp--the fore-topsail of a windjammer cut a square nick out of the horizon, and come like a scared white thing through the Golden Gate.
Directly below the man a house, which was perched on the declivity, seemed to burst with drunken mirth and laughter. A woman's voice swung in tune with a tinkling piano. She sang an old chantey that whalers know:
The man shrugged his shoulders, clinked two silver coins together, and descended the hill to the Blubber Room, from whence the song had come.
The piano drummed out a noisy welcome when he opened and closed the door.
He took a seat at a table, removed his cap from his gray-sprinkled head, leaned back, and looked around the smoky interior of the Blubber Room. The figures of old salts, crimps, half-pay officers, and one square-jawed sailor loomed through the fetid air. A woman with carmined lips and a thin blue neck stood by a youth who played the piano.
It was all familiar to Stirling--known from the Clyde to the Golden Horn as Horace Stirling, the Ice Pilot. He had been in such dives before. He knew Number Nine, Yokohama, and the Silver Dollar at Manila.
Stirling had struck hard luck, chicken farming over Oakland way. His chickens died as sailors die of scurvy at Herschel Island, and he wanted to quit the shore.
The sea and the Arctic called, and he had little money left. There was a chance for adventure in the Blubber Room that night; rumour had it that a ship was outfitting for a passage to East Cape, Siberia, and the unknown land around the Pole.
Stirling possessed a countenance stamped with the seal of misfortune--a face with which destiny loves to toy, the face of a rover and a castaway, yet withal, a strong face which would remain strong to the very end.
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