Nine days later the Mariposa threaded the Golden Gate and docked at San Francisco.  Humorous half-columns in the local papers, written in the customary silly way by unlicked cub reporters just out of grammar school, tickled the fancy of San Francisco for a fleeting moment in that the steamship Mariposa had rescued some sea-waifs possessed of a cock-and-bull story that not even the reporters believed.  Thus, silly reportorial unveracity usually proves extraordinary truth a liar.  It is the way of cub reporters, city newspapers, and flat-floor populations which get their thrills from moving pictures and for which the real world and all its spaciousness does not exist.

“Sunk by a whale!” demanded the average flat-floor person.  “Nonsense, that’s all.  Just plain rotten nonsense.  Now, in the ’Adventures of Eleanor,’ which is some film, believe me, I’ll tell you what I saw happen . . . "

So Daughtry and his crew went ashore into ’Frisco Town uheralded and unsung, the second following morning’s lucubrations of the sea reporters being varied disportations upon the attack on an Italian crab fisherman by an enormous jellyfish.  Big John promptly sank out of sight in a sailors’ boarding-house, and, within the week, joined the Sailors’ Union and shipped on a steam schooner to load redwood ties at Bandon, Oregon.  Ah Moy got no farther ashore than the detention sheds of the Federal Immigration Board, whence he was deported to China on the next Pacific Mail steamer.  The Mary Turner’s cat was adopted by the sailors’ forecastle of the Mariposa, and on the Mariposa sailed away on the back trip to Tahiti.  Scraps was taken ashore by a quartermaster and left in the bosom of his family.

And ashore went Dag Daughtry, with his small savings, to rent two cheap rooms for himself and his remaining responsibilities, namely, Charles Stough Greenleaf, Kwaque, Michael, and, not least, Cocky.  But not for long did he permit the Ancient Mariner to live with him.

“It’s not playing the game, sir,” he told him.  “What we need is capital.  We’ve got to interest capital, and you’ve got to do the interesting.  Now this very day you’ve got to buy a couple of suit-cases, hire a taxicab, go sailing up to the front door of the Bronx Hotel like good pay and be damned.  She’s a real stylish hotel, but reasonable if you want to make it so.  A little room, an inside room, European plan, of course, and then you can economise by eatin’ out.”

“But, steward, I have no money,” the Ancient Mariner protested.

“That’s all right, sir; I’ll back you for all I can.”

“But, my dear man, you know I’m an old impostor.  I can’t stick you up like the others.  You . . . why . . . why, you’re a friend, don’t you see?”