ce,
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