The man who was both cook and
waiter remembered afterwards that Farnum called for coffee,
sausage, and a waffle.
Before the editor left the waffle house it was the morning of the
twenty-third. He had never felt less sleepy. Nor did a book and a
pipe before his gas log seem quite what he wanted. The vagabond
streak in him was awake, the same potent wanderlust that as a boy
had driven him to the solitude of the forests and the hills. This
morning it sent him questing down Powers Avenue to that lower town
where the derelicts of the city floated without a rudder.
A cold damp mist had crept up from the water front and enwrapped
the city so that its lights showed like blurred moons. Some
instinct took him toward the wharves. He could hear the distant
cough of a tug as it fussed across the bay, and as he drew near
the big Transcontinental wharves of Joe Powers the black hulk of a
Japanese liner rose black out of the gray fog shadow. But the
freighters, the coasters, tramps that went hither and thither over
the earth wherever fat cargoes lured them--they were either
swallowed in the mist or shadowed to a ghost-like wraith of
themselves so tenuous that all detail was lost in the haze.
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