m before, joy cruisin' on the Barbary Coast one night with a lot of
drunken sailors--only he wasn't drunk. And I knew what he was--some
Chinese blood in him, and the name o' being a slick one. But I didn't
say anything about that. Gratu'tously telling a man you don't like him
don't lay you up to wind'ard any. No. And we sat down and he explains
what he wanted. There was a consignment of a few bales of hemp waiting
up on the British Columbia coast, and would I run the _Hattie_ over and
slip back with 'em? And we'd have to leave right away.

"Well, I would--after a talk. And with Archie Gillis and a few hoboes
that called themselves sailors, which I'd picked up in Jack Downing's
place in Seattle, we put out. Archie was mate and to get two hundred
dollars and me five hundred.

"It was a fine night, that night, and we put out into the sound and
worked our way up through the islands, and the second morning later
slips into a little cove behind some high hills with trees along the
banks--in Georgia Strait. Twenty-four hours we lay there, and then we
hears a steamer's wheel, but we don't see her; only a couple of hours
later the owner comes for me in a big ship's quarter-boat, and we work
the _Hattie_ over to a little island where we find a lot of bales
wrapped in burlap and hid in a cook's shack.

"'That all?' I asks my new owner--Durks his name.

"'Oh, yes--there's a couple o' Chinamen here. But let's see--where are
they?' He looks around. 'They're not here--strolling in the woods
somewhere. We'll take them along, too,' he says. 'You won't mind that,
will you?'

"Now there was nothing in the contract about Chinamen, and I didn't like
the notion of him working 'em aboard in that way, but I said all right
and soon as dark came we'd roll 'em aboard and put out.

"Well, the boss and I sits down to lunch in the cook-house, and by and
by, with nothing to do but wait for dark, we stroll around the island.
Now I'm no wizard in anything, but I always did have a good ear. And no
harm at all, a good ear, when you got to do most of your own watching
out. Before we'd gone far I knew somebody was trailing me and the new
owner. I could hear steps behind us an' dead twigs snapping and somebody
shoving aside branches, and once, when we stopped for a talk on the edge
of a clearing, I knew I heard somebody breathing just behind the bushes
which was hanging over the logs we were sitting on.

"Now I knew that this Durks wasn't very popula