sdain for all the books and schools.
Cresting seas filled me a foot or so with water, but I laughed at it
sloshing about my feet, and chanted my disdain for the wind and the
water. I hailed myself a master of life, riding on the back of the
unleashed elements, and John Barleycorn rode with me. Amid dissertations
on mathematics and philosophy and spoutings and quotations, I sang all
the old songs learned in the days when I went from the cannery to the
oyster boats to be a pirate--such songs as: "Black Lulu," "Flying Cloud,"
"Treat my Daughter Kind-i-ly," "The Boston Burglar," "Come all you
Rambling, Gambling Men," "I Wisht I was a Little Bird," "Shenandoah," and
"Ranzo, Boys, Ranzo."

Hours afterward, in the fires of sunset, where the Sacramento and the San
Joaquin tumble their muddy floods together, I took the New York Cut-Off,
skimmed across the smooth land-locked water past Black Diamond, on into
the San Joaquin, and on to Antioch, where, somewhat sobered and
magnificently hungry, I laid alongside a big potato sloop that had a
familiar rig. Here were old friends aboard, who fried my black bass in
olive oil. Then, too, there was a meaty fisherman's stew, delicious with
garlic, and crusty Italian bread without butter, and all washed down with
pint mugs of thick and heady claret.

My salmon boat was a-soak, but in the snug cabin of the sloop dry
blankets and a dry bunk were mine; and we lay and smoked and yarned of
old days, while overhead the wind screamed through the rigging and taut
halyards drummed against the mast.

CHAPTER XXIII

My cruise in the salmon boat lasted a week, and I returned ready to enter
the university. During the week's cruise I did not drink again. To
accomplish this I was compelled to avoid looking up old friends, for as
ever the adventure-path was beset with John Barleycorn. I had wanted the
drink that first day, and in the days that followed I did not want it.
My tired brain had recuperated. I had no moral scruples in the matter.
I was not ashamed nor sorry because of that first day's orgy at Benicia,
and I thought no more about it, returning gladly to my books and studies.

Long years were to pass ere I looked back upon that day and realised its
significance. At the time, and for a long time afterward, I was to think
of it only as a frolic. But still later, in the slough of brain-fag and
intellectual weariness, I was to remember and know the craving for the
anodyne that r