Mrs. Agatha Liggs occupied a neat cozy four-room cottage in the residential section of San Francisco, known as Richmond District. A well-kept garden, colorful with blossoming plants, flanked and fronted it; and there was a Cherokee rose which spread its wild luxuriant arms across the length of the porch and festooned it thick with its pink, floppy flowers during the early spring. Six blocks away, across a field of lupins, the waves of the blue Pacific lapped a narrow stretch of beach under the shadow of crumbling shale cliffs. The Presidio fortifications loomed here and there along the heights, frowning, formidable piles of concrete out of which peeped the grim noses of long-range guns turned seaward, reminding one of dogs of war everlastingly on the alert for the first scent of danger.
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