Five years later, Lily has grown up. Part of an acting troupe, she goes to San Francisco, the golden city, a mix of extreme wealth and desperate poverty, limitless opportunity and instant disaster. There, she searches for the mother she only dimly remembers, and encounters again the railroad detective who had pursued her through Los Angeles. The railroad strikes, rioting and uproar that consumed the whole United States in that summer reaches San Francisco and Lily is caught up in the turmoil of a free-wheeling society that is making itself up as it goes along.
Cecelia Holland was born in Henderson, Nevada, in 1943 and started writing at the age of twelve. Starting with The Firedrake in 1966, she has published twenty-one independent historical novels covering periods from the middle of the first millennium CE up through parts of the early twentieth century, ranging from Egypt through Russia, central Europe, Scandinavia, and Great Britain and Ireland to the West Coast of the US.