with Spider, and my ears burn now as I try to surmise the things they
must have said about me.

I asked Spider, in an off-hand way, what was eating French Frank. "He's
crazy jealous of you," was the answer. "Do you think so?" I said, and
dismissed the matter as not worth thinking about.

But I leave it to any one--the swell of my fifteen-years-old manhood at
learning that French Frank, the adventurer of fifty, the sailor of all
the seas of all the world, was jealous of me--and jealous over a girl
most romantically named the Queen of the Oyster Pirates. I had read of
such things in books, and regarded them as personal probabilities of a
distant maturity. Oh, I felt a rare young devil, as we hoisted the big
mainsail that morning, broke out anchor, and filled away close-hauled on
the three-mile beat to windward out into the bay.

Such was my escape from the killing machine-toil, and my introduction to
the oyster pirates. True, the introduction had begun with drink, and the
life promised to continue with drink. But was I to stay away from it for
such reason? Wherever life ran free and great, there men drank. Romance
and Adventure seemed always to go down the street locked arm in arm with
John Barleycorn. To know the two, I must know the third. Or else I must
go back to my free library books and read of the deeds of other men and
do no deeds of my own save slave for ten cents an hour at a machine in a
cannery.

No; I was not to be deterred from this brave life on the water by the
fact that the water-dwellers had queer and expensive desires for beer and
wine and whisky. What if their notions of happiness included the strange
one of seeing me drink? When they persisted in buying the stuff and
thrusting it upon me, why, I would drink it. It was the price I would
pay for their comradeship. And I didn't have to get drunk. I had not
got drunk the Sunday afternoon I arranged to buy the Razzle Dazzle,
despite the fact that not one of the rest was sober. Well, I could go on
into the future that way, drinking the stuff when it gave them pleasure
that I should drink it, but carefully avoiding over-drinking.

CHAPTER IX

Gradual as was my development as a heavy drinker among the oyster
pirates, the real heavy drinking came suddenly, and was the result, not
of desire for alcohol, but of an intellectual conviction.

The more I saw of the life, the more I was enamoured of it. I can never
forget my thrills the