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
clothe