He stared at me wonderingly.
"Why, it's bound to come within a few days," he said. "Wait till next Wednesday, say, and you won't recognise this place. There'll be a rush here such as there was when Oklahoma was opened. We have everything for us—climate, temperature, water. Harry," he added in my ear, "look around you. You are standing on the site of one of the grandest, stateliest cities of civilisation."
That night the boy Carrington and I sat late in consultation while Steele slept. "Nothing but force will do it," said the lad. "I know him well, and I've tried it again and again. It's no use any other way." So force it was.
How we got Steele back to San Diego I may not tell. Carrington is the only other person who knows, and I'm sure he will say nothing. When Steele found himself in the heart of a real city and began to look about him, and take stock of his surroundings, the real collapse came. He is in a sanitarium now somewhere in Illinois, and his wife and son see him on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons from two till five. Steele will never come out of that sanitarium, though he now realises that his desert city was a myth, a creation of his own distorted wits. He's sound enough on that point, but a strange inversion has taken place. It is now upon all other subjects that he is insane.
The Dis-Associated Charities
There used to be a place in feudal Paris called the Court of Miracles, and Mister Victor Hugo has told us all about it. This Court was a quarter of the town where the beggars lived, and it was called "of the miracles", because once across its boundaries the blind saw, the lame walked and the poor cared not to have the gospel preached unto them.
San Francisco has its Court of Miracles too. It is a far cry thither, for it lies on the other side of Chinatown and Dagotown, and blocks beyond Luna's restaurant. It is in the valley between Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, and you must pass through it as you go down to Meigg's Wharf where the Government tugs tie up.
One has elected to call it the Court of Miracles, but it is not a court, and the days of miracles are over. It is a row of seven two-story houses, one of them brick. The brick house is over a saloon kept by a Kanaka woman and called "The Eiffel Tower." Here San Francisco's beggars live and have their being. That is, a good many of them.
The doubled-up old man with the white beard and neck-handkerchief who used to play upon a zither and the sympathies of the public on the corner of Sutter street has moved out, and one can find no trace of him, and Father Elphick, the white-headed vegetarian of Lotta's Fountain, is dead. But plenty of the others are left. The neatly dressed fellow with dark blue spectacles, who sings the Marseillaise, accompanying himself upon an infinitesimal hand organ, is here; Mrs. McCleaverty is here, and the old bare-headed man who sits on the street corner by the Bohemian Club, after six o'clock in the evening and turns the crank of a soundless organ, has here set up his everlasting rest.
The beggars of the Seven Houses are genuine miserables. Perhaps they have an organisation and a president, I don't know. But I do know that Leander and I came very near demoralising the whole lot of them.