noon
The warmth , the stillness , the placid , drowsing quiet of Magdalena Bay , steaming under the golden eye of a tropic heaven , the white , baked beach , the bay-heads , striated with the mirage in the morning , the coruscating sunset , the enchanted mystery of the purple night , with its sheen of stars and riding moon , were now replaced by the hale and vigorous snorting of the Trades , the roll of breakers to landward , and the unremitting gallop of the unnumbered multitudes of gray-green seas , careering silently past the schooner , their crests occasionally hissing into brusque eruptions of white froth , or smiting broad on under her counter , showering her decks with a sprout of icy spray . It was cold ; at times thick fogs cloaked all the world of water . To the east a procession of bleak hills defiled slowly southward ; lighthouses were passed ; streamers of smoke on the western horizon marked the passage of steamships ; and once they met and passed close by a huge Cape Horner , a great deep-sea tramp , all sails set and drawing , rolling slowly and leisurely in seas that made the schooner dance . At last the Farallones looked over the ocean 's edge to the north ; then came the whistling-buoy , the Seal Rocks , the Heads , Point Reyes , the Golden Gate flanked with the old red Presidio , Lime Point with its watching cannon ; and by noon of a gray and boisterous day , under a lusty wind and a slant of rain , just five months after her departure , the `` Bertha Millner '' let go her anchor in San Francisco Bay some few hundred yards off the Lifeboat Station . In this berth the schooner was still three or four miles from the city and the water-front . But Moran detested any nearer approach to civilization , and Wilbur himself was willing to avoid , at least for one day , the publicity which he believed the `` Bertha 's '' reappearance was sure to attract . He remembered , too , that the little boat carried with her a fortune of $ 100,000 , and decided that until it could be safely landed and stored it was not desirable that its existence should be known along `` the Front . ''