e first things I had
been able to get for myself had been cigarette pictures, cigarette
posters, and cigarette albums.  I had not had the spending of the
money I earned, so I traded "extra" newspapers for these
treasures.  I traded duplicates with the other boys, and
circulating, as I did, all about town, I had greater opportunities
for trading and acquiring.

It was not long before I had complete every series issued by every
cigarette manufacturer--such as the Great Race Horses, Parisian
Beauties, Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted
Actors, Champion Prize Fighters, etc.  And each series I had three
different ways: in the card from the cigarette package, in the
poster, and in the album.

Then I began to accumulate duplicate sets, duplicate albums.  I
traded for other things that boys valued and which they usually
bought with money given them by their parents.  Naturally, they
did not have the keen sense of values that I had, who was never
given money to buy anything.  I traded for postage-stamps, for
minerals, for curios, for birds' eggs, for marbles (I had a more
magnificent collection of agates than I have ever seen any boy
possess--and the nucleus of the collection was a handful worth at
least three dollars, which I had kept as security for twenty cents
I loaned to a messenger-boy who was sent to reform school before
he could redeem them).

I'd trade anything and everything for anything else, and turn it
over in a dozen more trades until it was transmuted into something
that was worth something.  I was famous as a trader.  I was
notorious as a miser.  I could even make a junkman weep when I had
dealings with him.  Other boys called me in to sell for them their
collections of bottles, rags, old iron, grain, and gunny-sacks,
and five-gallon oil-cans--aye, and gave me a commission for doing
it.

And this was the thrifty, close-fisted boy, accustomed to slave at
a machine for ten cents an hour, who sat on the stringer-piece and
considered the matter of beer at five cents a glass and gone in a
moment with nothing to show for it.  I was now with men I admired.
I was proud to be with them.  Had all my pinching and saving
brought me the equivalent of one of the many thrills which had
been mine since I came among the oyster pirates? Then what was
worth while--money or thrills? These men had no horror of
squandering a nickel, or many nickels.  They were magnificently
careless of money, calling up eight men to drink whisky at ten
cents a glass, as French Frank had done.  Why, Nelson had just
spent sixty cents on beer for the two of us.

Which was it to be? I was aware that I was making a grave
decision.  I was deciding between money and men, between
niggardliness and romance.  Either I must throw overboard all my
old values of money and look upon it as something to be flung
about wastefully, or I must throw overboard my comradeship with
these men whose peculiar quirks made them like strong drink.

I retraced my steps up the wharf to the Last Chance, where Nelson
still stood outside.  "Come on and have a beer," I invited.  Again
we stood at the bar and drank and talked, but this time it was I
who paid ten cents! a whole hour of my labour at a machine for a
drink of something I didn't want and which tasted rotten.  But it
wasn't difficult.  I had achieved a concept.  Money no longer
counted.  It was comradeship that counted.  "Have another?" I
said.  And we had another, and I paid for it.  Nelson, with the
wisdom of the skilled drinker, said to the barkeeper, "Make mine a
small one, Johnny." Johnny nodded and gave him a glass that
contained only a third as much as the glasses we had been
drinking.  Yet the charge was the same--five cents.

By this time I was getting nicely jingled, so such extravagance
didn't hurt me much.  Besides, I was learning.  There was more in
this buying of drinks than mere quantity.  I got my finger on it.
There was a stage when the beer didn't count at all, but just the
spirit of comradeship of drinking together.  And, ha!--another
thing! I, too, could call for small beers and minimise by two-
thirds the detestable freightage with which comradeship burdened
one.

"I had to go aboard to get some money," I remarked casually, as we
drank, in the hope Nelson would take it as an explanation of why I
had let him treat six consecutive times.

"Oh, well, you didn't have to do that," he answered.  "Johnny'll
trust a fellow like you--won't you, Johnny!"

"Sure," Johnny agreed, with a smile.

"How much you got down against me?" Nelson queried.

Johnny pulled out the book he kept behind the bar, found Nelson's
page, and added up the account of several dollars.  At once I
became possessed with a desire to have a page in that book.
Almost it seemed the final badge of manhood.

After a couple more drinks, for which I insisted on paying, Nelson
decided to go.  We parted true comradely, and I wandered down the
wharf to the Razzle Dazzle.  Spider was just building the fire for
supper.

"Where'd you get it?" he grinned up at me through the open
companion.

"Oh, I've been with Nelson," I said carelessly, trying to hide my
pride.

Then an idea came to me.  Here was another one of them.  Now that
I had achieved my concept, I might as well practise it thoroughly.
"Come on," I said, "up to Johnny's and have a drink."

Going up the wharf, we met Clam coming down.  Clam was Nelson's
partner, and he was a fine, brave, handsome, moustached man of
thirty--everything, in short, that his nickname did not connote.
"Come on," I said, "and have a drink." He came.  As we turned into
the Last Chance, there was Pat, the Queen's brother, coming out.

"What's your hurry?" I greeted him.  "We're having a drink.  Come
on along." "I've just had one," he demurred.  "What of it?--we're
having one now," I retorted.  And Pat consented to join us, and I
melted my way into his good graces with a couple of glasses of
beer.  Oh! I was learning things that afternoon about John
Barleycorn.  There was more in him than the bad taste when you
swallowed him.  Here, at the absurd cost of ten cents, a gloomy,
grouchy individual, who threatened to become an enemy, was made
into a good friend.  He became even genial, his looks were kindly,
and our voices mellowed together as we talked water-front and
oyster-bed gossip.

"Small beer for me, Johnny," I said, when the others had ordered
schooners.  Yes, and I said it like the accustomed drinker,
carelessly, casually, as a sort of spontaneous thought that had
just occurred to me.  Looking back, I am confident that the only
one there who guessed I was a tyro at bar-drinking was Johnny
Heinhold.

"Where'd he get it?" I overheard Spider confidentially ask Johnny.

"Oh, he's been sousin' here with Nelson all afternoon," was
Johnny's answer.

I never let on that I'd heard, but PROUD? Aye, even the barkeeper
was giving me a recommendation as a man.  "HE'S BEEN SOUSIN' HERE
WITH NELSON ALL AFTERNOON." Magic words! The accolade delivered by
a barkeeper with a beer glass!

I remembered that French Frank had treated Johnny the day I bought
the Razzle Dazzle.  The glasses were filled and we were ready to
drink.  "Have something yourself, Johnny," I said, with an air of
having intended to say it all the time, but of having been a
trifle remiss because of the interesting conversation I had been
holding with Clam and Pat.

Johnny looked at me with quick sharpness, divining, I am positive,
the strides I was making in my education, and poured himself
whisky from his private bottle.  This hit me for a moment on my
thrifty side.  He had taken a ten-cent drink when the rest of us
were drinking five-cent drinks! But the hurt was only for a
moment.  I dismissed it as ignoble, remembered my concept, and did
not give myself away.

"You'd better put me down in the book for this," I said, when we
had finished the drink.  And I had the satisfaction of seeing a
fresh page devoted to my name and a charge pencilled for a round
of drinks amounting to thirty cents.  And I glimpsed, as through a
golden haze, a future wherein that page would be much charged, and
crossed off, and charged again.

I treated a second time around, and then, to my amazement, Johnny
redeemed himself in that matter of the ten-cent drink.  He treated
us around from behind the bar, and I decided that he had
arithmetically evened things up handsomely.

"Let's go around to the St. Louis House," Spider suggested when we
got outside.  Pat, who had been shovelling coal all day, had gone
home, and Clam had gone upon the Reindeer to cook supper.

So around Spider and I went to the St. Louis House--my first
visit--a huge bar-room, where perhaps fifty men, mostly
longshoremen, were congregated.  And there I met Soup Kennedy for
the second time, and Bill Kelley.  And Smith, of the Annie,
drifted in--he of the belt-buckled revolvers.  And Nelson showed
up.  And I met others, including the Vigy brothers, who ran the
place, and, chiefest of all, Joe Goose, with the wicked eyes, the
twisted nose, and the flowered vest, who played the harmonica like
a roystering angel and went on the most atrocious tears that even
the Oakland water-front could conceive of and admire.

As I bought drinks--others treated as well--the thought flickered
across my mind that Mammy Jennie wasn't going to be repaid much on
her loan out of that week's earnings of the Razzle Dazzle.  "But
what of it?" I thought, or rather, John Barleycorn thought it for
me.  "You're a man and you're getting acquainted with men.  Mammy
Jennie doesn't need the money as promptly as all that.  She isn't
starving.  You know that.  She's got other money in the bank.  Let
her wait, and pay her back gradually."

And thus it was I learned another trait of John Barleycorn.  He
inhibits morality.  Wrong conduct that it is impossible for one to
do sober, is done quite easily when one is not sober.  In fact, it
is the only thing one can do, for John Barleycorn's inhibition
rises like a wall between one's immediate desires and long-learned
morality.

I dismissed my thought of debt to Mammy Jennie and proceeded to
get acquainted at the trifling expense of some trifling money and
a jingle that was growing unpleasant.  Who took me on board and
put me to bed that night I do not know, but I imagine it must have
been Spider.



        CHAPTER X


And so I won my manhood's spurs.  My status on the water-front and
with the oyster pirates became immediately excellent.  I was
looked upon as a good fellow, as well as no coward.  And somehow,
from the day I achieved that concept sitting on the stringer-piece
of the Oakland City Wharf, I have never cared much for money.  No
one has ever considered me a miser since, while my carelessness of
money is a source of anxiety and worry to some that know me.

So completely did I break with my parsimonious past that I sent
word home to my mother to call in the boys of the neighbourhood
and give to them all my collections.  I never even cared to learn
what boys got what collections.  I was a man now, and I made a
clean sweep of everything that bound me to my boyhood.

My reputation grew.  When the story went around the water-front of
how French Frank had tried to run me down with his schooner, and
of how I had stood on the deck of the Razzle Dazzle, a cocked
double-barrelled shotgun in my hands, steering with my feet and
holding her to her course, and compelled him to put up his wheel
and keep away, the water-front decided that there was something in
me despite my youth.  And I continued to show what was in me.
There were the times I brought the Razzle Dazzle in with a bigger
load of oysters than any other two-man craft; there was the time
when we raided far down in Lower Bay, and mine was the only craft
back at daylight to the anchorage off Asparagus Island; there was
the Thursday night we raced for market and I brought the Razzle
Dazzle in without a rudder, first of the fleet, and skimmed the
cream of the Friday morning trade; and there was the time I
brought her in from Upper Bay under a jib, when Scotty burned my
mainsail.  (Yes; it was Scotty of the Idler adventure.  Irish had
followed Spider on board the Razzle Dazzle, and Scotty, turning
up, had taken Irish's place.)

But the things I did on the water only partly counted.  What
completed everything, and won for me the title of "Prince of the
Oyster Beds," was that I was a good fellow ashore with my money,
buying drinks like a man.  I little dreamed that the time would
come when the Oakland water-front, which had shocked me at first
would be shocked and annoyed by the devilry of the things I did.

But always the life was tied up with drinking.  The saloons are
poor men's clubs.  Saloons are congregating places.  We engaged to
meet one another in saloons.  We celebrated our good fortune or
wept our grief in saloons.  We got acquainted in saloons.

Can I ever forget the afternoon I met "Old Scratch," Nelson's
father? It was in the Last Chance.  Johnny Heinhold introduced us.
That Old Scratch was Nelson's father was noteworthy enough.  But
there was more in it than that.  He was owner and master of the
scow-schooner Annie Mine, and some day I might ship as a sailor
with him.  Still more, he was romance.  He was a blue-eyed,
yellow-haired, raw-boned Viking, big-bodied and strong-muscled
despite his age.  And he had sailed the seas in ships of all
nations in the old savage sailing days.

I had heard many weird tales about him, and worshipped him from a
distance.  It took the saloon to bring us together.  Even so, our
acquaintance might have been no more than a hand-grip and a word--
he was a laconic old fellow--had it not been for the drinking.

"Have a drink," I said, with promptitude, after the pause which I
had learned good form in drinking dictates.  Of course, while we
drank our beer, which I had paid for, it was incumbent on him to
listen to me and to talk to me.  And Johnny, like a true host,
made the tactful remarks that enabled us to find mutual topics of
conversation.  And of course, having drunk my beer, Captain Nelson
must now buy beer in turn.  This led to more talking, and Johnny
drifted out of the conversation to wait on other customers.

The more beer Captain Nelson and I drank, the better we got
acquainted.  In me he found an appreciative listener, who, by
virtue of book-reading, knew much about the sea-life he had lived.
So he drifted back to his wild young days, and spun many a rare
yarn for me, while we downed beer, treat by treat, all through a
blessed summer afternoon.  And it was only John Barleycorn that
made possible that long afternoon with the old sea-dog.

It was Johnny Heinhold who secretly warned me across the bar that
I was getting pickled and advised me to take small beers.  But as
long as Captain Nelson drank large beers, my pride forbade
anything else than large beers.  And not until the skipper ordered
his first small beer did I order one for myself.  Oh, when we came
to a lingering fond farewell, I was drunk.  But I had the
satisfaction of seeing Old Scratch as drunk as I.  My youthful
modesty scarcely let me dare believe that the hardened old
buccaneer was even more drunk.

And afterwards, from Spider, and Pat, and C]am, and Johnny
Heinhold, and others, came the tips that Old Scratch liked me and
had nothing but good words for the fine lad I was.  Which was the
more remarkable, because he was known as a savage, cantankerous
old cuss who never liked anybody.  (His very nickname, "Scratch,"
arose from a Berserker trick of his, in fighting, of tearing off
his opponent's face.) And that I had won his friendship, all
thanks were due to John Barleycorn.  I have given the incident
merely as an example of the multitudinous lures and draws and
services by which John Barleycorn wins his followers.



        CHAPTER XI


And still there arose in me no desire for alcohol, no chemical
demand.  In years and years of heavy drinking, drinking did not
beget the desire.  Drinking was the way of the life I led, the way
of the men with whom I lived.  While away on my cruises on the
bay, I took no drink along; and while out on the bay the thought
of the desirableness of a drink never crossed my mind.  It was not
until I tied the Razzle Dazzle up to the wharf and got ashore in
the congregating places of men, where drink flowed, that the
buying of drinks for other men, and the accepting of drinks from
other men, devolved upon me as a social duty and a manhood rite.

Then, too, there were the times, lying at the city wharf or across
the estuary on the sand-spit, when the Queen, and her sister, and
her brother Pat, and Mrs. Hadley came aboard.  It was my boat, I
was host, and I could only dispense hospitality in the terms of
their understanding of it.  So I would rush Spider, or Irish, or
Scotty, or whoever was my crew, with the can for beer and the
demijohn for red wine.  And again, lying at the wharf disposing of
my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big policemen and
plain-clothes men stole on board.  And because we lived in the
shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with
squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got stronger
stuff in bottles.

Drink as I would, I couldn't come to like John Barleycorn.  I
valued him extremely well for his associations, but not for the
taste of him.  All the time I was striving to be a man amongst
men, and all the time I nursed secret and shameful desires for
candy.  But I would have died before I'd let anybody guess it.  I
used to indulge in lonely debauches, on nights when I knew my crew
was going to sleep ashore.  I would go up to the Free Library,
exchange my books, buy a quarter's worth of all sorts of candy
that chewed and lasted, sneak aboard the Razzle Dazzle, lock
myself in the cabin, go to bed, and lie there long hours of bliss,
reading and chewing candy.  And those were the only times I felt
that I got my real money's worth.  Dollars and dollars, across the
bar, couldn't buy the satisfaction that twenty-five cents did in a
candy store.

As my drinking grew heavier, I began to note more and more that it
was in the drinking bouts the purple passages occurred.  Drunks
were always memorable.  At such times things happened.  Men like
Joe Goose dated existence from drunk to drunk.  The longshoremen
all looked forward to their Saturday night drunk.  We of the
oyster boats waited until we had disposed of our cargoes before we
got really started, though a scattering of drinks and a meeting of
a chance friend sometimes precipitated an accidental drunk.

In ways, the accidental drunks were the best.  Stranger and more
exciting things happened at such times.  As, for instance, the
Sunday when Nelson and French Frank and Captain Spink stole the
stolen salmon boat from Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek.  Changes
had taken place in the personnel of the oyster boats.  Nelson had
got into a fight with Bill Kelley on the Annie and was carrying a
bullet-hole through his left hand.  Also, having quarrelled with
Clam and broken partnership, Nelson had sailed the Reindeer, his
arm in a sling, with a crew of two deep-water sailors, and he had
sailed so madly as to frighten them ashore.  Such was the tale of
his recklessness they spread, that no one on the water-front would
go out with Nelson.  So the
Reindeer, crewless, lay across the estuary at the sandspit.
Beside her lay the Razzle Dazzle with a burned mainsail and Scotty
and me on board.  Whisky Bob had fallen out with French Frank and
gone on a raid "up river" with Nicky the Greek.

The result of this raid was a brand-new Columbia River salmon
boat, stolen from an Italian fisherman.  We oyster pirates were
all visited by the searching Italian, and we were convinced, from
what we knew of their movements, that Whisky Bob and Nicky the
Greek were the guilty parties.  But where was the salmon boat?
Hundreds of Greek and Italian fishermen, up river and down bay,
had searched every slough and tule patch for it.  When the owner
despairingly offered a reward of fifty dollars, our interest
increased and the mystery deepened.

One Sunday morning old Captain Spink paid me a visit.  The
conversation was confidential.  He had just been fishing in his
skiff in the old Alameda ferry slip.  As the tide went down, he
had noticed a rope tied to a pile under water and leading
downward.  In vain he had tried to heave up what was fast on the
other end.  Farther along, to another pile, was a similar rope,
leading downward and unheavable.  Without doubt, it was the
missing salmon boat.  If we restored it to its rightful owner
there was fifty dollars in it for us.  But I had queer ethical
notions about honour amongst thieves, and declined to have
anything to do with the affair.

But French Frank had quarrelled with Whisky Bob, and Nelson was
also an enemy.  (Poor Whisky Bob!--without viciousness, good-
natured, generous, born weak, raised poorly, with an irresistible
chemical demand for alcohol, still prosecuting his vocation of bay
pirate, his body was picked up, not long afterward, beside a dock
where it had sunk full of gunshot wounds.) Within an hour after I
had rejected Captain Spink's proposal, I saw him sail down the
estuary on board the Reindeer with Nelson.  Also, French Frank
went by on his schooner.

It was not long ere they sailed back up the estuary, curiously
side by side.  As they headed in for the sandspit, the submerged
salmon boat could be seen, gunwales awash and held up from sinking
by ropes fast to the schooner and the sloop.  The tide was half
out, and they sailed squarely in on the sand, grounding in a row,
with the salmon boat in the middle.

Immediately Hans, one of French Frank's sailors, was into a skiff
and pulling rapidly for the north shore.  The big demijohn in the
stern-sheets told his errand.  They couldn't wait a moment to
celebrate the fifty dollars they had so easily earned.  It is the
way of the devotees of John Barleycorn.  When good fortune comes,
they drink.  When they have no fortune, they drink to the hope of
good fortune.  If fortune be ill, they drink to forget it.  If
they meet a friend, they drink.  If they quarrel with a friend and
lose him, they drink.  If their love-making be crowned with
success, they are so happy they needs must drink.  If they be
jilted, they drink for the contrary reason.  And if they haven't
anything to do at all, why, they take a drink, secure in the
knowledge that when they have taken a sufficient number of drinks
the maggots will start crawling in their brains and they will have
their hands full with things to do.  When they are sober they want
to drink; and when they have drunk they want to drink more.

Of course, as fellow comrades, Scotty and I were called in for the
drinking.  We helped to make a hole in that fifty dollars not yet
received.  The afternoon, from just an ordinary common summer
Sunday afternoon, became a gorgeous, purple afternoon.  We all
talked and sang and ranted and bragged, and ever French Frank and
Nelson sent more drinks around.  We lay in full sight of the
Oakland water-front, and the noise of our revels attracted
friends.  Skiff after skiff crossed the estuary and hauled up on
the sandspit, while Hans' work was cut out for him--ever to row
back and forth for more supplies of booze.

Then Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek arrived, sober, indignant,
outraged in that their fellow pirates had raised their plant.
French Frank, aided by John Barleycorn, orated hypocritically
about virtue and honesty, and, despite his fifty years, got Whisky
Bob out on the sand and proceeded to lick him.  When Nicky the
Greek jumped in with a short-handled shovel to Whisky Bob's
assistance, short work was made of him by Hans.  And of course,
when the bleeding remnants of Bob and Nicky were sent packing in
their skiff, the event must needs be celebrated in further
carousal.

By this time, our visitors being numerous, we were a large crowd
compounded of many nationalities and diverse temperaments, all
aroused by John Barleycorn, all restraints cast off.  Old quarrels
revived, ancient hates flared up.  Fight was in the air.  And
whenever a longshoreman remembered something against a scow-
schooner sailor, or vice versa, or an oyster pirate remembered or
was remembered, a fist shot out and another fight was on.  And
every fight was made up in more rounds of drinks, wherein the
combatants, aided and abetted by the rest of us, embraced each
other and pledged undying friendship.

And, of all times, Soup Kennedy selected this time to come and
retrieve an old shirt of his, left aboard the Reindeer from the
trip he sailed with Clam.  He had espoused Clam's side of the
quarrel with Nelson.  Also, he had been drinking in the St. Louis
House, so that it was John Barleycorn who led him to the sandspit
in quest of his old shirt.  Few words started the fray.  He locked
with Nelson in the cockpit of the Reindeer, and in the mix-up
barely escaped being brained by an iron bar wielded by irate
French Frank--irate because a two-handed man had attacked a one-
handed man.  (If the Reindeer still floats, the dent of the iron
bar remains in the hard-wood rail of her cockpit.)

But Nelson pulled his bandaged hand, bullet-perforated, out of its
sling, and, held by us, wept and roared his Berserker belief that
he could lick Soup Kennedy one-handed.  And we let them loose on
the sand.  Once, when it looked as if Nelson were getting the
worst of it, French Frank and John Barleycorn sprang unfairly into
the fight.  Scotty protested and reached for French Frank, who
whirled upon him and fell on top of him in a pummelling clinch
after a sprawl of twenty feet across the sand.  In the course of
separating these two, half a dozen fights started amongst the rest
of us.  These fights were finished, one way or the other, or we
separated them with drinks, while all the time Nelson and Soup
Kennedy fought on.  Occasionally we returned to them and gave
advice, such as, when they lay exhausted in the sand, unable to
strike a blow, "Throw sand in his eyes." And they threw sand in
each other's eyes, recuperated, and fought on to successive
exhaustions.

And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial,
try to think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning
with the spirit of adventure, fancy-filled with tales of
buccaneers and sea-rovers, sacks of cities and conflicts of armed
men, and imagination-maddened by the stuff I had drunk.  It was
life raw and naked, wild and free--the only life of that sort
which my birth in time and space permitted me to attain.  And more
than that.  It carried a promise.  It was the beginning.  From the
sandspit the way led out through the Golden Gate to the vastness
of adventure of all the world, where battles would be fought, not
for old shirts and over stolen salmon boats, but for high purposes
and romantic ends.

And because I told Scotty what I thought of his letting an old man
like French Frank get away with him, we, too, brawled and added to
the festivity of the sandspit.  And Scotty threw up his job as
crew, and departed in the night with a pair of blankets belonging
to me.  During the night, while the oyster pirates lay stupefied
in their bunks, the schooner and the Reindeer floated on the high
water and swung about to their anchors.  The salmon boat, still
filled with rocks and water, rested on the bottom.

In the morning, early, I heard wild cries from the Reindeer, and
tumbled out in the chill grey to see a spectacle that made the
water-front laugh for days.  The beautiful salmon boat lay on the
hard sand, squashed flat as a pancake, while on it were perched
French Frank's schooner and the Reindeer.  Unfortunately two of
the Reindeer's planks had been crushed in by the stout oak stem of
the salmon boat.  The rising tide had flowed through the hole, and
just awakened Nelson by getting into his bunk with him.  I lent a
hand, and we pumped the Reindeer out and repaired the damage.

Then Nelson cooked breakfast, and while we ate we considered the
situation.  He was broke.  So was I.  The fifty dollars reward
would never be paid for that pitiful mess of splinters on the sand
beneath us.  He had a wounded hand and no crew.  I had a burned
main sail and no crew.

"What d'ye say, you and me?" Nelson queried.  "I'll go you," was
my answer.  And thus I became partners with "Young Scratch"
Nelson, the wildest, maddest of them all.  We borrowed the money
for an outfit of grub from Johnny Heinhold, filled our water-
barrels, and sailed away that day for the oyster-beds.



        CHAPTER XII


Nor have I ever regretted those months of mad devilry I put in
with Nelson.  He COULD sail, even if he did frighten every man
that sailed with him.  To steer to miss destruction by an inch or
an instant was his joy.  To do what everybody else did not dare
attempt to do, was his pride.  Never to reef down was his mania,
and in all the time I spent with him, blow high or low, the
Reindeer was never reefed.  Nor was she ever dry.  We strained her
open and sailed her open and sailed her open continually.  And we
abandoned the Oakland water-front and went wider afield for our
adventures.

And all this glorious passage in my life was made possible for me
by John Barleycorn.  And this is my complaint against John
Barleycorn.  Here I was, thirsting for the wild life of adventure,
and the only way for me to win to it was through John Barleycorn's
mediation.  It was the way of the men who lived the life.  Did I
wish to live the life, I must live it the way they did.  It was by
virtue of drinking that I gained that partnership and comradeship
with Nelson.  Had I drunk only the beer he paid for, or had I
declined to drink at all, I should never have been selected by him
as a partner.  He wanted a partner who would meet him on the
social side, as well as the work side of life.

I abandoned myself to the life, and developed the misconception
that the secret of John Barleycorn lay in going on mad drunks,
rising through the successive stages that only an iron
constitution could endure to final stupefaction and swinish
unconsciousness.  I did not like the taste, so I drank for the
sole purpose of getting drunk, of getting hopelessly, helplessly
drunk.  And I, who had saved and scraped, traded like a Shylock
and made junkmen weep; I, who had stood aghast when French Frank,
at a single stroke, spent eighty cents for whisky for eight men, I
turned myself loose with a more lavish disregard for money than
any of them.

I remember going ashore one night with Nelson.  In my pocket were
one hundred and eighty dollars.  It was my intention, first, to
buy me some clothes, after that, some drinks.  I needed the
clothes.  All I possessed were on me, and they were as follows: a
pair of sea-boots that providentially leaked the water out as fast
as it ran in, a pair of fifty-cent overalls, a forty-cent cotton
shirt, and a sou'wester.  I had no hat, so I had to wear the
sou'wester, and it will be noted that I have listed neither
underclothes nor socks.  I didn't own any.

To reach the stores where clothes could be bought, we had to pass
a dozen saloons.  So I bought me the drinks first.  I never got to
the clothing stores.  In the morning, broke, poisoned, but
contented, I came back on board, and we set sail.  I possessed
only the clothes I had gone ashore in, and not a cent remained of
the one hundred and eighty dollars.  It might well be deemed
impossible, by those who have never tried it, that in twelve hours
a lad can spend all of one hundred and eighty dollars for drinks.
I know otherwise.

And I had no regrets.  I was proud.  I had shown them I could
spend with the best of them.  Amongst strong men I had proved
myself strong.  I had clinched again, as I had often clinched, my
right to the title of "Prince." Also, my attitude may be
considered, in part, as a reaction from my childhood's meagreness
and my childhood's excessive toil.  Possibly my inchoate thought
was: Better to reign among booze-fighters a prince than to toil
twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an hour.  There are
no purple passages in machine toil.  But if the spending of one
hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage,
then I'd like to know what is.

Oh, I skip much of the details of my trafficking with John
Barleycorn during this period, and shall only mention events that
will throw light on John Barleycorn's ways.  There were three
things that enabled me to pursue this heavy drinking: first, a
magnificent constitution far better than the average; second, the
healthy open-air life on the water; and third, the fact that I
drank irregularly.  While out on the water, we never carried any
drink along.

The world was opening up to me.  Already I knew several hundred
miles of the water-ways of it, and of the towns and cities and
fishing hamlets on the shores.  Came the whisper to range farther.
I had not found it yet.  There was more behind.  But even this
much of the world was too wide for Nelson.  He wearied for his
beloved Oakland water-front, and when he elected to return to it
we separated in all friendliness.

I now made the old town of Benicia, on the Carquinez Straits, my
headquarters.  In a cluster of fishermen's arks, moored in the
tules on the water-front, dwelt a congenial crowd of drinkers and
vagabonds, and I joined them.  I had longer spells ashore, between
fooling with salmon fishing and making raids up and down bay and
rivers as a deputy fish patrolman, and I drank more and learned
more about drinking.  I held my own with any one, drink for drink;
and often drank more than my share to show the strength of my
manhood.  When, on a morning, my unconscious carcass was
disentangled from the nets on the drying-frames, whither I had
stupidly, blindly crawled the night before; and when the water-
front talked it over with many a giggle and laugh and another
drink, I was proud indeed.  It was an exploit.

And when I never drew a sober breath, on one stretch, for three
solid weeks, I was certain I had reached the top.  Surely, in that
direction, one could go no farther.  It was time for me to move
on.  For always, drunk or sober, at the back of my consciousness
something whispered that this carousing and bay-adventuring was
not all of life.  This whisper was my good fortune.  I happened to
be so made that I could hear it calling, always calling, out and
away over the world.  It was not canniness on my part.  It was
curiosity, desire to know, an unrest and a seeking for things
wonderful that I seemed somehow to have glimpsed or guessed.  What
was this life for, I demanded, if this were all? No; there was
something more, away and beyond.  (And, in relation to my much
later development as a drinker, this whisper, this promise of the
things at the back of life, must be noted, for it was destined to
play a dire part in my more recent wrestlings with John
Barleycorn.)

But what gave immediacy to my decision to move on was a trick John
Barleycorn played me--a monstrous, incredible trick that showed
abysses of intoxication hitherto undreamed.  At one o'clock in the
morning, after a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop
at the end of the wharf, intending to go to sleep.  The tides
sweep through Carquinez Straits as in a mill-race, and the full
ebb was on when I stumbled overboard.  There was nobody on the
wharf, nobody on the sloop.  I was borne away by the current.  I
was not startled.  I thought the misadventure delightful.  I was a
good swimmer, and in my inflamed condition the contact of the
water with my skin soothed me like cool linen.

And then John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick.  Some
maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me.
I had never been morbid.  Thoughts of suicide had never entered my
head.  And now that they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid
culminating, a perfect rounding off of my short but exciting
career.  I, who had never known girl's love, nor woman's love, nor
the love of children; who had never played in the wide joy-fields
of art, nor climbed the star-cool heights of philosophy, nor seen
with my eyes more than a pin-point's surface of the gorgeous
world; I decided that this was all, that I had seen all, lived
all, been all, that was worth while, and that now was the time to
cease.  This was the trick of John Barleycorn, laying me by the
heels of my imagination and in a drug-dream dragging me to death.

Oh, he was convincing.  I had really experienced all of life, and
it didn't amount to much.  The swinish drunkenness in which I had
lived for months (this was accompanied by the sense of degradation
and the old feeling of conviction of sin) was the last and best,
and I could see for myself what it was worth.  There were all the
broken-down old bums and loafers I had bought drinks for.  That
was what remained of life.  Did I want to become like them? A
thousand times no; and I wept tears of sweet sadness over my
glorious youth going out with the tide.  (And who has not seen the
weeping drunk, the melancholic drunk? They are to be found in all
the bar-rooms, if they can find no other listener telling their
sorrows to the barkeeper, who is paid to listen.)

The water was delicious.  It was a man's way to die.  John
Barleycorn changed the tune he played in my drink-maddened brain.
Away with tears and regret.  It was a hero's death, and by the
hero's own hand and will.  So I struck up my death-chant and was
singing it lustily, when the gurgle and splash of the current-
riffles in my ears reminded me of my more immediate situation.

Below the town of Benicia, where the Solano wharf projects, the
Straits widen out into what bay-farers call the "Bight of Turner's
Shipyard." I was in the shore-tide that swept under the Solano
wharf and on into the bight.  I knew of old the power of the suck
which developed when the tide swung around the end of Dead Man's
Island and drove straight for the wharf.  I didn't want to go
through those piles.  It wouldn't be nice, and I might lose an
hour in the bight on my way out with the tide.

I undressed in the water and struck out with a strong, single-
overhand stroke, crossing the current at right-angles.  Nor did I
cease until, by the wharf lights, I knew I was safe to sweep by
the end.  Then I turned over and rested.  The stroke had been a
telling one, and I was a little time in recovering my breath.

I was elated, for I had succeeded in avoiding the suck.  I started
to raise my death-chant again--a purely extemporised farrago of a
drug-crazed youth.  "Don't sing--yet," whispered John Barleycorn.
"The Solano runs all night.  There are railroad men on the wharf.
They will hear you, and come out in a boat and rescue you, and you
don't want to be rescued." I certainly didn't.  What? Be robbed of
my hero's death? Never.  And I lay on my back in the starlight,
watching the familiar wharf-lights go by, red and green and white,
and bidding sad sentimental farewell to them, each and all.

When I was well clear, in mid-channel, I sang again.  Sometimes I
swam a few strokes, but in the main I contented myself with
floating and dreaming long drunken dreams.  Before daylight, the
chill of the water and the passage of the hours had sobered me
sufficiently to make me wonder what portion of the Straits I was
in, and also to wonder if the turn of the tide wouldn't catch me
and take me back ere I had drifted out into San Pablo Bay.

Next I discovered that I was very weary and very cold, and quite
sober, and that I didn't in the least want to be drowned.  I could
make out the Selby Smelter on the Contra Costa shore and the Mare
Island lighthouse.  I started to swim for the Solano shore, but
was too weak and chilled, and made so little headway, and at the
cost of such painful effort, that I gave it up and contented
myself with floating, now and then giving a stroke to keep my
balance in the tide-rips which were increasing their commotion on
the surface of the water.  And I knew fear.  I was sober now, and
I didn't want to die.  I discovered scores of reasons for living.
And the more reasons I discovered, the more liable it seemed that
I was going to drown anyway.

Daylight, after I had been four hours in the water, found me in a
parlous condition in the tide-rips off Mare Island light, where
the swift ebbs from Vallejo Straits and Carquinez Straits were
fighting with each other, and where, at that particular moment,
they were fighting the flood tide setting up against them from San
Pablo Bay.  A stiff breeze had sprung up, and the crisp little
waves were persistently lapping into my mouth, and I was beginning
to swallow salt water.  With my swimmer's knowledge, I knew the
end was near.  And then the boat came--a Greek fisherman running
in for Vallejo; and again I had been saved from John Barleycorn by
my constitution and physical vigour.

And, in passing, let me note tha