off the Selby Smelter were smoking, as
I picked up ahead and left astern the old landmarks I had first learned
with Nelson in the unreefer Reindeer.

Benicia showed before me. I opened the bight of Turner's Shipyard,
rounded the Solano wharf, and surged along abreast of the patch of tules
and the clustering fishermen's arks where in the old days I had lived and
drunk deep.

And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I never
dreamed for many a long year to come. I had had no intention of stopping
at Benicia. The tide favoured, the wind was fair and howling--glorious
sailing for a sailor. Bull Head and Army Points showed ahead, marking
the entrance to Suisun Bay which I knew was smoking. And yet, when I
laid eyes on those fishing arks lying in the water-front tules, without
debate, on the instant, I put down my tiller, came in on the sheet, and
headed for the shore. On the instant, out of the profound of my
brain-fag, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to drink. I wanted to get
drunk.

The call was imperative. There was no uncertainty about it. More than
anything else in the world, my frayed and frazzled mind wanted surcease
from weariness in the way it knew surcease would come. And right here is
the point. For the first time in my life I consciously, deliberately,
desired to get drunk. It was a new, a totally different manifestation of
John Barleycorn's power. It was not a body need for alcohol. It was a
mental desire. My over-worked and jaded mind wanted to forget.

And here the point is drawn to its sharpest. Granted my prodigious
brain-fag, nevertheless, had I never drunk in the past, the thought would
never have entered my mind to get drunk now. Beginning with physical
intolerance for alcohol, for years drinking only for the sake of
comradeship and because alcohol was everywhere on the adventure-path, I
had now reached the stage where my brain cried out, not merely for a
drink, but for a drunk. And had I not been so long used to alcohol, my
brain would not have so cried out. I should have sailed on past Bull
Head, and in the smoking white of Suisun Bay, and in the wine of wind
that filled my sail and poured through me, I should have forgotten my
weary brain and rested and refreshed it.

So I sailed in to shore, made all fast, and hurried up among the arks.
Charley Le Grant fell on my neck. His wife, Lizzie, folded me to her
capacious breast. Billy Murphy, and Joe Lloyd, and a