ll the survivors of
the old guard, got around me and their arms around me. Charley seized
the can and started for Jorgensen's saloon across the railroad tracks.
That meant beer. I wanted whisky, so I called after him to bring a flask.

Many times that flask journeyed across the railroad tracks and back.
More old friends of the old free and easy times dropped in, fishermen,
Greeks, and Russians, and French. They took turns in treating, and
treated all around in turn again. They came and went, but I stayed on
and drank with all. I guzzled. I swilled. I ran the liquor down and
joyed as the maggots mounted in my brain.

And Clam came in, Nelson's partner before me, handsome as ever, but more
reckless, half insane, burning himself out with whisky. He had just had
a quarrel with his partner on the sloop Gazelle, and knives had been
drawn, and blows struck, and he was bent on maddening the fever of the
memory with more whisky. And while we downed it, we remembered Nelson
and that he had stretched out his great shoulders for the last long sleep
in this very town of Benicia; and we wept over the memory of him, and
remembered only the good things of him, and sent out the flask to be
filled and drank again.

They wanted me to stay over, but through the open door I could see the
brave wind on the water, and my ears were filled with the roar of it.
And while I forgot that I had plunged into the books nineteen hours a day
for three solid months, Charley Le Grant shifted my outfit into a big
Columbia River salmon boat. He added charcoal and a fisherman's brazier,
a coffee pot and frying pan, and the coffee and the meat, and a black
bass fresh from the water that day.

They had to help me down the rickety wharf and into the salmon boat.
Likewise they stretched my boom and sprit until the sail set like a
board. Some feared to set the sprit; but I insisted, and Charley had no
doubts. He knew me of old, and knew that I could sail as long as I could
see. They cast off my painter. I put the tiller up, filled away before
it, and with dizzy eyes checked and steadied the boat on her course and
waved farewell.

The tide had turned, and the fierce ebb, running in the teeth of a
fiercer wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea. Suisun Bay was white
with wrath and sea-lump. But a salmon boat can sail, and I knew how to
sail a salmon boat. So I drove her into it, and through it, and across,
and maundered aloud and chanted my di