ollections. I was a man now, and I made a clean sweep of everything
that bound me to my boyhood.

My reputation grew. When the story went around the water-front of how
French Frank had tried to run me down with his schooner, and of how I had
stood on the deck of the Razzle Dazzle, a cocked double-barrelled shotgun
in my hands, steering with my feet and holding her to her course, and
compelled him to put up his wheel and keep away, the water-front decided
that there was something in me despite my youth. And I continued to show
what was in me. There were the times I brought the Razzle Dazzle in with
a bigger load of oysters than any other two-man craft; there was the time
when we raided far down in Lower Bay, and mine was the only craft back at
daylight to the anchorage off Asparagus Island; there was the Thursday
night we raced for market and I brought the Razzle Dazzle in without a
rudder, first of the fleet, and skimmed the cream of the Friday morning
trade; and there was the time I brought her in from Upper Bay under a
jib, when Scotty burned my mainsail. (Yes; it was Scotty of the Idler
adventure. Irish had followed Spider on board the Razzle Dazzle, and
Scotty, turning up, had taken Irish's place.)

But the things I did on the water only partly counted. What completed
everything, and won for me the title of "Prince of the Oyster Beds," was
that I was a good fellow ashore with my money, buying drinks like a man.
I little dreamed that the time would come when the Oakland water-front,
which had shocked me at first would be shocked and annoyed by the devilry
of the things I did.

But always the life was tied up with drinking. The saloons are poor
men's clubs. Saloons are congregating places. We engaged to meet one
another in saloons. We celebrated our good fortune or wept our grief in
saloons. We got acquainted in saloons.

Can I ever forget the afternoon I met "Old Scratch," Nelson's father? It
was in the Last Chance. Johnny Heinhold introduced us. That Old Scratch
was Nelson's father was noteworthy enough. But there was more in it than
that. He was owner and master of the scow-schooner Annie Mine, and some
day I might ship as a sailor with him. Still more, he was romance. He
was a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, raw-boned Viking, big-bodied and
strong-muscled despite his age. And he had sailed the seas in ships of
all nations in the old savage sailing days.

I had heard many weird tales about him, an