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<pre>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Tales of the Fish Patrol, by Jack London
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
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to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
Title: Tales of the Fish Patrol
Author: Jack London
Release Date: March 25, 2015 [eBook #911]
[This file was first posted on March 22, 1997]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF THE FISH PATROL***
</pre>
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<td>
THERE IS ANOTHER EDITION OF THIS TITLE WITH ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS WHICH MAY VIEWED AT EBOOK <big><b><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28693">
[# 28693 ]</a></b></big>
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<p>Transcribed from the 1914 William Heinemann edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/coverb.jpg">
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src="images/covers.jpg" />
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<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/fpb.jpg">
<img alt=
"“Now will you keep off?” he demanded"
title=
"“Now will you keep off?” he demanded"
src="images/fps.jpg" />
</a></p>
<h1>Tales of the<br />
Fish Patrol</h1>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">By</span><br
/>
<b>Jack London</b><br />
Author of “Burning Daylight,” etc.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/tpb.jpg">
<img alt=
"Decorative graphic"
title=
"Decorative graphic"
src="images/tps.jpg" />
</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center">London<br />
William Heinemann<br />
1914</p>
<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>WHITE
AND YELLOW</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">San Francisco Bay</span> is so large that
often its storms are more disastrous to ocean-going craft than is
the ocean itself in its violent moments. The waters of the
bay contain all manner of fish, wherefore its surface is ploughed
by the keels of all manner of fishing boats manned by all manner
of fishermen. To protect the fish from this motley floating
population many wise laws have been passed, and there is a fish
patrol to see that these laws are enforced. Exciting times
are the lot of the fish patrol: in its history more than one dead
patrolman has marked defeat, and more often dead fishermen across
their illegal nets have marked success.</p>
<p>Wildest among the fisher-folk may be accounted the Chinese
shrimp-catchers. It is the habit of the shrimp to crawl
along the bottom in vast armies till it reaches fresh water, when
it turns about and crawls back again to the salt. And where
the tide ebbs and flows, the Chinese sink great bag-nets to the
bottom, with gaping mouths, into which the shrimp crawls and from
which it is transferred to the boiling-pot. This in itself
would not be bad, were it not for the small mesh of the nets, so
small that the tiniest fishes, little new-hatched things not a
quarter of an inch long, cannot pass through. The beautiful
beaches of Points Pedro and Pablo, where are the
shrimp-catchers’ villages, are made fearful by the stench
from myriads of decaying fish, and against this wasteful
destruction it has ever been the duty of the fish patrol to
act.</p>
<p>When I was a youngster of sixteen, a good sloop-sailor and
all-round bay-waterman, my sloop, the <i>Reindeer</i>, was
chartered by the Fish Commission, and I became for the time being
a deputy patrolman. After a deal of work among the Greek
fishermen of the Upper Bay and rivers, where knives flashed at
the beginning of trouble and men permitted themselves to be made
prisoners only after a revolver was thrust in their faces, we
hailed with delight an expedition to the Lower Bay against the
Chinese shrimp-catchers.</p>
<p>There were six of us, in two boats, and to avoid suspicion we
ran down after dark and dropped anchor under a projecting bluff
of land known as Point Pinole. As the east paled with the
first light of dawn we got under way again, and hauled close on
the land breeze as we slanted across the bay toward Point
Pedro. The morning mists curled and clung to the water so
that we could see nothing, but we busied ourselves driving the
chill from our bodies with hot coffee. Also we had to
devote ourselves to the miserable task of bailing, for in some
incomprehensible way the <i>Reindeer</i> had sprung a generous
leak. Half the night had been spent in overhauling the
ballast and exploring the seams, but the labor had been without
avail. The water still poured in, and perforce we doubled
up in the cockpit and tossed it out again.</p>
<p>After coffee, three of the men withdrew to the other boat, a
Columbia River salmon boat, leaving three of us in the
<i>Reindeer</i>. Then the two craft proceeded in company
till the sun showed over the eastern sky-line. Its fiery
rays dispelled the clinging vapors, and there, before our eyes,
like a picture, lay the shrimp fleet, spread out in a great
half-moon, the tips of the crescent fully three miles apart, and
each junk moored fast to the buoy of a shrimp-net. But
there was no stir, no sign of life.</p>
<p>The situation dawned upon us. While waiting for slack
water, in which to lift their heavy nets from the bed of the bay,
the Chinese had all gone to sleep below. We were elated,
and our plan of battle was swiftly formed.</p>
<p>“Throw each of your two men on to a junk,”
whispered Le Grant to me from the salmon boat. “And
you make fast to a third yourself. We’ll do the same,
and there’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t
capture six junks at the least.”</p>
<p>Then we separated. I put the <i>Reindeer</i> about on
the other tack, ran up under the lee of a junk, shivered the
mainsail into the wind and lost headway, and forged past the
stern of the junk so slowly and so near that one of the patrolmen
stepped lightly aboard. Then I kept off, filled the
mainsail, and bore away for a second junk.</p>
<p>Up to this time there had been no noise, but from the first
junk captured by the salmon boat an uproar now broke forth.
There was shrill Oriental yelling, a pistol shot, and more
yelling.</p>
<p>“It’s all up. They’re warning the
others,” said George, the remaining patrolman, as he stood
beside me in the cockpit.</p>
<p>By this time we were in the thick of the fleet, and the alarm
was spreading with incredible swiftness. The decks were
beginning to swarm with half-awakened and half-naked
Chinese. Cries and yells of warning and anger were flying
over the quiet water, and somewhere a conch shell was being blown
with great success. To the right of us I saw the captain of
a junk chop away his mooring line with an axe and spring to help
his crew at the hoisting of the huge, outlandish lug-sail.
But to the left the first heads were popping up from below on
another junk, and I rounded up the <i>Reindeer</i> alongside long
enough for George to spring aboard.</p>
<p>The whole fleet was now under way. In addition to the
sails they had gotten out long sweeps, and the bay was being
ploughed in every direction by the fleeing junks. I was now
alone in the <i>Reindeer</i>, seeking feverishly to capture a
third prize. The first junk I took after was a clean miss,
for it trimmed its sheets and shot away surprisingly into the
wind. By fully half a point it outpointed the
<i>Reindeer</i>, and I began to feel respect for the clumsy
craft. Realizing the hopelessness of the pursuit, I filled
away, threw out the main-sheet, and drove down before the wind
upon the junks to leeward, where I had them at a
disadvantage.</p>
<p>The one I had selected wavered indecisively before me, and, as
I swung wide to make the boarding gentle, filled suddenly and
darted away, the smart Mongols shouting a wild rhythm as they
bent to the sweeps. But I had been ready for this. I
luffed suddenly. Putting the tiller hard down, and holding
it down with my body, I brought the main-sheet in, hand over
hand, on the run, so as to retain all possible striking
force. The two starboard sweeps of the junk were crumpled
up, and then the two boats came together with a crash. The
<i>Reindeer’s</i> bowsprit, like a monstrous hand, reached
over and ripped out the junk’s chunky mast and towering
sail.</p>
<p>This was met by a curdling yell of rage. A big Chinaman,
remarkably evil-looking, with his head swathed in a yellow silk
handkerchief and face badly pock-marked, planted a pike-pole on
the <i>Reindeer’s</i> bow and began to shove the entangled
boats apart. Pausing long enough to let go the jib
halyards, and just as the <i>Reindeer</i> cleared and began to
drift astern, I leaped aboard the junk with a line and made
fast. He of the yellow handkerchief and pock-marked face
came toward me threateningly, but I put my hand into my hip
pocket, and he hesitated. I was unarmed, but the Chinese
have learned to be fastidiously careful of American hip pockets,
and it was upon this that I depended to keep him and his savage
crew at a distance.</p>
<p>I ordered him to drop the anchor at the junk’s bow, to
which he replied, “No sabbe.” The crew
responded in like fashion, and though I made my meaning plain by
signs, they refused to understand. Realizing the
inexpediency of discussing the matter, I went forward myself,
overran the line, and let the anchor go.</p>
<p>“Now get aboard, four of you,” I said in a loud
voice, indicating with my fingers that four of them were to go
with me and the fifth was to remain by the junk. The Yellow
Handkerchief hesitated; but I repeated the order fiercely (much
more fiercely than I felt), at the same time sending my hand to
my hip. Again the Yellow Handkerchief was overawed, and
with surly looks he led three of his men aboard the
<i>Reindeer</i>. I cast off at once, and, leaving the jib
down, steered a course for George’s junk. Here it was
easier, for there were two of us, and George had a pistol to fall
back on if it came to the worst. And here, as with my junk,
four Chinese were transferred to the sloop and one left behind to
take care of things.</p>
<p>Four more were added to our passenger list from the third
junk. By this time the salmon boat had collected its twelve
prisoners and came alongside, badly overloaded. To make
matters worse, as it was a small boat, the patrolmen were so
jammed in with their prisoners that they would have little chance
in case of trouble.</p>
<p>“You’ll have to help us out,” said Le
Grant.</p>
<p>I looked over my prisoners, who had crowded into the cabin and
on top of it. “I can take three,” I
answered.</p>
<p>“Make it four,” he suggested, “and
I’ll take Bill with me.” (Bill was the third
patrolman.) “We haven’t elbow room here, and in
case of a scuffle one white to every two of them will be just
about the right proportion.”</p>
<p>The exchange was made, and the salmon boat got up its
spritsail and headed down the bay toward the marshes off San
Rafael. I ran up the jib and followed with the
<i>Reindeer</i>. San Rafael, where we were to turn our
catch over to the authorities, communicated with the bay by way
of a long and tortuous slough, or marshland creek, which could be
navigated only when the tide was in. Slack water had come,
and, as the ebb was commencing, there was need for hurry if we
cared to escape waiting half a day for the next tide.</p>
<p>But the land breeze had begun to die away with the rising sun,
and now came only in failing puffs. The salmon boat got out
its oars and soon left us far astern. Some of the Chinese
stood in the forward part of the cockpit, near the cabin doors,
and once, as I leaned over the cockpit rail to flatten down the
jib-sheet a bit, I felt some one brush against my hip
pocket. I made no sign, but out of the corner of my eye I
saw that the Yellow Handkerchief had discovered the emptiness of
the pocket which had hitherto overawed him.</p>
<p>To make matters serious, during all the excitement of boarding
the junks the <i>Reindeer</i> had not been bailed, and the water
was beginning to slush over the cockpit floor. The
shrimp-catchers pointed at it and looked to me questioningly.</p>
<p>“Yes,” I said. “Bime by, allee same
dlown, velly quick, you no bail now. Sabbe?”</p>
<p>No, they did not “sabbe,” or at least they shook
their heads to that effect, though they chattered most
comprehendingly to one another in their own lingo. I pulled
up three or four of the bottom boards, got a couple of buckets
from a locker, and by unmistakable sign-language invited them to
fall to. But they laughed, and some crowded into the cabin
and some climbed up on top.</p>
<p>Their laughter was not good laughter. There was a hint
of menace in it, a maliciousness which their black looks
verified. The Yellow Handkerchief, since his discovery of
my empty pocket, had become most insolent in his bearing, and he
wormed about among the other prisoners, talking to them with
great earnestness.</p>
<p>Swallowing my chagrin, I stepped down into the cockpit and
began throwing out the water. But hardly had I begun, when
the boom swung overhead, the mainsail filled with a jerk, and the
<i>Reindeer</i> heeled over. The day wind was springing
up. George was the veriest of landlubbers, so I was forced
to give over bailing and take the tiller. The wind was
blowing directly off Point Pedro and the high mountains behind,
and because of this was squally and uncertain, half the time
bellying the canvas out and the other half flapping it idly.</p>
<p>George was about the most all-round helpless man I had ever
met. Among his other disabilities, he was a consumptive,
and I knew that if he attempted to bail, it might bring on a
hemorrhage. Yet the rising water warned me that something
must be done. Again I ordered the shrimp-catchers to lend a
hand with the buckets. They laughed defiantly, and those
inside the cabin, the water up to their ankles, shouted back and
forth with those on top.</p>
<p>“You’d better get out your gun and make them
bail,” I said to George.</p>
<p>But he shook his head and showed all too plainly that he was
afraid. The Chinese could see the funk he was in as well as
I could, and their insolence became insufferable. Those in
the cabin broke into the food lockers, and those above scrambled
down and joined them in a feast on our crackers and canned
goods.</p>
<p>“What do we care?” George said weakly.</p>
<p>I was fuming with helpless anger. “If they get out
of hand, it will be too late to care. The best thing you
can do is to get them in check right now.”</p>
<p>The water was rising higher and higher, and the gusts,
forerunners of a steady breeze, were growing stiffer and
stiffer. And between the gusts, the prisoners, having
gotten away with a week’s grub, took to crowding first to
one side and then to the other till the <i>Reindeer</i> rocked
like a cockle-shell. Yellow Handkerchief approached me,
and, pointing out his village on the Point Pedro beach, gave me
to understand that if I turned the <i>Reindeer</i> in that
direction and put them ashore, they, in turn, would go to
bailing. By now the water in the cabin was up to the bunks,
and the bed-clothes were sopping. It was a foot deep on the
cockpit floor. Nevertheless I refused, and I could see by
George’s face that he was disappointed.</p>
<p>“If you don’t show some nerve, they’ll rush
us and throw us overboard,” I said to him.
“Better give me your revolver, if you want to be
safe.”</p>
<p>“The safest thing to do,” he chattered cravenly,
“is to put them ashore. I, for one, don’t want
to be drowned for the sake of a handful of dirty
Chinamen.”</p>
<p>“And I, for another, don’t care to give in to a
handful of dirty Chinamen to escape drowning,” I answered
hotly.</p>
<p>“You’ll sink the <i>Reindeer</i> under us all at
this rate,” he whined. “And what good
that’ll do I can’t see.”</p>
<p>“Every man to his taste,” I retorted.</p>
<p>He made no reply, but I could see he was trembling
pitifully. Between the threatening Chinese and the rising
water he was beside himself with fright; and, more than the
Chinese and the water, I feared him and what his fright might
impel him to do. I could see him casting longing glances at
the small skiff towing astern, so in the next calm I hauled the
skiff alongside. As I did so his eyes brightened with hope;
but before he could guess my intention, I stove the frail bottom
through with a hand-axe, and the skiff filled to its
gunwales.</p>
<p>“It’s sink or float together,” I said.
“And if you’ll give me your revolver, I’ll have
the <i>Reindeer</i> bailed out in a jiffy.”</p>
<p>“They’re too many for us,” he
whimpered. “We can’t fight them all.”</p>
<p>I turned my back on him in disgust. The salmon boat had
long since passed from sight behind a little archipelago known as
the Marin Islands, so no help could be looked for from that
quarter. Yellow Handkerchief came up to me in a familiar
manner, the water in the cockpit slushing against his legs.
I did not like his looks. I felt that beneath the pleasant
smile he was trying to put on his face there was an ill
purpose. I ordered him back, and so sharply that he
obeyed.</p>
<p>“Now keep your distance,” I commanded, “and
don’t you come closer!”</p>
<p>“Wha’ fo’?” he demanded
indignantly. “I t’ink-um talkee talkee heap
good.”</p>
<p>“Talkee talkee,” I answered bitterly, for I knew
now that he had understood all that passed between George and
me. “What for talkee talkee? You no sabbe
talkee talkee.”</p>
<p>He grinned in a sickly fashion. “Yep, I sabbe
velly much. I honest Chinaman.”</p>
<p>“All right,” I answered. “You sabbe
talkee talkee, then you bail water plenty plenty. After
that we talkee talkee.”</p>
<p>He shook his head, at the same time pointing over his shoulder
to his comrades. “No can do. Velly bad
Chinamen, heap velly bad. I
t’ink-um—”</p>
<p>“Stand back!” I shouted, for I had noticed his
hand disappear beneath his blouse and his body prepare for a
spring.</p>
<p>Disconcerted, he went back into the cabin, to hold a council,
apparently, from the way the jabbering broke forth. The
<i>Reindeer</i> was very deep in the water, and her movements had
grown quite loggy. In a rough sea she would have inevitably
swamped; but the wind, when it did blow, was off the land, and
scarcely a ripple disturbed the surface of the bay.</p>
<p>“I think you’d better head for the beach,”
George said abruptly, in a manner that told me his fear had
forced him to make up his mind to some course of action.</p>
<p>“I think not,” I answered shortly.</p>
<p>“I command you,” he said in a bullying tone.</p>
<p>“I was commanded to bring these prisoners into San
Rafael,” was my reply.</p>
<p>Our voices were raised, and the sound of the altercation
brought the Chinese out of the cabin.</p>
<p>“Now will you head for the beach?”</p>
<p>This from George, and I found myself looking into the muzzle
of his revolver—of the revolver he dared to use on me, but
was too cowardly to use on the prisoners.</p>
<p>My brain seemed smitten with a dazzling brightness. The
whole situation, in all its bearings, was focussed sharply before
me—the shame of losing the prisoners, the worthlessness and
cowardice of George, the meeting with Le Grant and the other
patrol men and the lame explanation; and then there was the fight
I had fought so hard, victory wrenched from me just as I thought
I had it within my grasp. And out of the tail of my eye I
could see the Chinese crowding together by the cabin doors and
leering triumphantly. It would never do.</p>
<p>I threw my hand up and my head down. The first act
elevated the muzzle, and the second removed my head from the path
of the bullet which went whistling past. One hand closed on
George’s wrist, the other on the revolver. Yellow
Handkerchief and his gang sprang toward me. It was now or
never. Putting all my strength into a sudden effort, I
swung George’s body forward to meet them. Then I
pulled back with equal suddenness, ripping the revolver out of
his fingers and jerking him off his feet. He fell against
Yellow Handkerchief’s knees, who stumbled over him, and the
pair wallowed in the bailing hole where the cockpit floor was
torn open. The next instant I was covering them with my
revolver, and the wild shrimp-catchers were cowering and cringing
away.</p>
<p>But I swiftly discovered that there was all the difference in
the world between shooting men who are attacking and men who are
doing nothing more than simply refusing to obey. For obey
they would not when I ordered them into the bailing hole. I
threatened them with the revolver, but they sat stolidly in the
flooded cabin and on the roof and would not move.</p>
<p>Fifteen minutes passed, the <i>Reindeer</i> sinking deeper and
deeper, her mainsail flapping in the calm. But from off the
Point Pedro shore I saw a dark line form on the water and travel
toward us. It was the steady breeze I had been expecting so
long. I called to the Chinese and pointed it out.
They hailed it with exclamations. Then I pointed to the
sail and to the water in the <i>Reindeer</i>, and indicated by
signs that when the wind reached the sail, what of the water
aboard we would capsize. But they jeered defiantly, for
they knew it was in my power to luff the helm and let go the
main-sheet, so as to spill the wind and escape damage.</p>
<p>But my mind was made up. I hauled in the main-sheet a
foot or two, took a turn with it, and bracing my feet, put my
back against the tiller. This left me one hand for the
sheet and one for the revolver. The dark line drew nearer,
and I could see them looking from me to it and back again with an
apprehension they could not successfully conceal. My brain
and will and endurance were pitted against theirs, and the
problem was which could stand the strain of imminent death the
longer and not give in.</p>
<p>Then the wind struck us. The main-sheet tautened with a
brisk rattling of the blocks, the boom uplifted, the sail bellied
out, and the <i>Reindeer</i> heeled over—over, and over,
till the lee-rail went under, the cabin windows went under, and
the bay began to pour in over the cockpit rail. So
violently had she heeled over, that the men in the cabin had been
thrown on top of one another into the lee bunk, where they
squirmed and twisted and were washed about, those underneath
being perilously near to drowning.</p>
<p>The wind freshened a bit, and the <i>Reindeer</i> went over
farther than ever. For the moment I thought she was gone,
and I knew that another puff like that and she surely would
go. While I pressed her under and debated whether I should
give up or not, the Chinese cried for mercy. I think it was
the sweetest sound I have ever heard. And then, and not
until then, did I luff up and ease out the main-sheet. The
<i>Reindeer</i> righted very slowly, and when she was on an even
keel was so much awash that I doubted if she could be saved.</p>
<p>But the Chinese scrambled madly into the cockpit and fell to
bailing with buckets, pots, pans, and everything they could lay
hands on. It was a beautiful sight to see that water flying
over the side! And when the <i>Reindeer</i> was high and
proud on the water once more, we dashed away with the breeze on
our quarter, and at the last possible moment crossed the mud
flats and entered the slough.</p>
<p>The spirit of the Chinese was broken, and so docile did they
become that ere we made San Rafael they were out with the
tow-rope, Yellow Handkerchief at the head of the line. As
for George, it was his last trip with the fish patrol. He
did not care for that sort of thing, he explained, and he thought
a clerkship ashore was good enough for him. And we thought
so too.</p>
<h2><a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 21</span>THE
KING OF THE GREEKS</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Big Alec</span> had never been captured by
the fish patrol. It was his boast that no man could take
him alive, and it was his history that of the many men who had
tried to take him dead none had succeeded. It was also
history that at least two patrolmen who had tried to take him
dead had died themselves. Further, no man violated the fish
laws more systematically and deliberately than Big Alec.</p>
<p>He was called “Big Alec” because of his gigantic
stature. His height was six feet three inches, and he was
correspondingly broad-shouldered and deep-chested. He was
splendidly muscled and hard as steel, and there were innumerable
stories in circulation among the fisher-folk concerning his
prodigious strength. He was as bold and dominant of spirit
as he was strong of body, and because of this he was widely known
by another name, that of “The King of the
Greeks.” The fishing population was largely composed
of Greeks, and they looked up to him and obeyed him as their
chief. And as their chief, he fought their fights for them,
saw that they were protected, saved them from the law when they
fell into its clutches, and made them stand by one another and
himself in time of trouble.</p>
<p>In the old days, the fish patrol had attempted his capture
many disastrous times and had finally given it over, so that when
the word was out that he was coming to Benicia, I was most
anxious to see him. But I did not have to hunt him
up. In his usual bold way, the first thing he did on
arriving was to hunt us up. Charley Le Grant and I at the
time were under a patrolman named Carmintel, and the three of us
were on the <i>Reindeer</i>, preparing for a trip, when Big Alec
stepped aboard. Carmintel evidently knew him, for they
shook hands in recognition. Big Alec took no notice of
Charley or me.</p>
<p>“I’ve come down to fish sturgeon a couple of
months,” he said to Carmintel.</p>
<p>His eyes flashed with challenge as he spoke, and we noticed
the patrolman’s eyes drop before him.</p>
<p>“That’s all right, Alec,” Carmintel said in
a low voice. “I’ll not bother you. Come
on into the cabin, and we’ll talk things over,” he
added.</p>
<p>When they had gone inside and shut the doors after them,
Charley winked with slow deliberation at me. But I was only
a youngster, and new to men and the ways of some men, so I did
not understand. Nor did Charley explain, though I felt
there was something wrong about the business.</p>
<p>Leaving them to their conference, at Charley’s
suggestion we boarded our skiff and pulled over to the Old
Steamboat Wharf, where Big Alec’s ark was lying. An
ark is a house-boat of small though comfortable dimensions, and
is as necessary to the Upper Bay fisherman as are nets and
boats. We were both curious to see Big Alec’s ark,
for history said that it had been the scene of more than one
pitched battle, and that it was riddled with bullet-holes.</p>
<p>We found the holes (stopped with wooden plugs and painted
over), but there were not so many as I had expected.
Charley noted my look of disappointment, and laughed; and then to
comfort me he gave an authentic account of one expedition which
had descended upon Big Alec’s floating home to capture him,
alive preferably, dead if necessary. At the end of half a
day’s fighting, the patrolmen had drawn off in wrecked
boats, with one of their number killed and three wounded.
And when they returned next morning with reinforcements they
found only the mooring-stakes of Big Alec’s ark; the ark
itself remained hidden for months in the fastnesses of the Suisun
tules.</p>
<p>“But why was he not hanged for murder?” I
demanded. “Surely the United States is powerful
enough to bring such a man to justice.”</p>
<p>“He gave himself up and stood trial,” Charley
answered. “It cost him fifty thousand dollars to win
the case, which he did on technicalities and with the aid of the
best lawyers in the state. Every Greek fisherman on the
river contributed to the sum. Big Alec levied and collected
the tax, for all the world like a king. The United States
may be all-powerful, my lad, but the fact remains that Big Alec
is a king inside the United States, with a country and subjects
all his own.”</p>
<p>“But what are you going to do about his fishing for
sturgeon? He’s bound to fish with a ‘Chinese
line.’”</p>
<p>Charley shrugged his shoulders. “We’ll see
what we will see,” he said enigmatically.</p>
<p>Now a “Chinese line” is a cunning device invented
by the people whose name it bears. By a simple system of
floats, weights, and anchors, thousands of hooks, each on a
separate leader, are suspended at a distance of from six inches
to a foot above the bottom. The remarkable thing about such
a line is the hook. It is barbless, and in place of the
barb, the hook is filed long and tapering to a point as sharp as
that of a needle. These hoods are only a few inches apart,
and when several thousand of them are suspended just above the
bottom, like a fringe, for a couple of hundred fathoms, they
present a formidable obstacle to the fish that travel along the
bottom.</p>
<p>Such a fish is the sturgeon, which goes rooting along like a
pig, and indeed is often called “pig-fish.”
Pricked by the first hook it touches, the sturgeon gives a
startled leap and comes into contact with half a dozen more
hooks. Then it threshes about wildly, until it receives
hook after hook in its soft flesh; and the hooks, straining from
many different angles, hold the luckless fish fast until it is
drowned. Because no sturgeon can pass through a Chinese
line, the device is called a trap in the fish laws; and because
it bids fair to exterminate the sturgeon, it is branded by the
fish laws as illegal. And such a line, we were confident,
Big Alec intended setting, in open and flagrant violation of the
law.</p>
<p>Several days passed after the visit of Big Alec, during which
Charley and I kept a sharp watch on him. He towed his ark
around the Solano Wharf and into the big bight at Turner’s
Shipyard. The bight we knew to be good ground for sturgeon,
and there we felt sure the King of the Greeks intended to begin
operations. The tide circled like a mill-race in and out of
this bight, and made it possible to raise, lower, or set a
Chinese line only at slack water. So between the tides
Charley and I made it a point for one or the other of us to keep
a lookout from the Solano Wharf.</p>
<p>On the fourth day I was lying in the sun behind the
stringer-piece of the wharf, when I saw a skiff leave the distant
shore and pull out into the bight. In an instant the
glasses were at my eyes and I was following every movement of the
skiff. There were two men in it, and though it was a good
mile away, I made out one of them to be Big Alec; and ere the
skiff returned to shore I made out enough more to know that the
Greek had set his line.</p>
<p>“Big Alec has a Chinese line out in the bight off
Turner’s Shipyard,” Charley Le Grant said that
afternoon to Carmintel.</p>
<p>A fleeting expression of annoyance passed over the
patrolman’s face, and then he said, “Yes?” in
an absent way, and that was all.</p>
<p>Charley bit his lip with suppressed anger and turned on his
heel.</p>
<p>“Are you game, my lad?” he said to me later on in
the evening, just as we finished washing down the
<i>Reindeer’s</i> decks and were preparing to turn in.</p>
<p>A lump came up in my throat, and I could only nod my head.</p>
<p>“Well, then,” and Charley’s eyes glittered
in a determined way, “we’ve got to capture Big Alec
between us, you and I, and we’ve got to do it in spite of
Carmintel. Will you lend a hand?”</p>
<p>“It’s a hard proposition, but we can do it,”
he added after a pause.</p>
<p>“Of course we can,” I supplemented
enthusiastically.</p>
<p>And then he said, “Of course we can,” and we shook
hands on it and went to bed.</p>
<p>But it was no easy task we had set ourselves. In order
to convict a man of illegal fishing, it was necessary to catch
him in the act with all the evidence of the crime about
him—the hooks, the lines, the fish, and the man
himself. This meant that we must take Big Alec on the open
water, where he could see us coming and prepare for us one of the
warm receptions for which he was noted.</p>
<p>“There’s no getting around it,” Charley said
one morning. “If we can only get alongside it’s
an even toss, and there’s nothing left for us but to try
and get alongside. Come on, lad.”</p>
<p>We were in the Columbia River salmon boat, the one we had used
against the Chinese shrimp-catchers. Slack water had come,
and as we dropped around the end of the Solano Wharf we saw Big
Alec at work, running his line and removing the fish.</p>
<p>“Change places,” Charley commanded, “and
steer just astern of him as though you’re going into the
shipyard.”</p>
<p>I took the tiller, and Charley sat down on a thwart amidships,
placing his revolver handily beside him.</p>
<p>“If he begins to shoot,” he cautioned, “get
down in the bottom and steer from there, so that nothing more
than your hand will be exposed.”</p>
<p>I nodded, and we kept silent after that, the boat slipping
gently through the water and Big Alec growing nearer and
nearer. We could see him quite plainly, gaffing the
sturgeon and throwing them into the boat while his companion ran
the line and cleared the hooks as he dropped them back into the
water. Nevertheless, we were five hundred yards away when
the big fisherman hailed us.</p>
<p>“Here! You! What do you want?” he
shouted.</p>
<p>“Keep going,” Charley whispered, “just as
though you didn’t hear him.”</p>
<p>The next few moments were very anxious ones. The
fisherman was studying us sharply, while we were gliding up on
him every second.</p>
<p>“You keep off if you know what’s good for
you!” he called out suddenly, as though he had made up his
mind as to who and what we were. “If you don’t,
I’ll fix you!”</p>
<p>He brought a rifle to his shoulder and trained it on me.</p>
<p>“Now will you keep off?” he demanded.</p>
<p>I could hear Charley groan with disappointment.
“Keep off,” he whispered; “it’s all up
for this time.”</p>
<p>I put up the tiller and eased the sheet, and the salmon boat
ran off five or six points. Big Alec watched us till we
were out of range, when he returned to his work.</p>
<p>“You’d better leave Big Alec alone,”
Carmintel said, rather sourly, to Charley that night.</p>
<p>“So he’s been complaining to you, has
he?” Charley said significantly.</p>
<p>Carmintel flushed painfully. “You’d better
leave him alone, I tell you,” he repeated.
“He’s a dangerous man, and it won’t pay to fool
with him.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Charley answered softly; “I’ve
heard that it pays better to leave him alone.”</p>
<p>This was a direct thrust at Carmintel, and we could see by the
expression of his face that it sank home. For it was common
knowledge that Big Alec was as willing to bribe as to fight, and
that of late years more than one patrolman had handled the
fisherman’s money.</p>
<p>“Do you mean to say—” Carmintel began, in a
bullying tone.</p>
<p>But Charley cut him off shortly. “I mean to say
nothing,” he said. “You heard what I said, and
if the cap fits, why—”</p>
<p>He shrugged his shoulders, and Carmintel glowered at him,
speechless.</p>
<p>“What we want is imagination,” Charley said to me
one day, when we had attempted to creep upon Big Alec in the gray
of dawn and had been shot at for our trouble.</p>
<p>And thereafter, and for many days, I cudgelled my brains
trying to imagine some possible way by which two men, on an open
stretch of water, could capture another who knew how to use a
rifle and was never to be found without one. Regularly,
every slack water, without slyness, boldly and openly in the
broad day, Big Alec was to be seen running his line. And
what made it particularly exasperating was the fact that every
fisherman, from Benicia to Vallejo knew that he was successfully
defying us. Carmintel also bothered us, for he kept us busy
among the shad-fishers of San Pablo, so that we had little time
to spare on the King of the Greeks. But Charley’s
wife and children lived at Benicia, and we had made the place our
headquarters, so that we always returned to it.</p>
<p>“I’ll tell you what we can do,” I said,
after several fruitless weeks had passed; “we can wait some
slack water till Big Alec has run his line and gone ashore with
the fish, and then we can go out and capture the line. It
will put him to time and expense to make another, and then
we’ll figure to capture that too. If we can’t
capture him, we can discourage him, you see.”</p>
<p>Charley saw, and said it wasn’t a bad idea. We
watched our chance, and the next low-water slack, after Big Alec
had removed the fish from the line and returned ashore, we went
out in the salmon boat. We had the bearings of the line
from shore marks, and we knew we would have no difficulty in
locating it. The first of the flood tide was setting in,
when we ran below where we thought the line was stretched and
dropped over a fishing-boat anchor. Keeping a short rope to
the anchor, so that it barely touched the bottom, we dragged it
slowly along until it stuck and the boat fetched up hard and
fast.</p>
<p>“We’ve got it,” Charley cried.
“Come on and lend a hand to get it in.”</p>
<p>Together we hove up the rope till the anchor I came in sight
with the sturgeon line caught across one of the flukes.
Scores of the murderous-looking hooks flashed into sight as we
cleared the anchor, and we had just started to run along the line
to the end where we could begin to lift it, when a sharp thud in
the boat startled us. We looked about, but saw nothing and
returned to our work. An instant later there was a similar
sharp thud and the gunwale splintered between Charley’s
body and mine.</p>
<p>“That’s remarkably like a bullet, lad,” he
said reflectively. “And it’s a long shot Big
Alec’s making.”</p>
<p>“And he’s using smokeless powder,” he
concluded, after an examination of the mile-distant shore.
“That’s why we can’t hear the
report.”</p>
<p>I looked at the shore, but could see no sign of Big Alec, who
was undoubtedly hidden in some rocky nook with us at his
mercy. A third bullet struck the water, glanced, passed
singing over our heads, and struck the water again beyond.</p>
<p>“I guess we’d better get out of this,”
Charley remarked coolly. “What do you think,
lad?”</p>
<p>I thought so, too, and said we didn’t want the line
anyway. Whereupon we cast off and hoisted the
spritsail. The bullets ceased at once, and we sailed away,
unpleasantly confident that Big Alec was laughing at our
discomfiture.</p>
<p>And more than that, the next day on the fishing wharf, where
we were inspecting nets, he saw fit to laugh and sneer at us, and
this before all the fishermen. Charley’s face went
black with anger; but beyond promising Big Alec that in the end
he would surely land him behind the bars, he controlled himself
and said nothing. The King of the Greeks made his boast
that no fish patrol had ever taken him or ever could take him,
and the fishermen cheered him and said it was true. They
grew excited, and it looked like trouble for a while; but Big
Alec asserted his kingship and quelled them.</p>
<p>Carmintel also laughed at Charley, and dropped sarcastic
remarks, and made it hard for him. But Charley refused to
be angered, though he told me in confidence that he intended to
capture Big Alec if it took all the rest of his life to
accomplish it.</p>
<p>“I don’t know how I’ll do it,” he
said, “but do it I will, as sure as I am Charley Le
Grant. The idea will come to me at the right and proper
time, never fear.”</p>
<p>And at the right time it came, and most unexpectedly.
Fully a month had passed, and we were constantly up and down the
river, and down and up the bay, with no spare moments to devote
to the particular fisherman who ran a Chinese line in the bight
of Turner’s Shipyard. We had called in at
Selby’s Smelter one afternoon, while on patrol work, when
all unknown to us our opportunity happened along. It
appeared in the guise of a helpless yacht loaded with seasick
people, so we could hardly be expected to recognize it as the
opportunity. It was a large sloop-yacht, and it was
helpless inasmuch as the trade-wind was blowing half a gale and
there were no capable sailors aboard.</p>
<p>From the wharf at Selby’s we watched with careless
interest the lubberly manœuvre performed of bringing the
yacht to anchor, and the equally lubberly manœuvre of
sending the small boat ashore. A very miserable-looking man
in draggled ducks, after nearly swamping the boat in the heavy
seas, passed us the painter and climbed out. He staggered
about as though the wharf were rolling, and told us his troubles,
which were the troubles of the yacht. The only
rough-weather sailor aboard, the man on whom they all depended,
had been called back to San Francisco by a telegram, and they had
attempted to continue the cruise alone. The high wind and
big seas of San Pablo Bay had been too much for them; all hands
were sick, nobody knew anything or could do anything; and so they
had run in to the smelter either to desert the yacht or to get
somebody to bring it to Benicia. In short, did we know of
any sailors who would bring the yacht into Benicia?</p>
<p>Charley looked at me. The <i>Reindeer</i> was lying in a
snug place. We had nothing on hand in the way of patrol
work till midnight. With the wind then blowing, we could
sail the yacht into Benicia in a couple of hours, have several
more hours ashore, and come back to the smelter on the evening
train.</p>
<p>“All right, captain,” Charley said to the
disconsolate yachtsman, who smiled in sickly fashion at the
title.</p>
<p>“I’m only the owner,” he explained.</p>
<p>We rowed him aboard in much better style than he had come
ashore, and saw for ourselves the helplessness of the
passengers. There were a dozen men and women, and all of
them too sick even to appear grateful at our coming. The
yacht was rolling savagely, broad on, and no sooner had the
owner’s feet touched the deck than he collapsed and joined,
the others. Not one was able to bear a hand, so Charley and
I between us cleared the badly tangled running gear, got up sail,
and hoisted anchor.</p>
<p>It was a rough trip, though a swift one. The Carquinez
Straits were a welter of foam and smother, and we came through
them wildly before the wind, the big mainsail alternately dipping
and flinging its boom skyward as we tore along. But the
people did not mind. They did not mind anything. Two
or three, including the owner, sprawled in the cockpit,
shuddering when the yacht lifted and raced and sank dizzily into
the trough, and between-whiles regarding the shore with yearning
eyes. The rest were huddled on the cabin floor among the
cushions. Now and again some one groaned, but for the most
part they were as limp as so many dead persons.</p>
<p>As the bight at Turner’s Shipyard opened out, Charley
edged into it to get the smoother water. Benicia was in
view, and we were bowling along over comparatively easy water,
when a speck of a boat danced up ahead of us, directly in our
course. It was low-water slack. Charley and I looked
at each other. No word was spoken, but at once the yacht
began a most astonishing performance, veering and yawing as
though the greenest of amateurs was at the wheel. It was a
sight for sailormen to see. To all appearances, a runaway
yacht was careering madly over the bight, and now and again
yielding a little bit to control in a desperate effort to make
Benicia.</p>
<p>The owner forgot his seasickness long enough to look
anxious. The speck of a boat grew larger and larger, till
we could see Big Alec and his partner, with a turn of the
sturgeon line around a cleat, resting from their labor to laugh
at us. Charley pulled his sou’wester over his eyes,
and I followed his example, though I could not guess the idea he
evidently had in mind and intended to carry into execution.</p>
<p>We came foaming down abreast of the skiff, so close that we
could hear above the wind the voices of Big Alec and his mate as
they shouted at us with all the scorn that professional watermen
feel for amateurs, especially when amateurs are making fools of
themselves.</p>
<p>We thundered on past the fishermen, and nothing had
happened. Charley grinned at the disappointment he saw in
my face, and then shouted:</p>
<p>“Stand by the main-sheet to jibe!”</p>
<p>He put the wheel hard over, and the yacht whirled around
obediently. The main-sheet slacked and dipped, then shot
over our heads after the boom and tautened with a crash on the
traveller. The yacht heeled over almost on her beam ends,
and a great wail went up from the seasick passengers as they
swept across the cabin floor in a tangled mass and piled into a
heap in the starboard bunks.</p>
<p>But we had no time for them. The yacht, completing the
manœuvre, headed into the wind with slatting canvas, and
righted to an even keel. We were still plunging ahead, and
directly in our path was the skiff. I saw Big Alec dive
overboard and his mate leap for our bowsprit. Then came the
crash as we struck the boat, and a series of grinding bumps as it
passed under our bottom.</p>
<p>“That fixes his rifle,” I heard Charley mutter, as
he sprang upon the deck to look for Big Alec somewhere
astern.</p>
<p>The wind and sea quickly stopped our forward movement, and we
began to drift backward over the spot where the skiff had
been. Big Alec’s black head and swarthy face popped
up within arm’s reach; and all unsuspecting and very angry
with what he took to be the clumsiness of amateur sailors, he was
hauled aboard. Also he was out of breath, for he had dived
deep and stayed down long to escape our keel.</p>
<p>The next instant, to the perplexity and consternation of the
owner, Charley was on top of Big Alec in the cockpit, and I was
helping bind him with gaskets. The owner was dancing
excitedly about and demanding an explanation, but by that time
Big Alec’s partner had crawled aft from the bowsprit and
was peering apprehensively over the rail into the cockpit.
Charley’s arm shot around his neck and the man landed on
his back beside Big Alec.</p>
<p>“More gaskets!” Charley shouted, and I made haste
to supply them.</p>
<p>The wrecked skiff was rolling sluggishly a short distance to
windward, and I trimmed the sheets while Charley took the wheel
and steered for it.</p>
<p>“These two men are old offenders,” he explained to
the angry owner; “and they are most persistent violators of
the fish and game laws. You have seen them caught in the
act, and you may expect to be subpœnaed as witness for the
state when the trial comes off.”</p>
<p>As he spoke he rounded alongside the skiff. It had been
torn from the line, a section of which was dragging to it.
He hauled in forty or fifty feet with a young sturgeon still fast
in a tangle of barbless hooks, slashed that much of the line free
with his knife, and tossed it into the cockpit beside the
prisoners.</p>
<p>“And there’s the evidence, Exhibit A, for the
people,” Charley continued. “Look it over
carefully so that you may identify it in the court-room with the
time and place of capture.”</p>
<p>And then, in triumph, with no more veering and yawing, we
sailed into Benicia, the King of the Greeks bound hard and fast
in the cockpit, and for the first time in his life a prisoner of
the fish patrol.</p>
<h2><a name="page42"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 42</span>A RAID
ON THE OYSTER PIRATES</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Of</span> the fish patrolmen under whom we
served at various times, Charley Le Grant and I were agreed, I
think, that Neil Partington was the best. He was neither
dishonest nor cowardly; and while he demanded strict obedience
when we were under his orders, at the same time our relations
were those of easy comradeship, and he permitted us a freedom to
which we were ordinarily unaccustomed, as the present story will
show.</p>
<p>Neil’s family lived in Oakland, which is on the Lower
Bay, not more than six miles across the water from San
Francisco. One day, while scouting among the Chinese
shrimp-catchers of Point Pedro, he received word that his wife
was very ill; and within the hour the <i>Reindeer</i> was bowling
along for Oakland, with a stiff northwest breeze astern. We
ran up the Oakland Estuary and came to anchor, and in the days
that followed, while Neil was ashore, we tightened up the
<i>Reindeer’s</i> rigging, overhauled the ballast, scraped
down, and put the sloop into thorough shape.</p>
<p>This done, time hung heavy on our hands. Neil’s
wife was dangerously ill, and the outlook was a week’s
lie-over, awaiting the crisis. Charley and I roamed the
docks, wondering what we should do, and so came upon the oyster
fleet lying at the Oakland City Wharf. In the main they
were trim, natty boats, made for speed and bad weather, and we
sat down on the stringer-piece of the dock to study them.</p>
<p>“A good catch, I guess,” Charley said, pointing to
the heaps of oysters, assorted in three sizes, which lay upon
their decks.</p>
<p>Pedlers were backing their wagons to the edge of the wharf,
and from the bargaining and chaffering that went on, I managed to
learn the selling price of the oysters.</p>
<p>“That boat must have at least two hundred dollars’
worth aboard,” I calculated. “I wonder how long
it took to get the load?”</p>
<p>“Three or four days,” Charley answered.
“Not bad wages for two men—twenty-five dollars a day
apiece.”</p>
<p>The boat we were discussing, the <i>Ghost</i>, lay directly
beneath us. Two men composed its crew. One was a
squat, broad-shouldered fellow with remarkably long and
gorilla-like arms, while the other was tall and well
proportioned, with clear blue eyes and a mat of straight black
hair. So unusual and striking was this combination of hair
and eyes that Charley and I remained somewhat longer than we
intended.</p>
<p>And it was well that we did. A stout, elderly man, with
the dress and carriage of a successful merchant, came up and
stood beside us, looking down upon the deck of the
<i>Ghost</i>. He appeared angry, and the longer he looked
the angrier he grew.</p>
<p>“Those are my oysters,” he said at last.
“I know they are my oysters. You raided my beds last
night and robbed me of them.”</p>
<p>The tall man and the short man on the <i>Ghost</i> looked
up.</p>
<p>“Hello, Taft,” the short man said, with insolent
familiarity. (Among the bayfarers he had gained the
nickname of “The Centipede” on account of his long
arms.) “Hello, Taft,” he repeated, with the
same touch of insolence. “Wot ’r you growling
about now?”</p>
<p>“Those are my oysters—that’s what I
said. You’ve stolen them from my beds.”</p>
<p>“Yer mighty wise, ain’t ye?” was the
Centipede’s sneering reply. “S’pose you
can tell your oysters wherever you see ’em?”</p>
<p>“Now, in my experience,” broke in the tall man,
“oysters is oysters wherever you find ’em, an’
they’re pretty much alike all the Bay over, and the world
over, too, for that matter. We’re not wantin’
to quarrel with you, Mr. Taft, but we jes’ wish you
wouldn’t insinuate that them oysters is yours an’
that we’re thieves an’ robbers till you can prove the
goods.”</p>
<p>“I know they’re mine; I’d stake my life on
it!” Mr. Taft snorted.</p>
<p>“Prove it,” challenged the tall man, who we
afterward learned was known as “The Porpoise” because
of his wonderful swimming abilities.</p>
<p>Mr. Taft shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Of course he
could not prove the oysters to be his, no matter how certain he
might be.</p>
<p>“I’d give a thousand dollars to have you men
behind the bars!” he cried. “I’ll give
fifty dollars a head for your arrest and conviction, all of
you!”</p>
<p>A roar of laughter went up from the different boats, for the
rest of the pirates had been listening to the discussion.</p>
<p>“There’s more money in oysters,” the
Porpoise remarked dryly.</p>
<p>Mr. Taft turned impatiently on his heel and walked away.
From out of the corner of his eye, Charley noted the way he
went. Several minutes later, when he had disappeared around
a corner, Charley rose lazily to his feet. I followed him,
and we sauntered off in the opposite direction to that taken by
Mr. Taft.</p>
<p>“Come on! Lively!” Charley whispered, when
we passed from the view of the oyster fleet.</p>
<p>Our course was changed at once, and we dodged around corners
and raced up and down side-streets till Mr. Taft’s generous
form loomed up ahead of us.</p>
<p>“I’m going to interview him about that
reward,” Charley explained, as we rapidly overhauled the
oyster-bed owner. “Neil will be delayed here for a
week, and you and I might as well be doing something in the
meantime. What do you say?”</p>
<p>“Of course, of course,” Mr. Taft said, when
Charley had introduced himself and explained his errand.
“Those thieves are robbing me of thousands of dollars every
year, and I shall be glad to break them up at any
price,—yes, sir, at any price. As I said, I’ll
give fifty dollars a head, and call it cheap at that.
They’ve robbed my beds, torn down my signs, terrorized my
watchmen, and last year killed one of them. Couldn’t
prove it. All done in the blackness of night. All I
had was a dead watchman and no evidence. The detectives
could do nothing. Nobody has been able to do anything with
those men. We have never succeeded in arresting one of
them. So I say, Mr.—What did you say your name
was?”</p>
<p>“Le Grant,” Charley answered.</p>
<p>“So I say, Mr. Le Grant, I am deeply obliged to you for
the assistance you offer. And I shall be glad, most glad,
sir, to co-operate with you in every way. My watchmen and
boats are at your disposal. Come and see me at the San
Francisco offices any time, or telephone at my expense. And
don’t be afraid of spending money. I’ll foot
your expenses, whatever they are, so long as they are within
reason. The situation is growing desperate, and something
must be done to determine whether I or that band of ruffians own
those oyster beds.”</p>
<p>“Now we’ll see Neil,” Charley said, when he
had seen Mr. Taft upon his train to San Francisco.</p>
<p>Not only did Neil Partington interpose no obstacle to our
adventure, but he proved to be of the greatest assistance.
Charley and I knew nothing of the oyster industry, while his head
was an encyclopædia of facts concerning it. Also,
within an hour or so, he was able to bring to us a Greek boy of
seventeen or eighteen who knew thoroughly well the ins and outs
of oyster piracy.</p>
<p>At this point I may as well explain that we of the fish patrol
were free lances in a way. While Neil Partington, who was a
patrolman proper, received a regular salary, Charley and I, being
merely deputies, received only what we earned—that is to
say, a certain percentage of the fines imposed on convicted
violators of the fish laws. Also, any rewards that chanced
our way were ours. We offered to share with Partington
whatever we should get from Mr. Taft, but the patrolman would not
hear of it. He was only too happy, he said, to do a good
turn for us, who had done so many for him.</p>
<p>We held a long council of war, and mapped out the following
line of action. Our faces were unfamiliar on the Lower Bay,
but as the <i>Reindeer</i> was well known as a fish-patrol sloop,
the Greek boy, whose name was Nicholas, and I were to sail some
innocent-looking craft down to Asparagus Island and join the
oyster pirates’ fleet. Here, according to
Nicholas’s description of the beds and the manner of
raiding, it was possible for us to catch the pirates in the act
of stealing oysters, and at the same time to get them in our
power. Charley was to be on the shore, with Mr.
Taft’s watchmen and a posse of constables, to help us at
the right time.</p>
<p>“I know just the boat,” Neil said, at the
conclusion of the discussion, “a crazy old sloop
that’s lying over at Tiburon. You and Nicholas can go
over by the ferry, charter it for a song, and sail direct for the
beds.”</p>
<p>“Good luck be with you, boys,” he said at parting,
two days later. “Remember, they are dangerous men, so
be careful.”</p>
<p>Nicholas and I succeeded in chartering the sloop very cheaply;
and between laughs, while getting up sail, we agreed that she was
even crazier and older than she had been described. She was
a big, flat-bottomed, square-sterned craft, sloop-rigged, with a
sprung mast, slack rigging, dilapidated sails, and rotten
running-gear, clumsy to handle and uncertain in bringing about,
and she smelled vilely of coal tar, with which strange stuff she
had been smeared from stem to stern and from cabin-roof to
centreboard. And to cap it all, <i>Coal Tar Maggie</i> was
printed in great white letters the whole length of either
side.</p>
<p>It was an uneventful though laughable run from Tiburon to
Asparagus Island, where we arrived in the afternoon of the
following day. The oyster pirates, a fleet of a dozen
sloops, were lying at anchor on what was known as the
“Deserted Beds.” The <i>Coal Tar Maggie</i>
came sloshing into their midst with a light breeze astern, and
they crowded on deck to see us. Nicholas and I had caught
the spirit of the crazy craft, and we handled her in most
lubberly fashion.</p>
<p>“Wot is it?” some one called.</p>
<p>“Name it ’n’ ye kin have it!” called
another.</p>
<p>“I swan naow, ef it ain’t the old Ark
itself!” mimicked the Centipede from the deck of the
<i>Ghost</i>.</p>
<p>“Hey! Ahoy there, clipper ship!” another wag
shouted. “Wot’s yer port?”</p>
<p>We took no notice of the joking, but acted, after the manner
of greenhorns, as though the <i>Coal Tar Maggie</i> required our
undivided attention. I rounded her well to windward of the
<i>Ghost</i>, and Nicholas ran for’ard to drop the
anchor. To all appearances it was a bungle, the way the
chain tangled and kept the anchor from reaching the bottom.
And to all appearances Nicholas and I were terribly excited as we
strove to clear it. At any rate, we quite deceived the
pirates, who took huge delight in our predicament.</p>
<p>But the chain remained tangled, and amid all kinds of mocking
advice we drifted down upon and fouled the <i>Ghost</i>, whose
bowsprit poked square through our mainsail and ripped a hole in
it as big as a barn door. The Centipede and the Porpoise
doubled up on the cabin in paroxysms of laughter, and left us to
get clear as best we could. This, with much unseaman-like
performance, we succeeded in doing, and likewise in clearing the
anchor-chain, of which we let out about three hundred feet.
With only ten feet of water under us, this would permit the
<i>Coal Tar Maggie</i> to swing in a circle six hundred feet in
diameter, in which circle she would be able to foul at least half
the fleet.</p>
<p>The oyster pirates lay snugly together at short hawsers, the
weather being fine, and they protested loudly at our ignorance in
putting out such an unwarranted length of anchor-chain. And
not only did they protest, for they made us heave it in again,
all but thirty feet.</p>
<p>Having sufficiently impressed them with our general
lubberliness, Nicholas and I went below to congratulate ourselves
and to cook supper. Hardly had we finished the meal and
washed the dishes, when a skiff ground against the <i>Coal Tar
Maggie’s</i> side, and heavy feet trampled on deck.
Then the Centipede’s brutal face appeared in the
companionway, and he descended into the cabin, followed by the
Porpoise. Before they could seat themselves on a bunk,
another skiff came alongside, and another, and another, till the
whole fleet was represented by the gathering in the cabin.</p>
<p>“Where’d you swipe the old tub?” asked a
squat and hairy man, with cruel eyes and Mexican features.</p>
<p>“Didn’t swipe it,” Nicholas answered,
meeting them on their own ground and encouraging the idea that we
had stolen the <i>Coal Tar Maggie</i>. “And if we
did, what of it?”</p>
<p>“Well, I don’t admire your taste, that’s
all,” sneered he of the Mexican features.
“I’d rot on the beach first before I’d take a
tub that couldn’t get out of its own way.”</p>
<p>“How were we to know till we tried her?” Nicholas
asked, so innocently as to cause a laugh. “And how do
you get the oysters?” he hurried on. “We want a
load of them; that’s what we came for, a load of
oysters.”</p>
<p>“What d’ye want ’em for?” demanded the
Porpoise.</p>
<p>“Oh, to give away to our friends, of course,”
Nicholas retorted. “That’s what you do with
yours, I suppose.”</p>
<p>This started another laugh, and as our visitors grew more
genial we could see that they had not the slightest suspicion of
our identity or purpose.</p>
<p>“Didn’t I see you on the dock in Oakland the other
day?” the Centipede asked suddenly of me.</p>
<p>“Yep,” I answered boldly, taking the bull by the
horns. “I was watching you fellows and figuring out
whether we’d go oystering or not. It’s a pretty
good business, I calculate, and so we’re going in for
it. That is,” I hastened to add, “if you
fellows don’t mind.”</p>
<p>“I’ll tell you one thing, which ain’t two
things,” he replied, “and that is you’ll have
to hump yerself an’ get a better boat. We won’t
stand to be disgraced by any such box as this.
Understand?”</p>
<p>“Sure,” I said. “Soon as we sell some
oysters we’ll outfit in style.”</p>
<p>“And if you show yerself square an’ the right
sort,” he went on, “why, you kin run with us.
But if you don’t” (here his voice became stern and
menacing), “why, it’ll be the sickest day of yer
life. Understand?”</p>
<p>“Sure,” I said.</p>
<p>After that and more warning and advice of similar nature, the
conversation became general, and we learned that the beds were to
be raided that very night. As they got into their boats,
after an hour’s stay, we were invited to join them in the
raid with the assurance of “the more the
merrier.”</p>
<p>“Did you notice that short, Mexican-looking chap?”
Nicholas asked, when they had departed to their various
sloops. “He’s Barchi, of the Sporting Life
Gang, and the fellow that came with him is Skilling.
They’re both out now on five thousand dollars’
bail.”</p>
<p>I had heard of the Sporting Life Gang before, a crowd of
hoodlums and criminals that terrorized the lower quarters of
Oakland, and two-thirds of which were usually to be found in
state’s prison for crimes that ranged from perjury and
ballot-box stuffing to murder.</p>
<p>“They are not regular oyster pirates,” Nicholas
continued. “They’ve just come down for the lark
and to make a few dollars. But we’ll have to watch
out for them.”</p>
<p>We sat in the cockpit and discussed the details of our plan
till eleven o’clock had passed, when we heard the rattle of
an oar in a boat from the direction of the <i>Ghost</i>. We
hauled up our own skiff, tossed in a few sacks, and rowed
over. There we found all the skiffs assembling, it being
the intention to raid the beds in a body.</p>
<p>To my surprise, I found barely a foot of water where we had
dropped anchor in ten feet. It was the big June run-out of
the full moon, and as the ebb had yet an hour and a half to run,
I knew that our anchorage would be dry ground before slack
water.</p>
<p>Mr. Taft’s beds were three miles away, and for a long
time we rowed silently in the wake of the other boats, once in a
while grounding and our oar blades constantly striking
bottom. At last we came upon soft mud covered with not more
than two inches of water—not enough to float the
boats. But the pirates at once were over the side, and by
pushing and pulling on the flat-bottomed skiffs, we moved
steadily along.</p>
<p>The full moon was partly obscured by high-flying clouds, but
the pirates went their way with the familiarity born of long
practice. After half a mile of the mud, we came upon a deep
channel, up which we rowed, with dead oyster shoals looming high
and dry on either side. At last we reached the picking
grounds. Two men, on one of the shoals, hailed us and
warned us off. But the Centipede, the Porpoise, Barchi, and
Skilling took the lead, and followed by the rest of us, at least
thirty men in half as many boats, rowed right up to the
watchmen.</p>
<p>“You’d better slide outa this here,” Barchi
said threateningly, “or we’ll fill you so full of
holes you wouldn’t float in molasses.”</p>
<p>The watchmen wisely retreated before so overwhelming a force,
and rowed their boat along the channel toward where the shore
should be. Besides, it was in the plan for them to
retreat.</p>
<p>We hauled the noses of the boats up on the shore side of a big
shoal, and all hands, with sacks, spread out and began
picking. Every now and again the clouds thinned before the
face of the moon, and we could see the big oysters quite
distinctly. In almost no time sacks were filled and carried
back to the boats, where fresh ones were obtained. Nicholas
and I returned often and anxiously to the boats with our little
loads, but always found some one of the pirates coming or
going.</p>
<p>“Never mind,” he said; “no hurry. As
they pick farther and farther away, it will take too long to
carry to the boats. Then they’ll stand the full sacks
on end and pick them up when the tide comes in and the skiffs
will float to them.”</p>
<p>Fully half an hour went by, and the tide had begun to flood,
when this came to pass. Leaving the pirates at their work,
we stole back to the boats. One by one, and noiselessly, we
shoved them off and made them fast in an awkward flotilla.
Just as we were shoving off the last skiff, our own, one of the
men came upon us. It was Barchi. His quick eye took
in the situation at a glance, and he sprang for us; but we went
clear with a mighty shove, and he was left floundering in the
water over his head. As soon as he got back to the shoal he
raised his voice and gave the alarm.</p>
<p>We rowed with all our strength, but it was slow going with so
many boats in tow. A pistol cracked from the shoal, a
second, and a third; then a regular fusillade began. The
bullets spat and spat all about us; but thick clouds had covered
the moon, and in the dim darkness it was no more than random
firing. It was only by chance that we could be hit.</p>
<p>“Wish we had a little steam launch,” I panted.</p>
<p>“I’d just as soon the moon stayed hidden,”
Nicholas panted back.</p>
<p>It was slow work, but every stroke carried us farther away
from the shoal and nearer the shore, till at last the shooting
died down, and when the moon did come out we were too far away to
be in danger. Not long afterward we answered a shoreward
hail, and two Whitehall boats, each pulled by three pairs of
oars, darted up to us. Charley’s welcome face bent
over to us, and he gripped us by the hands while he cried,
“Oh, you joys! You joys! Both of
you!”</p>
<p>When the flotilla had been landed, Nicholas and I and a
watchman rowed out in one of the Whitehalls, with Charley in the
stern-sheets. Two other Whitehalls followed us, and as the
moon now shone brightly, we easily made out the oyster pirates on
their lonely shoal. As we drew closer, they fired a
rattling volley from their revolvers, and we promptly retreated
beyond range.</p>
<p>“Lot of time,” Charley said. “The
flood is setting in fast, and by the time it’s up to their
necks there won’t be any fight left in them.”</p>
<p>So we lay on our oars and waited for the tide to do its
work. This was the predicament of the pirates: because of
the big run-out, the tide was now rushing back like a mill-race,
and it was impossible for the strongest swimmer in the world to
make against it the three miles to the sloops. Between the
pirates and the shore were we, precluding escape in that
direction. On the other hand, the water was rising rapidly
over the shoals, and it was only a question of a few hours when
it would be over their heads.</p>
<p>It was beautifully calm, and in the brilliant white moonlight
we watched them through our night glasses and told Charley of the
voyage of the <i>Coal Tar Maggie</i>. One o’clock
came, and two o’clock, and the pirates were clustering on
the highest shoal, waist-deep in water.</p>
<p>“Now this illustrates the value of imagination,”
Charley was saying. “Taft has been trying for years
to get them, but he went at it with bull strength and
failed. Now we used our heads . . .”</p>
<p>Just then I heard a scarcely audible gurgle of water, and
holding up my hand for silence, I turned and pointed to a ripple
slowly widening out in a growing circle. It was not more
than fifty feet from us. We kept perfectly quiet and
waited. After a minute the water broke six feet away, and a
black head and white shoulder showed in the moonlight. With
a snort of surprise and of suddenly expelled breath, the head and
shoulder went down.</p>
<p>We pulled ahead several strokes and drifted with the
current. Four pairs of eyes searched the surface of the
water, but never another ripple showed, and never another glimpse
did we catch of the black head and white shoulder.</p>
<p>“It’s the Porpoise,” Nicholas said.
“It would take broad daylight for us to catch
him.”</p>
<p>At a quarter to three the pirates gave their first sign of
weakening. We heard cries for help, in the unmistakable
voice of the Centipede, and this time, on rowing closer, we were
not fired upon. The Centipede was in a truly perilous
plight. Only the heads and shoulders of his
fellow-marauders showed above the water as they braced themselves
against the current, while his feet were off the bottom and they
were supporting him.</p>
<p>“Now, lads,” Charley said briskly, “we have
got you, and you can’t get away. If you cut up rough,
we’ll have to leave you alone and the water will finish
you. But if you’re good we’ll take you aboard,
one man at a time, and you’ll all be saved. What do
you say?”</p>
<p>“Ay,” they chorused hoarsely between their
chattering teeth.</p>
<p>“Then one man at a time, and the short men
first.”</p>
<p>The Centipede was the first to be pulled aboard, and he came
willingly, though he objected when the constable put the
handcuffs on him. Barchi was next hauled in, quite meek and
resigned from his soaking. When we had ten in, our boat we
drew back, and the second Whitehall was loaded. The third
Whitehall received nine prisoners only—a catch of
twenty-nine in all.</p>
<p>“You didn’t get the Porpoise,” the Centipede
said exultantly, as though his escape materially diminished our
success.</p>
<p>Charley laughed. “But we saw him just the same,
a-snorting for shore like a puffing pig.”</p>
<p>It was a mild and shivering band of pirates that we marched up
the beach to the oyster house. In answer to Charley’s
knock, the door was flung open, and a pleasant wave of warm air
rushed out upon us.</p>
<p>“You can dry your clothes here, lads, and get some hot
coffee,” Charley announced, as they filed in.</p>
<p>And there, sitting ruefully by the fire, with a steaming mug
in his hand, was the Porpoise. With one accord Nicholas and
I looked at Charley. He laughed gleefully.</p>
<p>“That comes of imagination,” he said.
“When you see a thing, you’ve got to see it all
around, or what’s the good of seeing it at all? I saw
the beach, so I left a couple of constables behind to keep an eye
on it. That’s all.”</p>
<h2><a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 64</span>THE
SIEGE OF THE “LANCASHIRE QUEEN”</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Possibly</span> our most exasperating
experience on the fish patrol was when Charley Le Grant and I
laid a two weeks’ siege to a big four-masted English
ship. Before we had finished with the affair, it became a
pretty mathematical problem, and it was by the merest chance that
we came into possession of the instrument that brought it to a
successful termination.</p>
<p>After our raid on the oyster pirates we had returned to
Oakland, where two more weeks passed before Neil
Partington’s wife was out of danger and on the highroad to
recovery. So it was after an absence of a month, all told,
that we turned the <i>Reindeer’s</i> nose toward
Benicia. When the cat’s away the mice will play, and
in these four weeks the fishermen had become very bold in
violating the law. When we passed Point Pedro we noticed
many signs of activity among the shrimp-catchers, and, well into
San Pablo Bay, we observed a widely scattered fleet of Upper Bay
fishing-boats hastily pulling in their nets and getting up
sail.</p>
<p>This was suspicious enough to warrant investigation, and the
first and only boat we succeeded in boarding proved to have an
illegal net. The law permitted no smaller mesh for catching
shad than one that measured seven and one-half inches inside the
knots, while the mesh of this particular net measured only three
inches. It was a flagrant breach of the rules, and the two
fishermen were forthwith put under arrest. Neil Partington
took one of them with him to help manage the <i>Reindeer</i>,
while Charley and I went on ahead with the other in the captured
boat.</p>
<p>But the shad fleet had headed over toward the Petaluma shore
in wild flight, and for the rest of the run through San Pablo Bay
we saw no more fishermen at all. Our prisoner, a bronzed
and bearded Greek, sat sullenly on his net while we sailed his
craft. It was a new Columbia River salmon boat, evidently
on its first trip, and it handled splendidly. Even when
Charley praised it, our prisoner refused to speak or to notice
us, and we soon gave him up as a most unsociable fellow.</p>
<p>We ran up the Carquinez Straits and edged into the bight at
Turner’s Shipyard for smoother water. Here were lying
several English steel sailing ships, waiting for the wheat
harvest; and here, most unexpectedly, in the precise place where
we had captured Big Alec, we came upon two Italians in a skiff
that was loaded with a complete “Chinese” sturgeon
line. The surprise was mutual, and we were on top of them
before either they or we were aware. Charley had barely
time to luff into the wind and run up to them. I ran
forward and tossed them a line with orders to make it fast.
One of the Italians took a turn with it over a cleat, while I
hastened to lower our big spritsail. This accomplished, the
salmon boat dropped astern, dragging heavily on the skiff.</p>
<p>Charley came forward to board the prize, but when I proceeded
to haul alongside by means of the line, the Italians cast it
off. We at once began drifting to leeward, while they got
out two pairs of oars and rowed their light craft directly into
the wind. This manœuvre for the moment disconcerted
us, for in our large and heavily loaded boat we could not hope to
catch them with the oars. But our prisoner came
unexpectedly to our aid. His black eyes were flashing
eagerly, and his face was flushed with suppressed excitement, as
he dropped the centre-board, sprang forward with a single leap,
and put up the sail.</p>
<p>“I’ve always heard that Greeks don’t like
Italians,” Charley laughed, as he ran aft to the
tiller.</p>
<p>And never in my experience have I seen a man so anxious for
the capture of another as was our prisoner in the chase that
followed. His eyes fairly snapped, and his nostrils
quivered and dilated in a most extraordinary way. Charley
steered while he tended the sheet; and though Charley was as
quick and alert as a cat, the Greek could hardly control his
impatience.</p>
<p>The Italians were cut off from the shore, which was fully a
mile away at its nearest point. Did they attempt to make
it, we could haul after them with the wind abeam, and overtake
them before they had covered an eighth of the distance. But
they were too wise to attempt it, contenting themselves with
rowing lustily to windward along the starboard side of a big
ship, the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>. But beyond the ship lay
an open stretch of fully two miles to the shore in that
direction. This, also, they dared not attempt, for we were
bound to catch them before they could cover it. So, when
they reached the bow of the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>, nothing
remained but to pass around and row down her port side toward the
stern, which meant rowing to leeward and giving us the
advantage.</p>
<p>We in the salmon boat, sailing close on the wind, tacked about
and crossed the ship’s bow. Then Charley put up the
tiller and headed down the port side of the ship, the Greek
letting out the sheet and grinning with delight. The
Italians were already half-way down the ship’s length; but
the stiff breeze at our back drove us after them far faster than
they could row. Closer and closer we came, and I, lying
down forward, was just reaching out to grasp the skiff, when it
ducked under the great stern of the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>.</p>
<p>The chase was virtually where it had begun. The Italians
were rowing up the starboard side of the ship, and we were hauled
close on the wind and slowly edging out from the ship as we
worked to windward. Then they darted around her bow and
began the row down her port side, and we tacked about, crossed
her bow, and went plunging down the wind hot after them.
And again, just as I was reaching for the skiff, it ducked under
the ship’s stern and out of danger. And so it went,
around and around, the skiff each time just barely ducking into
safety.</p>
<p>By this time the ship’s crew had become aware of what
was taking place, and we could see their heads in a long row as
they looked at us over the bulwarks. Each time we missed
the skiff at the stern, they set up a wild cheer and dashed
across to the other side of the <i>Lancashire Queen</i> to see
the chase to windward. They showered us and the Italians
with jokes and advice, and made our Greek so angry that at least
once on each circuit he raised his fist and shook it at them in a
rage. They came to look for this, and at each display
greeted it with uproarious mirth.</p>
<p>“Wot a circus!” cried one.</p>
<p>“Tork about yer marine hippodromes,—if this
ain’t one, I’d like to know!” affirmed
another.</p>
<p>“Six-days-go-as-yer-please,” announced a
third. “Who says the dagoes won’t
win?”</p>
<p>On the next tack to windward the Greek offered to change
places with Charley.</p>
<p>“Let-a me sail-a de boat,” he demanded.
“I fix-a them, I catch-a them, sure.”</p>
<p>This was a stroke at Charley’s professional pride, for
pride himself he did upon his boat-sailing abilities; but he
yielded the tiller to the prisoner and took his place at the
sheet. Three times again we made the circuit, and the Greek
found that he could get no more speed out of the salmon boat than
Charley had.</p>
<p>“Better give it up,” one of the sailors advised
from above.</p>
<p>The Greek scowled ferociously and shook his fist in his
customary fashion. In the meanwhile my mind had not been
idle, and I had finally evolved an idea.</p>
<p>“Keep going, Charley, one time more,” I said.</p>
<p>And as we laid out on the next tack to windward, I bent a
piece of line to a small grappling hook I had seen lying in the
bail-hole. The end of the line I made fast to the ring-bolt
in the bow, and with the hook out of sight I waited for the next
opportunity to use it. Once more they made their leeward
pull down the port side of the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>, and once
more we churned down after them before the wind. Nearer and
nearer we drew, and I was making believe to reach for them as
before. The stern of the skiff was not six feet away, and
they were laughing at me derisively as they ducked under the
ship’s stern. At that instant I suddenly arose and
threw the grappling iron. It caught fairly and squarely on
the rail of the skiff, which was jerked backward out of safety as
the rope tautened and the salmon boat ploughed on.</p>
<p>A groan went up from the row of sailors above, which quickly
changed to a cheer as one of the Italians whipped out a long
sheath-knife and cut the rope. But we had drawn them out of
safety, and Charley, from his place in the stern-sheets, reached
over and clutched the stern of the skiff. The whole thing
happened in a second of time, for the first Italian was cutting
the rope and Charley was clutching the skiff when the second
Italian dealt him a rap over the head with an oar, Charley
released his hold and collapsed, stunned, into the bottom of the
salmon boat, and the Italians bent to their oars and escaped back
under the ship’s stern.</p>
<p>The Greek took both tiller and sheet and continued the chase
around the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>, while I attended to Charley,
on whose head a nasty lump was rapidly rising. Our sailor
audience was wild with delight, and to a man encouraged the
fleeing Italians. Charley sat up, with one hand on his
head, and gazed about him sheepishly.</p>
<p>“It will never do to let them escape now,” he
said, at the same time drawing his revolver.</p>
<p>On our next circuit, he threatened the Italians with the
weapon; but they rowed on stolidly, keeping splendid stroke and
utterly disregarding him.</p>
<p>“If you don’t stop, I’ll shoot,”
Charley said menacingly.</p>
<p>But this had no effect, nor were they to be frightened into
surrendering even when he fired several shots dangerously close
to them. It was too much to expect him to shoot unarmed
men, and this they knew as well as we did; so they continued to
pull doggedly round and round the ship.</p>
<p>“We’ll run them down, then!” Charley
exclaimed. “We’ll wear them out and wind
them!”</p>
<p>So the chase continued. Twenty times more we ran them
around the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>, and at last we could see that
even their iron muscles were giving out. They were nearly
exhausted, and it was only a matter of a few more circuits, when
the game took on a new feature. On the row to windward they
always gained on us, so that they were half-way down the
ship’s side on the row to leeward when we were passing the
bow. But this last time, as we passed the bow, we saw them
escaping up the ship’s gangway, which had been suddenly
lowered. It was an organized move on the part of the
sailors, evidently countenanced by the captain; for by the time
we arrived where the gangway had been, it was being hoisted up,
and the skiff, slung in the ship’s davits, was likewise
flying aloft out of reach.</p>
<p>The parley that followed with the captain was short and
snappy. He absolutely forbade us to board the <i>Lancashire
Queen</i>, and as absolutely refused to give up the two
men. By this time Charley was as enraged as the
Greek. Not only had he been foiled in a long and ridiculous
chase, but he had been knocked senseless into the bottom of his
boat by the men who had escaped him.</p>
<p>“Knock off my head with little apples,” he
declared emphatically, striking the fist of one hand into the
palm of the other, “if those two men ever escape me!
I’ll stay here to get them if it takes the rest of my
natural life, and if I don’t get them, then I promise you
I’ll live unnaturally long or until I do get them, or my
name’s not Charley Le Grant!”</p>
<p>And then began the siege of the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>, a
siege memorable in the annals of both fishermen and fish
patrol. When the <i>Reindeer</i> came along, after a
fruitless pursuit of the shad fleet, Charley instructed Neil
Partington to send out his own salmon boat, with blankets,
provisions, and a fisherman’s charcoal stove. By
sunset this exchange of boats was made, and we said good-by to
our Greek, who perforce had to go into Benicia and be locked up
for his own violation of the law. After supper, Charley and
I kept alternate four-hour watches till daylight. The
fishermen made no attempt to escape that night, though the ship
sent out a boat for scouting purposes to find if the coast were
clear.</p>
<p>By the next day we saw that a steady siege was in order, and
we perfected our plans with an eye to our own comfort. A
dock, known as the Solano Wharf, which ran out from the Benicia
shore, helped us in this. It happened that the
<i>Lancashire Queen</i>, the shore at Turner’s Shipyard,
and the Solano Wharf were the corners of a big equilateral
triangle. From ship to shore, the side of the triangle
along which the Italians had to escape, was a distance equal to
that from the Solano Wharf to the shore, the side of the triangle
along which we had to travel to get to the shore before the
Italians. But as we could sail much faster than they could
row, we could permit them to travel about half their side of the
triangle before we darted out along our side. If we allowed
them to get more than half-way, they were certain to beat us to
shore; while if we started before they were half-way, they were
equally certain to beat us back to the ship.</p>
<p>We found that an imaginary line, drawn from the end of the
wharf to a windmill farther along the shore, cut precisely in
half the line of the triangle along which the Italians must
escape to reach the land. This line made it easy for us to
determine how far to let them run away before we bestirred
ourselves in pursuit. Day after day we would watch them
through our glasses as they rowed leisurely along toward the
half-way point; and as they drew close into line with the
windmill, we would leap into the boat and get up sail. At
sight of our preparation, they would turn and row slowly back to
the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>, secure in the knowledge that we
could not overtake them.</p>
<p>To guard against calms—when our salmon boat would be
useless—we also had in readiness a light rowing skiff
equipped with spoon-oars. But at such times, when the wind
failed us, we were forced to row out from the wharf as soon as
they rowed from the ship. In the night-time, on the other
hand, we were compelled to patrol the immediate vicinity of the
ship; which we did, Charley and I standing four-hour watches turn
and turn about. The Italians, however, preferred the
daytime in which to escape, and so our long night vigils were
without result.</p>
<p>“What makes me mad,” said Charley, “is our
being kept from our honest beds while those rascally lawbreakers
are sleeping soundly every night. But much good may it do
them,” he threatened. “I’ll keep them on
that ship till the captain charges them board, as sure as a
sturgeon’s not a catfish!”</p>
<p>It was a tantalizing problem that confronted us. As long
as we were vigilant, they could not escape; and as long as they
were careful, we would be unable to catch them. Charley
cudgelled his brains continually, but for once his imagination
failed him. It was a problem apparently without other
solution than that of patience. It was a waiting game, and
whichever waited the longer was bound to win. To add to our
irritation, friends of the Italians established a code of signals
with them from the shore, so that we never dared relax the siege
for a moment. And besides this, there were always one or
two suspicious-looking fishermen hanging around the Solano Wharf
and keeping watch on our actions. We could do nothing but
“grin and bear it,” as Charley said, while it took up
all our time and prevented us from doing other work.</p>
<p>The days went by, and there was no change in the
situation. Not that no attempts were made to change
it. One night friends from the shore came out in a skiff
and attempted to confuse us while the two Italians escaped.
That they did not succeed was due to the lack of a little oil on
the ship’s davits. For we were drawn back from the
pursuit of the strange boat by the creaking of the davits, and
arrived at the <i>Lancashire Queen</i> just as the Italians were
lowering their skiff. Another night, fully half a dozen
skiffs rowed around us in the darkness, but we held on like a
leech to the side of the ship and frustrated their plan till they
grew angry and showered us with abuse. Charley laughed to
himself in the bottom of the boat.</p>
<p>“It’s a good sign, lad,” he said to
me. “When men begin to abuse, make sure they’re
losing patience; and shortly after they lose patience, they lose
their heads. Mark my words, if we only hold out,
they’ll get careless some fine day, and then we’ll
get them.”</p>
<p>But they did not grow careless, and Charley confessed that
this was one of the times when all signs failed. Their
patience seemed equal to ours, and the second week of the siege
dragged monotonously along. Then Charley’s lagging
imagination quickened sufficiently to suggest a ruse. Peter
Boyelen, a new patrolman and one unknown to the fisher-folk,
happened to arrive in Benicia and we took him into our
plan. We were as secret as possible about it, but in some
unfathomable way the friends ashore got word to the beleaguered
Italians to keep their eyes open.</p>
<p>On the night we were to put our ruse into effect, Charley and
I took up our usual station in our rowing skiff alongside the
<i>Lancashire Queen</i>. After it was thoroughly dark,
Peter Boyelen came out in a crazy duck boat, the kind you can
pick up and carry away under one arm. When we heard him
coming along, paddling noisily, we slipped away a short distance
into the darkness, and rested on our oars. Opposite the
gangway, having jovially hailed the anchor-watch of the
<i>Lancashire Queen</i> and asked the direction of the
<i>Scottish Chiefs</i>, another wheat ship, he awkwardly capsized
himself. The man who was standing the anchor-watch ran down
the gangway and hauled him out of the water. This was what
he wanted, to get aboard the ship; and the next thing he expected
was to be taken on deck and then below to warm up and dry
out. But the captain inhospitably kept him perched on the
lowest gangway step, shivering miserably and with his feet
dangling in the water, till we, out of very pity, rowed in from
the darkness and took him off. The jokes and gibes of the
awakened crew sounded anything but sweet in our ears, and even
the two Italians climbed up on the rail and laughed down at us
long and maliciously.</p>
<p>“That’s all right,” Charley said in a low
voice, which I only could hear. “I’m mighty
glad it’s not us that’s laughing first.
We’ll save our laugh to the end, eh, lad?”</p>
<p>He clapped a hand on my shoulder as he finished, but it seemed
to me that there was more determination than hope in his
voice.</p>
<p>It would have been possible for us to secure the aid of United
States marshals and board the English ship, backed by Government
authority. But the instructions of the Fish Commission were
to the effect that the patrolmen should avoid complications, and
this one, did we call on the higher powers, might well end in a
pretty international tangle.</p>
<p>The second week of the siege drew to its close, and there was
no sign of change in the situation. On the morning of the
fourteenth day the change came, and it came in a guise as
unexpected and startling to us as it was to the men we were
striving to capture.</p>
<p>Charley and I, after our customary night vigil by the side of
the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>, rowed into the Solana Wharf.</p>
<p>“Hello!” cried Charley, in surprise.
“In the name of reason and common sense, what is
that? Of all unmannerly craft did you ever see the
like?”</p>
<p>Well might he exclaim, for there, tied up to the dock, lay the
strangest looking launch I had ever seen. Not that it could
be called a launch, either, but it seemed to resemble a launch
more than any other kind of boat. It was seventy feet long,
but so narrow was it, and so bare of superstructure, that it
appeared much smaller than it really was. It was built
wholly of steel, and was painted black. Three smokestacks,
a good distance apart and raking well aft, arose in single file
amidships; while the bow, long and lean and sharp as a knife,
plainly advertised that the boat was made for speed.
Passing under the stern, we read <i>Streak</i>, painted in small
white letters.</p>
<p>Charley and I were consumed with curiosity. In a few
minutes we were on board and talking with an engineer who was
watching the sunrise from the deck. He was quite willing to
satisfy our curiosity, and in a few minutes we learned that the
<i>Streak</i> had come in after dark from San Francisco; that
this was what might be called the trial trip; and that she was
the property of Silas Tate, a young mining millionaire of
California, whose fad was high-speed yachts. There was some
talk about turbine engines, direct application of steam, and the
absence of pistons, rods, and cranks,—all of which was
beyond me, for I was familiar only with sailing craft; but I did
understand the last words of the engineer.</p>
<p>“Four thousand horse-power and forty-five miles an hour,
though you wouldn’t think it,” he concluded
proudly.</p>
<p>“Say it again, man! Say it again!” Charley
exclaimed in an excited voice.</p>
<p>“Four thousand horse-power and forty-five miles an
hour,” the engineer repeated, grinning good-naturedly.</p>
<p>“Where’s the owner?” was Charley’s
next question. “Is there any way I can speak to
him?”</p>
<p>The engineer shook his head. “No, I’m afraid
not. He’s asleep, you see.”</p>
<p>At that moment a young man in blue uniform came on deck
farther aft and stood regarding the sunrise.</p>
<p>“There he is, that’s him, that’s Mr.
Tate,” said the engineer.</p>
<p>Charley walked aft and spoke to him, and while he talked
earnestly the young man listened with an amused expression on his
face. He must have inquired about the depth of water close
in to the shore at Turner’s Shipyard, for I could see
Charley making gestures and explaining. A few minutes later
he came back in high glee.</p>
<p>“Come on lad,” he said. “On to the
dock with you. We’ve got them!”</p>
<p>It was our good fortune to leave the <i>Streak</i> when we
did, for a little later one of the spy fishermen appeared.
Charley and I took up our accustomed places, on the
stringer-piece, a little ahead of the <i>Streak</i> and over our
own boat, where we could comfortably watch the <i>Lancashire
Queen</i>. Nothing occurred till about nine o’clock,
when we saw the two Italians leave the ship and pull along their
side of the triangle toward the shore. Charley looked as
unconcerned as could be, but before they had covered a quarter of
the distance, he whispered to me:</p>
<p>“Forty-five miles an hour . . . nothing can save them .
. . they are ours!”</p>
<p>Slowly the two men rowed along till they were nearly in line
with the windmill. This was the point where we always
jumped into our salmon boat and got up the sail, and the two men,
evidently expecting it, seemed surprised when we gave no
sign.</p>
<p>When they were directly in line with the windmill, as near to
the shore as to the ship, and nearer the shore than we had ever
allowed them before, they grew suspicious. We followed them
through the glasses, and saw them standing up in the skiff and
trying to find out what we were doing. The spy fisherman,
sitting beside us on the stringer-piece was likewise
puzzled. He could not understand our inactivity. The
men in the skiff rowed nearer the shore, but stood up again and
scanned it, as if they thought we might be in hiding there.
But a man came out on the beach and waved a handkerchief to
indicate that the coast was clear. That settled them.
They bent to the oars to make a dash for it. Still Charley
waited. Not until they had covered three-quarters of the
distance from the <i>Lancashire Queen</i>, which left them hardly
more than a quarter of a mile to gain the shore, did Charley slap
me on the shoulder and cry:</p>
<p>“They’re ours! They’re
ours!”</p>
<p>We ran the few steps to the side of the <i>Streak</i> and
jumped aboard. Stern and bow lines were cast off in a
jiffy. The <i>Streak</i> shot ahead and away from the
wharf. The spy fisherman we had left behind on the
stringer-piece pulled out a revolver and fired five shots into
the air in rapid succession. The men in the skiff gave
instant heed to the warning, for we could see them pulling away
like mad.</p>
<p>But if they pulled like mad, I wonder how our progress can be
described? We fairly flew. So frightful was the speed
with which we displaced the water, that a wave rose up on either
side our bow and foamed aft in a series of three stiff,
up-standing waves, while astern a great crested billow pursued us
hungrily, as though at each moment it would fall aboard and
destroy us. The <i>Streak</i> was pulsing and vibrating and
roaring like a thing alive. The wind of our progress was
like a gale—a forty-five-mile gale. We could not face
it and draw breath without choking and strangling. It blew
the smoke straight back from the mouths of the smoke-stacks at a
direct right angle to the perpendicular. In fact, we were
travelling as fast as an express train. “We just
<i>streaked</i> it,” was the way Charley told it afterward,
and I think his description comes nearer than any I can give.</p>
<p>As for the Italians in the skiff—hardly had we started,
it seemed to me, when we were on top of them. Naturally, we
had to slow down long before we got to them; but even then we
shot past like a whirlwind and were compelled to circle back
between them and the shore. They had rowed steadily, rising
from the thwarts at every stroke, up to the moment we passed
them, when they recognized Charley and me. That took the
last bit of fight out of them. They hauled in their oars,
and sullenly submitted to arrest.</p>
<p>“Well, Charley,” Neil Partington said, as we
discussed it on the wharf afterward, “I fail to see where
your boasted imagination came into play this time.”</p>
<p>But Charley was true to his hobby.
“Imagination?” he demanded, pointing to the
<i>Streak</i>. “Look at that! just look at it!
If the invention of that isn’t imagination, I should like
to know what is.”</p>
<p>“Of course,” he added, “it’s the other
fellow’s imagination, but it did the work all the
same.”</p>
<h2><a name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
84</span>CHARLEY’S COUP</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Perhaps</span> our most laughable exploit
on the fish patrol, and at the same time our most dangerous one,
was when we rounded in, at a single haul, an even score of
wrathful fishermen. Charley called it a “coop,”
having heard Neil Partington use the term; but I think he
misunderstood the word, and thought it meant “coop,”
to catch, to trap. The fishermen, however, coup or coop,
must have called it a Waterloo, for it was the severest stroke
ever dealt them by the fish patrol, while they had invited it by
open and impudent defiance of the law.</p>
<p>During what is called the “open season” the
fishermen might catch as many salmon as their luck allowed and
their boats could hold. But there was one important
restriction. From sun-down Saturday night to sun-up Monday
morning, they were not permitted to set a net. This was a
wise provision on the part of the Fish Commission, for it was
necessary to give the spawning salmon some opportunity to ascend
the river and lay their eggs. And this law, with only an
occasional violation, had been obediently observed by the Greek
fishermen who caught salmon for the canneries and the market.</p>
<p>One Sunday morning, Charley received a telephone call from a
friend in Collinsville, who told him that the full force of
fishermen was out with its nets. Charley and I jumped into
our salmon boat and started for the scene of the trouble.
With a light favoring wind at our back we went through the
Carquinez Straits, crossed Suisun Bay, passed the Ship Island
Light, and came upon the whole fleet at work.</p>
<p>But first let me describe the method by which they
worked. The net used is what is known as a gill-net.
It has a simple diamond-shaped mesh which measures at least seven
and one-half inches between the knots. From five to seven
and even eight hundred feet in length, these nets are only a few
feet wide. They are not stationary, but float with the
current, the upper edge supported on the surface by floats, the
lower edge sunk by means of leaden weights.</p>
<p>This arrangement keeps the net upright in the current and
effectually prevents all but the smaller fish from ascending the
river. The salmon, swimming near the surface, as is their
custom, run their heads through these meshes, and are prevented
from going on through by their larger girth of body, and from
going back because of their gills, which catch in the mesh.
It requires two fishermen to set such a net,—one to row the
boat, while the other, standing in the stern, carefully pays out
the net. When it is all out, stretching directly across the
stream, the men make their boat fast to one end of the net and
drift along with it.</p>
<p>As we came upon the fleet of law-breaking fishermen, each boat
two or three hundred yards from its neighbors, and boats and nets
dotting the river as far as we could see, Charley said:</p>
<p>“I’ve only one regret, lad, and that is that I
have’nt a thousand arms so as to be able to catch them
all. As it is, we’ll only be able to catch one boat,
for while we are tackling that one it will be up nets and away
with the rest.”</p>
<p>As we drew closer, we observed none of the usual flurry and
excitement which our appearance invariably produced.
Instead, each boat lay quietly by its net, while the fishermen
favored us with not the slightest attention.</p>
<p>“It’s curious,” Charley muttered.
“Can it be they don’t recognize us?”</p>
<p>I said that it was impossible, and Charley agreed; yet there
was a whole fleet, manned by men who knew us only too well, and
who took no more notice of us than if we were a hay scow or a
pleasure yacht.</p>
<p>This did not continue to be the case, however, for as we bore
down upon the nearest net, the men to whom it belonged detached
their boat and rowed slowly toward the shore. The rest of
the boats showed no, sign of uneasiness.</p>
<p>“That’s funny,” was Charley’s
remark. “But we can confiscate the net, at any
rate.”</p>
<p>We lowered sail, picked up one end of the net, and began to
heave it into the boat. But at the first heave we heard a
bullet zip-zipping past us on the water, followed by the faint
report of a rifle. The men who had rowed ashore were
shooting at us. At the next heave a second bullet went
zipping past, perilously near. Charley took a turn around a
pin and sat down. There were no more shots. But as
soon as he began to heave in, the shooting recommenced.</p>
<p>“That settles it,” he said, flinging the end of
the net overboard. “You fellows want it worse than we
do, and you can have it.”</p>
<p>We rowed over toward the next net, for Charley was intent on
finding out whether or not we were face to face with an organized
defiance. As we approached, the two fishermen proceeded to
cast off from their net and row ashore, while the first two rowed
back and made fast to the net we had abandoned. And at the
second net we were greeted by rifle shots till we desisted and
went on to the third, where the manœuvre was again
repeated.</p>
<p>Then we gave it up, completely routed, and hoisted sail and
started on the long windward beat back to Benicia. A number
of Sundays went by, on each of which the law was persistently
violated. Yet, short of an armed force of soldiers, we
could do nothing. The fishermen had hit upon a new idea and
were using it for all it was worth, while there seemed no way by
which we could get the better of them.</p>
<p>About this time Neil Partington happened along from the Lower
Bay, where he had been for a number of weeks. With him was
Nicholas, the Greek boy who had helped us in our raid on the
oyster pirates, and the pair of them took a hand. We made
our arrangements carefully. It was planned that while
Charley and I tackled the nets, they were to be hidden ashore so
as to ambush the fishermen who landed to shoot at us.</p>
<p>It was a pretty plan. Even Charley said it was.
But we reckoned not half so well as the Greeks. They
forestalled us by ambushing Neil and Nicholas and taking them
prisoners, while, as of old, bullets whistled about our ears when
Charley and I attempted to take possession of the nets.
When we were again beaten off, Neil Partington and Nicholas were
released. They were rather shamefaced when they put in an
appearance, and Charley chaffed them unmercifully. But Neil
chaffed back, demanding to know why Charley’s imagination
had not long since overcome the difficulty.</p>
<p>“Just you wait; the idea’ll come all right,”
Charley promised.</p>
<p>“Most probably,” Neil agreed. “But
I’m afraid the salmon will be exterminated first, and then
there will be no need for it when it does come.”</p>
<p>Neil Partington, highly disgusted with his adventure, departed
for the Lower Bay, taking Nicholas with him, and Charley and I
were left to our own resources. This meant that the Sunday
fishing would be left to itself, too, until such time as
Charley’s idea happened along. I puzzled my head a
good deal to find out some way of checkmating the Greeks, as also
did Charley, and we broached a thousand expedients which on
discussion proved worthless.</p>
<p>The fishermen, on the other hand, were in high feather, and
their boasts went up and down the river to add to our
discomfiture. Among all classes of them we became aware of
a growing insubordination. We were beaten, and they were
losing respect for us. With the loss of respect, contempt
began to arise. Charley began to be spoken of as the
“olda woman,” and I received my rating as the
“pee-wee kid.” The situation was fast becoming
unbearable, and we knew that we should have to deliver a stunning
stroke at the Greeks in order to regain the old-time respect in
which we had stood.</p>
<p>Then one morning the idea came. We were down on
Steamboat Wharf, where the river steamers made their landings,
and where we found a group of amused long-shoremen and loafers
listening to the hard-luck tale of a sleepy-eyed young fellow in
long sea-boots. He was a sort of amateur fisherman, he
said, fishing for the local market of Berkeley. Now
Berkeley was on the Lower Bay, thirty miles away. On the
previous night, he said, he had set his net and dozed off to
sleep in the bottom of the boat.</p>
<p>The next he knew it was morning, and he opened his eyes to
find his boat rubbing softly against the piles of Steamboat Wharf
at Benicia. Also he saw the river steamer <i>Apache</i>
lying ahead of him, and a couple of deck-hands disentangling the
shreds of his net from the paddle-wheel. In short, after he
had gone to sleep, his fisherman’s riding light had gone
out, and the <i>Apache</i> had run over his net. Though
torn pretty well to pieces, the net in some way still remained
foul, and he had had a thirty-mile tow out of his course.</p>
<p>Charley nudged me with his elbow. I grasped his thought
on the instant, but objected:</p>
<p>“We can’t charter a steamboat.”</p>
<p>“Don’t intend to,” he rejoined.
“But let’s run over to Turner’s Shipyard.
I’ve something in my mind there that may be of use to
us.”</p>
<p>And over we went to the shipyard, where Charley led the way to
the <i>Mary Rebecca</i>, lying hauled out on the ways, where she
was being cleaned and overhauled. She was a scow-schooner
we both knew well, carrying a cargo of one hundred and forty tons
and a spread of canvas greater than other schooner on the
bay.</p>
<p>“How d’ye do, Ole,” Charley greeted a big
blue-shirted Swede who was greasing the jaws of the main gaff
with a piece of pork rind.</p>
<p>Ole grunted, puffed away at his pipe, and went on
greasing. The captain of a bay schooner is supposed to work
with his hands just as well as the men.</p>
<p>Ole Ericsen verified Charley’s conjecture that the
<i>Mary Rebecca</i>, as soon as launched, would run up the San
Joaquin River nearly to Stockton for a load of wheat. Then
Charley made his proposition, and Ole Ericsen shook his head.</p>
<p>“Just a hook, one good-sized hook,” Charley
pleaded.</p>
<p>“No, Ay tank not,” said Ole Ericsen.
“Der <i>Mary Rebecca</i> yust hang up on efery mud-bank
with that hook. Ay don’t want to lose der <i>Mary
Rebecca</i>. She’s all Ay got.”</p>
<p>“No, no,” Charley hurried to explain.
“We can put the end of the hook through the bottom from the
outside, and fasten it on the inside with a nut. After
it’s done its work, why, all we have to do is to go down
into the hold, unscrew the nut, and out drops the hook.
Then drive a wooden peg into the hole, and the <i>Mary
Rebecca</i> will be all right again.”</p>
<p>Ole Ericsen was obstinate for a long time; but in the end,
after we had had dinner with him, he was brought round to
consent.</p>
<p>“Ay do it, by Yupiter!” he said, striking one huge
fist into the palm of the other hand. “But yust hurry
you up wid der hook. Der <i>Mary Rebecca</i> slides into
der water to-night.”</p>
<p>It was Saturday, and Charley had need to hurry. We
headed for the shipyard blacksmith shop, where, under
Charley’s directions, a most generously curved book of
heavy steel was made. Back we hastened to the <i>Mary
Rebecca</i>. Aft of the great centre-board case, through
what was properly her keel, a hole was bored. The end of
the hook was inserted from the outside, and Charley, on the
inside, screwed the nut on tightly. As it stood complete,
the hook projected over a foot beneath the bottom of the
schooner. Its curve was something like the curve of a
sickle, but deeper.</p>
<p>In the late afternoon the <i>Mary Rebecca</i> was launched,
and preparations were finished for the start up-river next
morning. Charley and Ole intently studied the evening sky
for signs of wind, for without a good breeze our project was
doomed to failure. They agreed that there were all the
signs of a stiff westerly wind—not the ordinary afternoon
sea-breeze, but a half-gale, which even then was springing
up.</p>
<p>Next morning found their predictions verified. The sun
was shining brightly, but something more than a half-gale was
shrieking up the Carquinez Straits, and the <i>Mary Rebecca</i>
got under way with two reefs in her mainsail and one in her
foresail. We found it quite rough in the Straits and in
Suisun Bay; but as the water grew more land-locked it became
calm, though without let-up in the wind.</p>
<p>Off Ship Island Light the reefs were shaken out, and at
Charley’s suggestion a big fisherman’s staysail was
made all ready for hoisting, and the maintopsail, bunched into a
cap at the masthead, was overhauled so that it could be set on an
instant’s notice.</p>
<p>We were tearing along, wing-and-wing, before the wind,
foresail to starboard and mainsail to port, as we came upon the
salmon fleet. There they were, boats and nets, as on that
first Sunday when they had bested us, strung out evenly over the
river as far as we could see. A narrow space on the
right-hand side of the channel was left clear for steamboats, but
the rest of the river was covered with the wide-stretching
nets. The narrow space was our logical course, but Charley,
at the wheel, steered the <i>Mary Rebecca</i> straight for the
nets. This did not cause any alarm among the fishermen,
because up-river sailing craft are always provided with
“shoes” on the ends of their keels, which permit them
to slip over the nets without fouling them.</p>
<p>“Now she takes it!” Charley cried, as we dashed
across the middle of a line of floats which marked a net.
At one end of this line was a small barrel buoy, at the other the
two fishermen in their boat. Buoy and boat at once began to
draw together, and the fishermen to cry out, as they were jerked
after us. A couple of minutes later we hooked a second net,
and then a third, and in this fashion we tore straight up through
the centre of the fleet.</p>
<p>The consternation we spread among the fishermen was
tremendous. As fast as we hooked a net the two ends of it,
buoy and boat, came together as they dragged out astern; and so
many buoys and boats, coming together at such breakneck speed,
kept the fishermen on the jump to avoid smashing into one
another. Also, they shouted at us like mad to heave to into
the wind, for they took it as some drunken prank on the part of
scow-sailors, little dreaming that we were the fish patrol.</p>
<p>The drag of a single net is very heavy, and Charley and Ole
Ericsen decided that even in such a wind ten nets were all the
<i>Mary Rebecca</i> could take along with her. So when we
had hooked ten nets, with ten boats containing twenty men
streaming along behind us, we veered to the left out of the fleet
and headed toward Collinsville.</p>
<p>We were all jubilant. Charley was handling the wheel as
though he were steering the winning yacht home in a race.
The two sailors who made up the crew of the <i>Mary Rebecca</i>,
were grinning and joking. Ole Ericsen was rubbing his huge
hands in child-like glee.</p>
<p>“Ay tank you fish patrol fallers never ban so lucky as
when you sail with Ole Ericsen,” he was saying, when a
rifle cracked sharply astern, and a bullet gouged along the newly
painted cabin, glanced on a nail, and sang shrilly onward into
space.</p>
<p>This was too much for Ole Ericsen. At sight of his
beloved paintwork thus defaced, he jumped up and shook his fist
at the fishermen; but a second bullet smashed into the cabin not
six inches from his head, and he dropped down to the deck under
cover of the rail.</p>
<p>All the fishermen had rifles, and they now opened a general
fusillade. We were all driven to cover—even Charley,
who was compelled to desert the wheel. Had it not been for
the heavy drag of the nets, we would inevitably have broached to
at the mercy of the enraged fishermen. But the nets,
fastened to the bottom of the <i>Mary Rebecca</i> well aft, held
her stern into the wind, and she continued to plough on, though
somewhat erratically.</p>
<p>Charley, lying on the deck, could just manage to reach the
lower spokes of the wheel; but while he could steer after a
fashion, it was very awkward. Ole Ericsen bethought himself
of a large piece of sheet steel in the empty hold.</p>
<p>It was in fact a plate from the side of the <i>New Jersey</i>,
a steamer which had recently been wrecked outside the Golden
Gate, and in the salving of which the <i>Mary Rebecca</i> had
taken part.</p>
<p>Crawling carefully along the deck, the two sailors, Ole, and
myself got the heavy plate on deck and aft, where we reared it as
a shield between the wheel and the fishermen. The bullets
whanged and banged against it till it rang like a
bull’s-eye, but Charley grinned in its shelter, and coolly
went on steering.</p>
<p>So we raced along, behind us a howling, screaming bedlam of
wrathful Greeks, Collinsville ahead, and bullets spat-spatting
all around us.</p>
<p>“Ole,” Charley said in a faint voice, “I
don’t know what we’re going to do.”</p>
<p>Ole Ericsen, lying on his back close to the rail and grinning
upward at the sky, turned over on his side and looked at
him. “Ay tank we go into Collinsville yust der
same,” he said.</p>
<p>“But we can’t stop,” Charley groaned.
“I never thought of it, but we can’t stop.”</p>
<p>A look of consternation slowly overspread Ole Ericsen’s
broad face. It was only too true. We had a
hornet’s nest on our hands, and to stop at Collinsville
would be to have it about our ears.</p>
<p>“Every man Jack of them has a gun,” one of the
sailors remarked cheerfully.</p>
<p>“Yes, and a knife, too,” the other sailor
added.</p>
<p>It was Ole Ericsen’s turn to groan. “What
for a Svaidish faller like me monkey with none of my biziness, I
don’t know,” he soliloquized.</p>
<p>A bullet glanced on the stern and sang off to starboard like a
spiteful bee. “There’s nothing to do but plump
the <i>Mary Rebecca</i> ashore and run for it,” was the
verdict of the first cheerful sailor.</p>
<p>“And leaf der <i>Mary Rebecca</i>?” Ole demanded,
with unspeakable horror in his voice.</p>
<p>“Not unless you want to,” was the response.
“But I don’t want to be within a thousand miles of
her when those fellers come aboard”—indicating the
bedlam of excited Greeks towing behind.</p>
<p>We were right in at Collinsville then, and went foaming by
within biscuit-toss of the wharf.</p>
<p>“I only hope the wind holds out,” Charley said,
stealing a glance at our prisoners.</p>
<p>“What of der wind?” Ole demanded
disconsolately. “Der river will not hold out, and
then . . . and then . . .”</p>
<p>“It’s head for tall timber, and the Greeks take
the hindermost,” adjudged the cheerful sailor, while Ole
was stuttering over what would happen when we came to the end of
the river.</p>
<p>We had now reached a dividing of the ways. To the left
was the mouth of the Sacramento River, to the right the mouth of
the San Joaquin. The cheerful sailor crept forward and
jibed over the foresail as Charley put the helm to starboard and
we swerved to the right into the San Joaquin. The wind,
from which we had been running away on an even keel, now caught
us on our beam, and the <i>Mary Rebecca</i> was pressed down on
her port side as if she were about to capsize.</p>
<p>Still we dashed on, and still the fishermen dashed on
behind. The value of their nets was greater than the fines
they would have to pay for violating the fish laws; so to cast
off from their nets and escape, which they could easily do, would
profit them nothing. Further, they remained by their nets
instinctively, as a sailor remains by his ship. And still
further, the desire for vengeance was roused, and we could depend
upon it that they would follow us to the ends of the earth, if we
undertook to tow them that far.</p>
<p>The rifle-firing had ceased, and we looked astern to see what
our prisoners were doing. The boats were strung along at
unequal distances apart, and we saw the four nearest ones
bunching together. This was done by the boat ahead trailing
a small rope astern to the one behind. When this was
caught, they would cast off from their net and heave in on the
line till they were brought up to the boat in front. So
great was the speed at which we were travelling, however, that
this was very slow work. Sometimes the men would strain to
their utmost and fail to get in an inch of the rope; at other
times they came ahead more rapidly.</p>
<p>When the four boats were near enough together for a man to
pass from one to another, one Greek from each of three got into
the nearest boat to us, taking his rifle with him. This
made five in the foremost boat, and it was plain that their
intention was to board us. This they undertook to do, by
main strength and sweat, running hand over hand the float-line of
a net. And though it was slow, and they stopped frequently
to rest, they gradually drew nearer.</p>
<p>Charley smiled at their efforts, and said, “Give her the
topsail, Ole.”</p>
<p>The cap at the mainmast head was broken out, and sheet and
downhaul pulled flat, amid a scattering rifle fire from the
boats; and the <i>Mary Rebecca</i> lay over and sprang ahead
faster than ever.</p>
<p>But the Greeks were undaunted. Unable, at the increased
speed, to draw themselves nearer by means of their hands, they
rigged from the blocks of their boat sail what sailors call a
“watch-tackle.” One of them, held by the legs
by his mates, would lean far over the bow and make the tackle
fast to the float-line. Then they would heave in on the
tackle till the blocks were together, when the manœuvre
would be repeated.</p>
<p>“Have to give her the staysail,” Charley said.</p>
<p>Ole Ericsen looked at the straining <i>Mary Rebecca</i> and
shook his head. “It will take der masts out of
her,” he said.</p>
<p>“And we’ll be taken out of her if you
don’t,” Charley replied.</p>
<p>Ole shot an anxious glance at his masts, another at the boat
load of armed Greeks, and consented.</p>
<p>The five men were in the bow of the boat—a bad place
when a craft is towing. I was watching the behavior of
their boat as the great fisherman’s staysail, far, far
larger than the topsail and used only in light breezes, was
broken out. As the <i>Mary Rebecca</i> lurched forward with
a tremendous jerk, the nose of the boat ducked down into the
water, and the men tumbled over one another in a wild rush into
the stern to save the boat from being dragged sheer under
water.</p>
<p>“That settles them!” Charley remarked, though he
was anxiously studying the behavior of the <i>Mary Rebecca</i>,
which was being driven under far more canvas than she was rightly
able to carry.</p>
<p>“Next stop is Antioch!” announced the cheerful
sailor, after the manner of a railway conductor. “And
next comes Merryweather!”</p>
<p>“Come here, quick,” Charley said to me.</p>
<p>I crawled across the deck and stood upright beside him in the
shelter of the sheet steel.</p>
<p>“Feel in my inside pocket,” he commanded,
“and get my notebook. That’s right. Tear
out a blank page and write what I tell you.”</p>
<p>And this is what I wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>Telephone to Merryweather, to the sheriff, the
constable, or the judge. Tell them we are coming and to
turn out the town. Arm everybody. Have them down on
the wharf to meet us or we are gone gooses.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Now make it good and fast to that marlin-spike, and
stand by to toss it ashore.”</p>
<p>I did as he directed. By then we were close to
Antioch. The wind was shouting through our rigging, the
<i>Mary Rebecca</i> was half over on her side and rushing ahead
like an ocean greyhound. The seafaring folk of Antioch had
seen us breaking out topsail and staysail, a most reckless
performance in such weather, and had hurried to the wharf-ends in
little groups to find out what was the matter.</p>
<p>Straight down the water front we boomed, Charley edging in
till a man could almost leap ashore. When he gave the
signal I tossed the marlinspike. It struck the planking of
the wharf a resounding smash, bounced along fifteen or twenty
feet, and was pounced upon by the amazed onlookers.</p>
<p>It all happened in a flash, for the next minute Antioch was
behind and we were heeling it up the San Joaquin toward
Merryweather, six miles away. The river straightened out
here into its general easterly course, and we squared away before
the wind, wing-and-wing once more, the foresail bellying out to
starboard.</p>
<p>Ole Ericsen seemed sunk into a state of stolid despair.
Charley and the two sailors were looking hopeful, as they had
good reason to be. Merryweather was a coal-mining town,
and, it being Sunday, it was reasonable to expect the men to be
in town. Further, the coal-miners had never lost any love
for the Greek fishermen, and were pretty certain to render us
hearty assistance.</p>
<p>We strained our eyes for a glimpse of the town, and the first
sight we caught of it gave us immense relief. The wharves
were black with men. As we came closer, we could see them
still arriving, stringing down the main street, guns in their
hands and on the run. Charley glanced astern at the
fishermen with a look of ownership in his eye which till then had
been missing. The Greeks were plainly overawed by the
display of armed strength and were putting their own rifles
away.</p>
<p>We took in topsail and staysail, dropped the main peak, and as
we got abreast of the principal wharf jibed the mainsail.
The <i>Mary Rebecca</i> shot around into the wind, the captive
fishermen describing a great arc behind her, and forged ahead
till she lost way, when lines we’re flung ashore and she
was made fast. This was accomplished under a hurricane of
cheers from the delighted miners.</p>
<p>Ole Ericsen heaved a great sigh. “Ay never tank Ay
see my wife never again,” he confessed.</p>
<p>“Why, we were never in any danger,” said
Charley.</p>
<p>Ole looked at him incredulously.</p>
<p>“Sure, I mean it,” Charley went on.
“All we had to do, any time, was to let go our end—as
I am going to do now, so that those Greeks can untangle their
nets.”</p>
<p>He went below with a monkey-wrench, unscrewed the nut, and let
the hook drop off. When the Greeks had hauled their nets
into their boats and made everything shipshape, a posse of
citizens took them off our hands and led them away to jail.</p>
<p>“Ay tank Ay ban a great big fool,” said Ole
Ericsen. But he changed his mind when the admiring
townspeople crowded aboard to shake hands with him, and a couple
of enterprising newspaper men took photographs of the <i>Mary
Rebecca</i> and her captain.</p>
<h2><a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
111</span>DEMETRIOS CONTOS</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> must not be thought, from what I
have told of the Greek fishermen, that they were altogether
bad. Far from it. But they were rough men, gathered
together in isolated communities and fighting with the elements
for a livelihood. They lived far away from the law and its
workings, did not understand it, and thought it tyranny.
Especially did the fish laws seem tyrannical. And because
of this, they looked upon the men of the fish patrol as their
natural enemies.</p>
<p>We menaced their lives, or their living, which is the same
thing, in many ways. We confiscated illegal traps and nets,
the materials of which had cost them considerable sums and the
making of which required weeks of labor. We prevented them
from catching fish at many times and seasons, which was
equivalent to preventing them from making as good a living as
they might have made had we not been in existence. And when
we captured them, they were brought into the courts of law, where
heavy cash fines were collected from them. As a result,
they hated us vindictively. As the dog is the natural enemy
of the cat, the snake of man, so were we of the fish patrol the
natural enemies of the fishermen.</p>
<p>But it is to show that they could act generously as well as
hate bitterly that this story of Demetrios Contos is told.
Demetrios Contos lived in Vallejo. Next to Big Alec, he was
the largest, bravest, and most influential man among the
Greeks. He had given us no trouble, and I doubt if he would
ever have clashed with us had he not invested in a new salmon
boat. This boat was the cause of all the trouble. He
had had it built upon his own model, in which the lines of the
general salmon boat were somewhat modified.</p>
<p>To his high elation he found his new boat very fast—in
fact, faster than any other boat on the bay or rivers.
Forthwith he grew proud and boastful: and, our raid with the
<i>Mary Rebecca</i> on the Sunday salmon fishers having wrought
fear in their hearts, he sent a challenge up to Benicia.
One of the local fishermen conveyed it to us; it was to the
effect that Demetrios Contos would sail up from Vallejo on the
following Sunday, and in the plain sight of Benicia set his net
and catch salmon, and that Charley Le Grant, patrolman, might
come and get him if he could. Of course Charley and I had
heard nothing of the new boat. Our own boat was pretty
fast, and we were not afraid to have a brush with any other that
happened along.</p>
<p>Sunday came. The challenge had been bruited abroad, and
the fishermen and seafaring folk of Benicia turned out to a man,
crowding Steamboat Wharf till it looked like the grand stand at a
football match. Charley and I had been sceptical, but the
fact of the crowd convinced us that there was something in
Demetrios Contos’s dare.</p>
<p>In the afternoon, when the sea-breeze had picked up in
strength, his sail hove into view as he bowled along before the
wind. He tacked a score of feet from the wharf, waved his
hand theatrically, like a knight about to enter the lists,
received a hearty cheer in return, and stood away into the
Straits for a couple of hundred yards. Then he lowered
sail, and, drifting the boat sidewise by means of the wind,
proceeded to set his net. He did not set much of it,
possibly fifty feet; yet Charley and I were thunderstruck at the
man’s effrontery. We did not know at the time, but we
learned afterward, that the net he used was old and
worthless. It <i>could</i> catch fish, true; but a catch of
any size would have torn it to pieces.</p>
<p>Charley shook his head and said:</p>
<p>“I confess, it puzzles me. What if he has out only
fifty feet? He could never get it in if we once started for
him. And why does he come here anyway, flaunting his
law-breaking in our faces? Right in our home town,
too.”</p>
<p>Charley’s voice took on an aggrieved tone, and he
continued for some minutes to inveigh against the brazenness of
Demetrios Contos.</p>
<p>In the meantime, the man in question was lolling in the stern
of his boat and watching the net floats. When a large fish
is meshed in a gill-net, the floats by their agitation advertise
the fact. And they evidently advertised it to Demetrios,
for he pulled in about a dozen feet of net, and held aloft for a
moment, before he flung it into the bottom of the boat, a big,
glistening salmon. It was greeted by the audience on the
wharf with round after round of cheers. This was more than
Charley could stand.</p>
<p>“Come on, lad,” he called to me; and we lost no
time jumping into our salmon boat and getting up sail.</p>
<p>The crowd shouted warning to Demetrios, and as we darted out
from the wharf we saw him slash his worthless net clear with a
long knife. His sail was all ready to go up, and a moment
later it fluttered in the sunshine. He ran aft, drew in the
sheet, and filled on the long tack toward the Contra Costa
Hills.</p>
<p>By this time we were not more than thirty feet astern.
Charley was jubilant. He knew our boat was fast, and he
knew, further, that in fine sailing few men were his
equals. He was confident that we should surely catch
Demetrios, and I shared his confidence. But somehow we did
not seem to gain.</p>
<p>It was a pretty sailing breeze. We were gliding sleekly
through the water, but Demetrios was slowly sliding away from
us. And not only was he going faster, but he was eating
into the wind a fraction of a point closer than we. This
was sharply impressed upon us when he went about under the Contra
Costa Hills and passed us on the other tack fully one hundred
feet dead to windward.</p>
<p>“Whew!” Charley exclaimed. “Either
that boat is a daisy, or we’ve got a five-gallon coal-oil
can fast to our keel!”</p>
<p>It certainly looked it one way or the other. And by the
time Demetrios made the Sonoma Hills, on the other side of the
Straits, we were so hopelessly outdistanced that Charley told me
to slack off the sheet, and we squared away for Benicia.
The fishermen on Steamboat Wharf showered us with ridicule when
we returned and tied up. Charley and I got out and walked
away, feeling rather sheepish, for it is a sore stroke to
one’s pride when he thinks he has a good boat and knows how
to sail it, and another man comes along and beats him.</p>
<p>Charley mooned over it for a couple of days; then word was
brought to us, as before, that on the next Sunday Demetrios
Contos would repeat his performance. Charley roused
himself. He had our boat out of the water, cleaned and
repainted its bottom, made a trifling alteration about the
centre-board, overhauled the running gear, and sat up nearly all
of Saturday night sewing on a new and much larger sail. So
large did he make it, in fact, that additional ballast was
imperative, and we stowed away nearly five hundred extra pounds
of old railroad iron in the bottom of the boat.</p>
<p>Sunday came, and with it came Demetrios Contos, to break the
law defiantly in open day. Again we had the afternoon
sea-breeze, and again Demetrios cut loose some forty or more feet
of his rotten net, and got up sail and under way under our very
noses. But he had anticipated Charley’s move, and his
own sail peaked higher than ever, while a whole extra cloth had
been added to the after leech.</p>
<p>It was nip and tuck across to the Contra Costa Hills, neither
of us seeming to gain or to lose. But by the time we had
made the return tack to the Sonoma Hills, we could see that,
while we footed it at about equal speed, Demetrios had eaten into
the wind the least bit more than we. Yet Charley was
sailing our boat as finely and delicately as it was possible to
sail it, and getting more out of it than he ever had before.</p>
<p>Of course, he could have drawn his revolver and fired at
Demetrios; but we had long since found it contrary to our natures
to shoot at a fleeing man guilty of only a petty offence.
Also a sort of tacit agreement seemed to have been reached
between the patrolmen and the fishermen. If we did not
shoot while they ran away, they, in turn, did not fight if we
once laid hands on them. Thus Demetrios Contos ran away
from us, and we did no more than try our best to overtake him;
and, in turn, if our boat proved faster than his, or was sailed
better, he would, we knew, make no resistance when we caught up
with him.</p>
<p>With our large sails and the healthy breeze romping up the
Carquinez Straits, we found that our sailing was what is called
“ticklish.” We had to be constantly on the
alert to avoid a capsize, and while Charley steered I held the
main-sheet in my hand with but a single turn round a pin, ready
to let go at any moment. Demetrios, we could see, sailing
his boat alone, had his hands full.</p>
<p>But it was a vain undertaking for us to attempt to catch
him. Out of his inner consciousness he had evolved a boat
that was better than ours. And though Charley sailed fully
as well, if not the least bit better, the boat he sailed was not
so good as the Greek’s.</p>
<p>“Slack away the sheet,” Charley commanded; and as
our boat fell off before the wind, Demetrios’s mocking
laugh floated down to us.</p>
<p>Charley shook his head, saying, “It’s no
use. Demetrios has the better boat. If he tries his
performance again, we must meet it with some new
scheme.”</p>
<p>This time it was my imagination that came to the rescue.</p>
<p>“What’s the matter,” I suggested, on the
Wednesday following, “with my chasing Demetrios in the boat
next Sunday, while you wait for him on the wharf at Vallejo when
he arrives?”</p>
<p>Charley considered it a moment and slapped his knee.</p>
<p>“A good idea! You’re beginning to use that
head of yours. A credit to your teacher, I must
say.”</p>
<p>“But you mustn’t chase him too far,” he went
on, the next moment, “or he’ll head out into San
Pablo Bay instead of running home to Vallejo, and there
I’ll be, standing lonely on the wharf and waiting in vain
for him to arrive.”</p>
<p>On Thursday Charley registered an objection to my plan.</p>
<p>“Everybody’ll know I’ve gone to Vallejo, and
you can depend upon it that Demetrios will know, too.
I’m afraid we’ll have to give up the idea.”</p>
<p>This objection was only too valid, and for the rest of the day
I struggled under my disappointment. But that night a new
way seemed to open to me, and in my eagerness I awoke Charley
from a sound sleep.</p>
<p>“Well,” he grunted, “what’s the
matter? House afire?”</p>
<p>“No,” I replied, “but my head is.
Listen to this. On Sunday you and I will be around Benicia
up to the very moment Demetrios’s sail heaves into
sight. This will lull everybody’s suspicions.
Then, when Demetrios’s sail does heave in sight, do you
stroll leisurely away and up-town. All the fishermen will
think you’re beaten and that you know you’re
beaten.”</p>
<p>“So far, so good,” Charley commented, while I
paused to catch breath.</p>
<p>“And very good indeed,” I continued proudly.
“You stroll carelessly up-town, but when you’re once
out of sight you leg it for all you’re worth for Dan
Maloney’s. Take the little mare of his, and strike
out on the country road for Vallejo. The road’s in
fine condition, and you can make it in quicker time than
Demetrios can beat all the way down against the wind.”</p>
<p>“And I’ll arrange right away for the mare, first
thing in the morning,” Charley said, accepting the modified
plan without hesitation.</p>
<p>“But, I say,” he said, a little later, this time
waking <i>me</i> out of a sound sleep.</p>
<p>I could hear him chuckling in the dark.</p>
<p>“I say, lad, isn’t it rather a novelty for the
fish patrol to be taking to horseback?”</p>
<p>“Imagination,” I answered. “It’s
what you’re always preaching—‘keep thinking one
thought ahead of the other fellow, and you’re bound to win
out.’”</p>
<p>“He! he!” he chuckled. “And if one
thought ahead, including a mare, doesn’t take the other
fellow’s breath away this time, I’m not your humble
servant, Charley Le Grant.”</p>
<p>“But can you manage the boat alone?” he asked, on
Friday. “Remember, we’ve a ripping big sail on
her.”</p>
<p>I argued my proficiency so well that he did not refer to the
matter again till Saturday, when he suggested removing one whole
cloth from the after leech. I guess it was the
disappointment written on my face that made him desist; for I,
also, had a pride in my boat-sailing abilities, and I was almost
wild to get out alone with the big sail and go tearing down the
Carquinez Straits in the wake of the flying Greek.</p>
<p>As usual, Sunday and Demetrios Contos arrived together.
It had become the regular thing for the fishermen to assemble on
Steamboat Wharf to greet his arrival and to laugh at our
discomfiture. He lowered sail a couple of hundred yards out
and set his customary fifty feet of rotten net.</p>
<p>“I suppose this nonsense will keep up as long as his old
net holds out,” Charley grumbled, with intention, in the
hearing of several of the Greeks.</p>
<p>“Den I give-a heem my old-a net-a,” one of them
spoke up, promptly and maliciously.</p>
<p>“I don’t care,” Charley answered.
“I’ve got some old net myself he can have—if
he’ll come around and ask for it.”</p>
<p>They all laughed at this, for they could afford to be
sweet-tempered with a man so badly outwitted as Charley was.</p>
<p>“Well, so long, lad,” Charley called to me a
moment later. “I think I’ll go up-town to
Maloney’s.”</p>
<p>“Let me take the boat out?” I asked.</p>
<p>“If you want to,” was his answer, as he turned on
his heel and walked slowly away.</p>
<p>Demetrios pulled two large salmon out of his net, and I jumped
into the boat. The fishermen crowded around in a spirit of
fun, and when I started to get up sail overwhelmed me with all
sorts of jocular advice. They even offered extravagant bets
to one another that I would surely catch Demetrios, and two of
them, styling themselves the committee of judges, gravely asked
permission to come along with me to see how I did it.</p>
<p>But I was in no hurry. I waited to give Charley all the
time I could, and I pretended dissatisfaction with the stretch of
the sail and slightly shifted the small tackle by which the huge
sprit forces up the peak. It was not until I was sure that
Charley had reached Dan Maloney’s and was on the little
mare’s back, that I cast off from the wharf and gave the
big sail to the wind. A stout puff filled it and suddenly
pressed the lee gunwale down till a couple of buckets of water
came inboard. A little thing like this will happen to the
best small-boat sailors, and yet, though I instantly let go the
sheet and righted, I was cheered sarcastically, as though I had
been guilty of a very awkward blunder.</p>
<p>When Demetrios saw only one person in the fish patrol boat,
and that one a boy, he proceeded to play with me. Making a
short tack out, with me not thirty feet behind, he returned, with
his sheet a little free, to Steamboat Wharf. And there he
made short tacks, and turned and twisted and ducked around, to
the great delight of his sympathetic audience. I was right
behind him all the time, and I dared to do whatever he did, even
when he squared away before the wind and jibed his big sail
over—a most dangerous trick with such a sail in such a
wind.</p>
<p>He depended upon the brisk sea breeze and the strong ebb-tide,
which together kicked up a nasty sea, to bring me to grief.
But I was on my mettle, and never in all my life did I sail a
boat better than on that day. I was keyed up to concert
pitch, my brain was working smoothly and quickly, my hands never
fumbled once, and it seemed that I almost divined the thousand
little things which a small-boat sailor must be taking into
consideration every second.</p>
<p>It was Demetrios who came to grief instead. Something
went wrong with his centre-board, so that it jammed in the case
and would not go all the way down. In a moment’s
breathing space, which he had gained from me by a clever trick, I
saw him working impatiently with the centre-board, trying to
force it down. I gave him little time, and he was compelled
quickly to return to the tiller and sheet.</p>
<p>The centre-board made him anxious. He gave over playing
with me, and started on the long beat to Vallejo. To my
joy, on the first long tack across, I found that I could eat into
the wind just a little bit closer than he. Here was where
another man in the boat would have been of value to him; for,
with me but a few feet astern, he did not dare let go the tiller
and run amidships to try to force down the centre-board.</p>
<p>Unable to hang on as close in the eye of the wind as formerly,
he proceeded to slack his sheet a trifle and to ease off a bit,
in order to outfoot me. This I permitted him to do till I
had worked to windward, when I bore down upon him. As I
drew close, he feinted at coming about. This led me to
shoot into the wind to forestall him. But it was only a
feint, cleverly executed, and he held back to his course while I
hurried to make up lost ground.</p>
<p>He was undeniably smarter than I when it came to
manœuvring. Time after time I all but had him, and
each time he tricked me and escaped. Besides, the wind was
freshening, constantly, and each of us had his hands full to
avoid capsizing. As for my boat, it could not have been
kept afloat but for the extra ballast. I sat cocked over
the weather gunwale, tiller in one hand and sheet in the other;
and the sheet, with a single turn around a pin, I was very often
forced to let go in the severer puffs. This allowed the
sail to spill the wind, which was equivalent to taking off so
much driving power, and of course I lost ground. My
consolation was that Demetrios was as often compelled to do the
same thing.</p>
<p>The strong ebb-tide, racing down the Straits in the teeth of
the wind, caused an unusually heavy and spiteful sea, which
dashed aboard continually. I was dripping wet, and even the
sail was wet half-way up the after leech. Once I did
succeed in outmanœuvring Demetrios, so that my bow bumped
into him amidships. Here was where I should have had
another man. Before I could run forward and leap aboard, he
shoved the boats apart with an oar, laughing mockingly in my face
as he did so.</p>
<p>We were now at the mouth of the Straits, in a bad stretch of
water. Here the Vallejo Straits and the Carquinez Straits
rushed directly at each other. Through the first flowed all
the water of Napa River and the great tide-lands; through the
second flowed all the water of Suisun Bay and the Sacramento and
San Joaquin rivers. And where such immense bodies of water,
flowing swiftly, clashed together, a terrible tide-rip was
produced. To make it worse, the wind howled up San Pablo
Bay for fifteen miles and drove in a tremendous sea upon the
tide-rip.</p>
<p>Conflicting currents tore about in all directions, colliding,
forming whirlpools, sucks, and boils, and shooting up spitefully
into hollow waves which fell aboard as often from leeward as from
windward. And through it all, confused, driven into a
madness of motion, thundered the great smoking seas from San
Pablo Bay.</p>
<p>I was as wildly excited as the water. The boat was
behaving splendidly, leaping and lurching through the welter like
a race-horse. I could hardly contain myself with the joy of
it. The huge sail, the howling wind, the driving seas, the
plunging boat—I, a pygmy, a mere speck in the midst of it,
was mastering the elemental strife, flying through it and over
it, triumphant and victorious.</p>
<p>And just then, as I roared along like a conquering hero, the
boat received a frightful smash and came instantly to a dead
stop. I was flung forward and into the bottom. As I
sprang up I caught a fleeting glimpse of a greenish,
barnacle-covered object, and knew it at once for what it was,
that terror of navigation, a sunken pile. No man may guard
against such a thing. Water-logged and floating just
beneath the surface, it was impossible to sight it in the
troubled water in time to escape.</p>
<p>The whole bow of the boat must have been crushed in, for in a
few seconds the boat was half full. Then a couple of seas
filled it, and it sank straight down, dragged to bottom by the
heavy ballast. So quickly did it all happen that I was
entangled in the sail and drawn under. When I fought my way
to the surface, suffocating, my lungs almost bursting, I could
see nothing of the oars. They must have been swept away by
the chaotic currents. I saw Demetrios Contos looking back
from his boat, and heard the vindictive and mocking tones of his
voice as he shouted exultantly. He held steadily on his
course, leaving me to perish.</p>
<p>There was nothing to do but to swim for it, which, in that
wild confusion, was at the best a matter of but a few
moments. Holding my breath and working with my hands, I
managed to get off my heavy sea-boots and my jacket. Yet
there was very little breath I could catch to hold, and I swiftly
discovered that it was not so much a matter of swimming as of
breathing.</p>
<p>I was beaten and buffeted, smashed under by the great San
Pablo whitecaps, and strangled by the hollow tide-rip waves which
flung themselves into my eyes, nose, and mouth. Then the
strange sucks would grip my legs and drag me under, to spout me
up in some fierce boiling, where, even as I tried to catch my
breath, a great whitecap would crash down upon my head.</p>
<p>It was impossible to survive any length of time. I was
breathing more water than air, and drowning all the time.
My senses began to leave me, my head to whirl around. I
struggled on, spasmodically, instinctively, and was barely half
conscious when I felt myself caught by the shoulders and hauled
over the gunwale of a boat.</p>
<p>For some time I lay across a seat where I had been flung, face
downward, and with the water running out of my mouth. After
a while, still weak and faint, I turned around to see who was my
rescuer. And there, in the stern, sheet in one hand and
tiller in the other, grinning and nodding good-naturedly, sat
Demetrios Contos. He had intended to leave me to
drown,—he said so afterward,—but his better self had
fought the battle, conquered, and sent him back to me.</p>
<p>“You all-a right?” he asked.</p>
<p>I managed to shape a “yes” on my lips, though I
could not yet speak.</p>
<p>“You sail-a de boat verr-a good-a,” he said.
“So good-a as a man.”</p>
<p>A compliment from Demetrios Contos was a compliment indeed,
and I keenly appreciated it, though I could only nod my head in
acknowledgment.</p>
<p>We held no more conversation, for I was busy recovering and he
was busy with the boat. He ran in to the wharf at Vallejo,
made the boat fast, and helped me out. Then it was, as we
both stood on the wharf, that Charley stepped out from behind a
net-rack and put his hand on Demetrios Contos’s arm.</p>
<p>“He saved my life, Charley,” I protested;
“and I don’t think he ought to be
arrested.”</p>
<p>A puzzled expression came into Charley’s face, which
cleared immediately after, in a way it had when he made up his
mind.</p>
<p>“I can’t help it, lad,” he said
kindly. “I can’t go back on my duty, and
it’s plain duty to arrest him. To-day is Sunday;
there are two salmon in his boat which he caught to-day.
What else can I do?”</p>
<p>“But he saved my life,” I persisted, unable to
make any other argument.</p>
<p>Demetrios Contos’s face went black with rage when he
learned Charley’s judgment. He had a sense of being
unfairly treated. The better part of his nature had
triumphed, he had performed a generous act and saved a helpless
enemy, and in return the enemy was taking him to jail.</p>
<p>Charley and I were out of sorts with each other when we went
back to Benicia. I stood for the spirit of the law and not
the letter; but by the letter Charley made his stand. As
far as he could see, there was nothing else for him to do.
The law said distinctly that no salmon should be caught on
Sunday. He was a patrolman, and it was his duty to enforce
that law. That was all there was to it. He had done
his duty, and his conscience was clear. Nevertheless, the
whole thing seemed unjust to me, and I felt very sorry for
Demetrios Contos.</p>
<p>Two days later we went down to Vallejo to the trial. I
had to go along as a witness, and it was the most hateful task
that I ever performed in my life when I testified on the witness
stand to seeing Demetrios catch the two salmon Charley had
captured him with.</p>
<p>Demetrios had engaged a lawyer, but his case was
hopeless. The jury was out only fifteen minutes, and
returned a verdict of guilty. The judge sentenced Demetrios
to pay a fine of one hundred dollars or go to jail for fifty
days.</p>
<p>Charley stepped up to the clerk of the court. “I
want to pay that fine,” he said, at the same time placing
five twenty-dollar gold pieces on the desk.
“It—it was the only way out of it, lad,” he
stammered, turning to me.</p>
<p>The moisture rushed into my eyes as I seized his hand.
“I want to pay—” I began.</p>
<p>“To pay your half?” he interrupted. “I
certainly shall expect you to pay it.”</p>
<p>In the meantime Demetrios had been informed by his lawyer that
his fee likewise had been paid by Charley.</p>
<p>Demetrios came over to shake Charley’s hand, and all his
warm Southern blood flamed in his face. Then, not to be
outdone in generosity, he insisted on paying his fine and
lawyer’s fee himself, and flew half-way into a passion
because Charley refused to let him.</p>
<p>More than anything else we ever did, I think, this action of
Charley’s impressed upon the fishermen the deeper
significance of the law. Also Charley was raised high in
their esteem, while I came in for a little share of praise as a
boy who knew how to sail a boat. Demetrios Contos not only
never broke the law again, but he became a very good friend of
ours, and on more than one occasion he ran up to Benicia to have
a gossip with us.</p>
<h2><a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
134</span>YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF</h2>
<p>“<span class="smcap">I’m</span> not wanting to
dictate to you, lad,” Charley said; “but I’m
very much against your making a last raid. You’ve
gone safely through rough times with rough men, and it would be a
shame to have something happen to you at the very end.”</p>
<p>“But how can I get out of making a last raid?” I
demanded, with the cocksureness of youth. “There
always has to be a last, you know, to anything.”</p>
<p>Charley crossed his legs, leaned back, and considered the
problem. “Very true. But why not call the
capture of Demetrios Contos the last? You’re back
from it safe and sound and hearty, for all your good wetting,
and—and—” His voice broke and he could
not speak for a moment. “And I could never forgive
myself if anything happened to you now.”</p>
<p>I laughed at Charley’s fears while I gave in to the
claims of his affection, and agreed to consider the last raid
already performed. We had been together for two years, and
now I was leaving the fish patrol in order to go back and finish
my education. I had earned and saved money to put me
through three years at the high school, and though the beginning
of the term was several months away, I intended doing a lot of
studying for the entrance examinations.</p>
<p>My belongings were packed snugly in a sea-chest, and I was all
ready to buy my ticket and ride down on the train to Oakland,
when Neil Partington arrived in Benicia. The
<i>Reindeer</i> was needed immediately for work far down on the
Lower Bay, and Neil said he intended to run straight for
Oakland. As that was his home and as I was to live with his
family while going to school, he saw no reason, he said, why I
should not put my chest aboard and come along.</p>
<p>So the chest went aboard, and in the middle of the afternoon
we hoisted the <i>Reindeer’s</i> big mainsail and cast
off. It was tantalizing fall weather. The sea-breeze,
which had blown steadily all summer, was gone, and in its place
were capricious winds and murky skies which made the time of
arriving anywhere extremely problematical. We started on
the first of the ebb, and as we slipped down the Carquinez
Straits, I looked my last for some time upon Benicia and the
bight at Turner’s Shipyard, where we had besieged the
<i>Lancashire Queen</i>, and had captured Big Alec, the King of
the Greeks. And at the mouth of the Straits I looked with
not a little interest upon the spot where a few days before I
should have drowned but for the good that was in the nature of
Demetrios Contos.</p>
<p>A great wall of fog advanced across San Pablo Bay to meet us,
and in a few minutes the <i>Reindeer</i> was running blindly
through the damp obscurity. Charley, who was steering,
seemed to have an instinct for that kind of work. How he
did it, he himself confessed that he did not know; but he had a
way of calculating winds, currents, distance, time, drift, and
sailing speed that was truly marvellous.</p>
<p>“It looks as though it were lifting,” Neil
Partington said, a couple of hours after we had entered the
fog. “Where do you say we are, Charley?”</p>
<p>Charley looked at his watch, “Six o’clock, and
three hours more of ebb,” he remarked casually.</p>
<p>“But where do you say we are?” Neil insisted.</p>
<p>Charley pondered a moment, and then answered, “The tide
has edged us over a bit out of our course, but if the fog lifts
right now, as it is going to lift, you’ll find we’re
not more than a thousand miles off McNear’s
Landing.”</p>
<p>“You might be a little more definite by a few miles,
anyway,” Neil grumbled, showing by his tone that he
disagreed.</p>
<p>“All right, then,” Charley said, conclusively,
“not less than a quarter of a mile, not more than a
half.”</p>
<p>The wind freshened with a couple of little puffs, and the fog
thinned perceptibly.</p>
<p>“McNear’s is right off there,” Charley said,
pointing directly into the fog on our weather beam.</p>
<p>The three of us were peering intently in that direction, when
the <i>Reindeer</i> struck with a dull crash and came to a
standstill. We ran forward, and found her bowsprit
entangled in the tanned rigging of a short, chunky mast.
She had collided, head on, with a Chinese junk lying at
anchor.</p>
<p>At the moment we arrived forward, five Chinese, like so many
bees, came swarming out of the little ’tween-decks cabin,
the sleep still in their eyes.</p>
<p>Leading them came a big, muscular man, conspicuous for his
pock-marked face and the yellow silk handkerchief swathed about
his head. It was Yellow Handkerchief, the Chinaman whom we
had arrested for illegal shrimp-fishing the year before, and who,
at that time, had nearly sunk the <i>Reindeer</i>, as he had
nearly sunk it now by violating the rules of navigation.</p>
<p>“What d’ye mean, you yellow-faced heathen, lying
here in a fairway without a horn a-going?” Charley cried
hotly.</p>
<p>“Mean?” Neil calmly answered. “Just
take a look—that’s what he means.”</p>
<p>Our eyes followed the direction indicated by Neil’s
finger, and we saw the open amidships of the junk, half filled,
as we found on closer examination, with fresh-caught
shrimps. Mingled with the shrimps were myriads of small
fish, from a quarter of an inch upward in size.</p>
<p>Yellow Handkerchief had lifted the trap-net at high-water
slack, and, taking advantage of the concealment offered by the
fog, had boldly been lying by, waiting to lift the net again at
low-water slack.</p>
<p>“Well,” Neil hummed and hawed, “in all my
varied and extensive experience as a fish patrolman, I must say
this is the easiest capture I ever made. What’ll we
do with them, Charley?”</p>
<p>“Tow the junk into San Rafael, of course,” came
the answer. Charley turned to me. “You stand by
the junk, lad, and I’ll pass you a towing line. If
the wind doesn’t fail us, we’ll make the creek before
the tide gets too low, sleep at San Rafael, and arrive in Oakland
to-morrow by midday.”</p>
<p>So saying, Charley and Neil returned to the <i>Reindeer</i>
and got under way, the junk towing astern. I went aft and
took charge of the prize, steering by means of an antiquated
tiller and a rudder with large, diamond-shaped holes, through
which the water rushed back and forth.</p>
<p>By now the last of the fog had vanished, and Charley’s
estimate of our position was confirmed by the sight of
McNear’s Landing a short half-mile away. Following
along the west shore, we rounded Point Pedro in plain view of the
Chinese shrimp villages, and a great to-do was raised when they
saw one of their junks towing behind the familiar fish patrol
sloop.</p>
<p>The wind, coming off the land, was rather puffy and uncertain,
and it would have been more to our advantage had it been
stronger. San Rafael Creek, up which we had to go to reach
the town and turn over our prisoners to the authorities, ran
through wide-stretching marshes, and was difficult to navigate on
a falling tide, while at low tide it was impossible to navigate
at all. So, with the tide already half-ebbed, it was
necessary for us to make time. This the heavy junk
prevented, lumbering along behind and holding the <i>Reindeer</i>
back by just so much dead weight.</p>
<p>“Tell those coolies to get up that sail,” Charley
finally called to me. “We don’t want to hang up
on the mud flats for the rest of the night.”</p>
<p>I repeated the order to Yellow Handkerchief, who mumbled it
huskily to his men. He was suffering from a bad cold, which
doubled him up in convulsive coughing spells and made his eyes
heavy and bloodshot. This made him more evil-looking than
ever, and when he glared viciously at me I remembered with a
shiver the close shave I had had with him at the time of his
previous arrest.</p>
<p>His crew sullenly tailed on to the halyards, and the strange,
outlandish sail, lateen in rig and dyed a warm brown, rose in the
air. We were sailing on the wind, and when Yellow
Handkerchief flattened down the sheet the junk forged ahead and
the tow-line went slack. Fast as the <i>Reindeer</i> could
sail, the junk outsailed her; and to avoid running her down I
hauled a little closer on the wind. But the junk likewise
outpointed, and in a couple of minutes I was abreast of the
<i>Reindeer</i> and to windward. The tow-line had now
tautened, at right angles to the two boats, and the predicament
was laughable.</p>
<p>“Cast off!” I shouted.</p>
<p>Charley hesitated.</p>
<p>“It’s all right,” I added.
“Nothing can happen. We’ll make the creek on
this tack, and you’ll be right behind me all the way up to
San Rafael.”</p>
<p>At this Charley cast off, and Yellow Handkerchief sent one of
his men forward to haul in the line. In the gathering
darkness I could just make out the mouth of San Rafael Creek, and
by the time we entered it I could barely see its banks. The
<i>Reindeer</i> was fully five minutes astern, and we continued
to leave her astern as we beat up the narrow, winding
channel. With Charley behind us, it seemed I had little to
fear from my five prisoners; but the darkness prevented my
keeping a sharp eye on them, so I transferred my revolver from my
trousers pocket to the side pocket of my coat, where I could more
quickly put my hand on it.</p>
<p>Yellow Handkerchief was the one I feared, and that he knew it
and made use of it, subsequent events will show. He was
sitting a few feet away from me, on what then happened to be the
weather side of the junk. I could scarcely see the outlines
of his form, but I soon became convinced that he was slowly, very
slowly, edging closer to me. I watched him carefully.
Steering with my left hand, I slipped my right into my pocket and
got hold of the revolver.</p>
<p>I saw him shift along for a couple of inches, and I was just
about to order him back—the words were trembling on the tip
of my tongue—when I was struck with great force by a heavy
figure that had leaped through the air upon me from the lee
side. It was one of the crew. He pinioned my right
arm so that I could not withdraw my hand from my pocket, and at
the same time clapped his other hand over my mouth. Of
course, I could have struggled away from him and freed my hand or
gotten my mouth clear so that I might cry an alarm, but in a
trice Yellow Handkerchief was on top of me.</p>
<p>I struggled around to no purpose in the bottom of the junk,
while my legs and arms were tied and my mouth securely bound in
what I afterward found to be a cotton shirt. Then I was
left lying in the bottom. Yellow Handkerchief took the
tiller, issuing his orders in whispers; and from our position at
the time, and from the alteration of the sail, which I could
dimly make out above me as a blot against the stars, I knew the
junk was being headed into the mouth of a small slough which
emptied at that point into San Rafael Creek.</p>
<p>In a couple of minutes we ran softly alongside the bank, and
the sail was silently lowered. The Chinese kept very
quiet. Yellow Handkerchief sat down in the bottom alongside
of me, and I could feel him straining to repress his raspy,
hacking cough. Possibly seven or eight minutes later I
heard Charley’s voice as the <i>Reindeer</i> went past the
mouth of the slough.</p>
<p>“I can’t tell you how relieved I am,” I
could plainly hear him saying to Neil, “that the lad has
finished with the fish patrol without accident.”</p>
<p>Here Neil said something which I could not catch, and then
Charley’s voice went on:</p>
<p>“The youngster takes naturally to the water, and if,
when he finishes high school, he takes a course in navigation and
goes deep sea, I see no reason why he shouldn’t rise to be
master of the finest and biggest ship afloat.”</p>
<p>It was all very flattering to me, but lying there, bound and
gagged by my own prisoners, with the voices growing faint and
fainter as the <i>Reindeer</i> slipped on through the darkness
toward San Rafael, I must say I was not in quite the proper
situation to enjoy my smiling future. With the
<i>Reindeer</i> went my last hope. What was to happen next
I could not imagine, for the Chinese were a different race from
mine, and from what I knew I was confident that fair play was no
part of their make-up.</p>
<p>After waiting a few minutes longer, the crew hoisted the
lateen sail, and Yellow Handkerchief steered down toward the
mouth of San Rafael Creek. The tide was getting lower, and
he had difficulty in escaping the mud-banks. I was hoping
he would run aground, but he succeeded in making the Bay without
accident.</p>
<p>As we passed out of the creek a noisy discussion arose, which
I knew related to me. Yellow Handkerchief was vehement, but
the other four as vehemently opposed him. It was very
evident that he advocated doing away with me and that they were
afraid of the consequences. I was familiar enough with the
Chinese character to know that fear alone restrained them.
But what plan they offered in place of Yellow
Handkerchief’s murderous one, I could not make out.</p>
<p>My feelings, as my fate hung in the balance, may be
guessed. The discussion developed into a quarrel, in the
midst of which Yellow Handkerchief unshipped the heavy tiller and
sprang toward me. But his four companions threw themselves
between, and a clumsy struggle took place for possession of the
tiller. In the end Yellow Handkerchief was overcome, and
sullenly returned to the steering, while they soundly berated him
for his rashness.</p>
<p>Not long after, the sail was run down and the junk slowly
urged forward by means of the sweeps. I felt it ground
gently on the soft mud. Three of the Chinese—they all
wore long sea-boots—got over the side, and the other two
passed me across the rail. With Yellow Handkerchief at my
legs and his two companions at my shoulders, they began to
flounder along through the mud. After some time their feet
struck firmer footing, and I knew they were carrying me up some
beach. The location of this beach was not doubtful in my
mind. It could be none other than one of the Marin Islands,
a group of rocky islets which lay off the Marin County shore.</p>
<p>When they reached the firm sand that marked high tide, I was
dropped, and none too gently. Yellow Handkerchief kicked me
spitefully in the ribs, and then the trio floundered back through
the mud to the junk. A moment later I heard the sail go up
and slat in the wind as they drew in the sheet. Then
silence fell, and I was left to my own devices for getting
free.</p>
<p>I remembered having seen tricksters writhe and squirm out of
ropes with which they were bound, but though I writhed and
squirmed like a good fellow, the knots remained as hard as ever,
and there was no appreciable slack. In the course of my
squirming, however, I rolled over upon a heap of
clam-shells—the remains, evidently, of some yachting
party’s clam-bake. This gave me an idea. My
hands were tied behind my back; and, clutching a shell in them, I
rolled over and over, up the beach, till I came to the rocks I
knew to be there.</p>
<p>Rolling around and searching, I finally discovered a narrow
crevice, into which I shoved the shell. The edge of it was
sharp, and across the sharp edge I proceeded to saw the rope that
bound my wrists. The edge of the shell was also brittle,
and I broke it by bearing too heavily upon it. Then I
rolled back to the heap and returned with as many shells as I
could carry in both hands. I broke many shells, cut my
hands a number of times, and got cramps in my legs from my
strained position and my exertions.</p>
<p>While I was suffering from the cramps, and resting, I heard a
familiar halloo drift across the water. It was Charley,
searching for me. The gag in my mouth prevented me from
replying, and I could only lie there, helplessly fuming, while he
rowed past the island and his voice slowly lost itself in the
distance.</p>
<p>I returned to the sawing process, and at the end of half an
hour succeeded in severing the rope. The rest was
easy. My hands once free, it was a matter of minutes to
loosen my legs and to take the gag out of my mouth. I ran
around the island to make sure it <i>was</i> an island and not by
any chance a portion of the mainland. An island it
certainly was, one of the Marin group, fringed with a sandy beach
and surrounded by a sea of mud. Nothing remained but to
wait till daylight and to keep warm; for it was a cold, raw night
for California, with just enough wind to pierce the skin and
cause one to shiver.</p>
<p>To keep up the circulation, I ran around the island a dozen
times or so, and clambered across its rocky backbone as many
times more—all of which was of greater service to me, as I
afterward discovered, than merely to warm me up. In the
midst of this exercise I wondered if I had lost anything out of
my pockets while rolling over and over in the sand. A
search showed the absence of my revolver and pocket-knife.
The first Yellow Handkerchief had taken; but the knife had been
lost in the sand.</p>
<p>I was hunting for it when the sound of rowlocks came to my
ears. At first, of course, I thought of Charley; but on
second thought I knew Charley would be calling out as he rowed
along. A sudden premonition of danger seized me. The
Marin Islands are lonely places; chance visitors in the dead of
night are hardly to be expected. What if it were Yellow
Handkerchief? The sound made by the rowlocks grew more
distinct. I crouched in the sand and listened
intently. The boat, which I judged a small skiff from the
quick stroke of the oars, was landing in the mud about fifty
yards up the beach. I heard a raspy, hacking cough, and my
heart stood still. It was Yellow Handkerchief. Not to
be robbed of his revenge by his more cautious companions, he had
stolen away from the village and come back alone.</p>
<p>I did some swift thinking. I was unarmed and helpless on
a tiny islet, and a yellow barbarian, whom I had reason to fear,
was coming after me. Any place was safer than the island,
and I turned instinctively to the water, or rather to the
mud. As he began to flounder ashore through the mud, I
started to flounder out into it, going over the same course which
the Chinese had taken in landing me and in returning to the
junk.</p>
<p>Yellow Handkerchief, believing me to be lying tightly bound,
exercised no care, but came ashore noisily. This helped me,
for, under the shield of his noise and making no more myself than
necessary, I managed to cover fifty feet by the time he had made
the beach. Here I lay down in the mud. It was cold
and clammy, and made me shiver, but I did not care to stand up
and run the risk of being discovered by his sharp eyes.</p>
<p>He walked down the beach straight to where he had left me
lying, and I had a fleeting feeling of regret at not being able
to see his surprise when he did not find me. But it was a
very fleeting regret, for my teeth were chattering with the
cold.</p>
<p>What his movements were after that I had largely to deduce
from the facts of the situation, for I could scarcely see him in
the dim starlight. But I was sure that the first thing he
did was to make the circuit of the beach to learn if landings had
been made by other boats. This he would have known at once
by the tracks through the mud.</p>
<p>Convinced that no boat had removed me from the island, he next
started to find out what had become of me. Beginning at the
pile of clam-shells, he lighted matches to trace my tracks in the
sand. At such times I could see his villanous face plainly,
and, when the sulphur from the matches irritated his lungs,
between the raspy cough that followed and the clammy mud in which
I was lying, I confess I shivered harder than ever.</p>
<p>The multiplicity of my footprints puzzled him. Then the
idea that I might be out in the mud must have struck him, for he
waded out a few yards in my direction, and, stooping, with his
eyes searched the dim surface long and carefully. He could
not have been more than fifteen feet from me, and had he lighted
a match he would surely have discovered me.</p>
<p>He returned to the beach and clambered about, over the rocky
backbone, again hunting for me with lighted matches, The
closeness of the shave impelled me to further flight. Not
daring to wade upright, on account of the noise made by
floundering and by the suck of the mud, I remained lying down in
the mud and propelled myself over its surface by means of my
hands. Still keeping the trail made by the Chinese in going
from and to the junk, I held on until I reached the water.
Into this I waded to a depth of three feet, and then I turned off
to the side on a line parallel with the beach.</p>
<p>The thought came to me of going toward Yellow
Handkerchief’s skiff and escaping in it, but at that very
moment he returned to the beach, and, as though fearing the very
thing I had in mind, he slushed out through the mud to assure
himself that the skiff was safe. This turned me in the
opposite direction. Half swimming, half wading, with my
head just out of water and avoiding splashing, I succeeded in
putting about a hundred feet between myself and the spot where
the Chinese had begun to wade ashore from the junk. I drew
myself out on the mud and remained lying flat.</p>
<p>Again Yellow Handkerchief returned to the beach and made a
search of the island, and again he returned to the heap of
clam-shells. I knew what was running in his mind as well as
he did himself. No one could leave or land without making
tracks in the mud. The only tracks to be seen were those
leading from his skiff and from where the junk had been. I
was not on the island. I must have left it by one or the
other of those two tracks. He had just been over the one to
his skiff, and was certain I had not left that way.
Therefore I could have left the island only by going over the
tracks of the junk landing. This he proceeded to verify by
wading out over them himself, lighting matches as he came
along.</p>
<p>When he arrived at the point where I had first lain, I knew,
by the matches he burned and the time he took, that he had
discovered the marks left by my body. These he followed
straight to the water and into it, but in three feet of water he
could no longer see them. On the other hand, as the tide
was still falling, he could easily make out the impression made
by the junk’s bow, and could have likewise made out the
impression of any other boat if it had landed at that particular
spot. But there was no such mark; and I knew that he was
absolutely convinced that I was hiding somewhere in the mud.</p>
<p>But to hunt on a dark night for a boy in a sea of mud would be
like hunting for a needle in a haystack, and he did not attempt
it. Instead he went back to the beach and prowled around
for some time. I was hoping he would give me up and go, for
by this time I was suffering severely from the cold. At
last he waded out to his skiff and rowed away. What if this
departure of Yellow Handkerchief’s were a sham? What
if he had done it merely to entice me ashore?</p>
<p>The more I thought of it the more certain I became that he had
made a little too much noise with his oars as he rowed
away. So I remained, lying in the mud and shivering.
I shivered till the muscles of the small of my back ached and
pained me as badly as the cold, and I had need of all my
self-control to force myself to remain in my miserable
situation.</p>
<p>It was well that I did, however, for, possibly an hour later,
I thought I could make out something moving on the beach. I
watched intently, but my ears were rewarded first, by a raspy
cough I knew only too well. Yellow Handkerchief had sneaked
back, landed on the other side of the island, and crept around to
surprise me if I had returned.</p>
<p>After that, though hours passed without sign of him, I was
afraid to return to the island at all. On the other hand, I
was almost equally afraid that I should die of the exposure I was
undergoing. I had never dreamed one could suffer so.
I grew so cold and numb, finally, that I ceased to shiver.
But my muscles and bones began to ache in a way that was
agony. The tide had long since begun to rise, and, foot by
foot, it drove me in toward the beach. High water came at
three o’clock, and at three o’clock I drew myself up
on the beach, more dead than alive, and too helpless to have
offered any resistance had Yellow Handkerchief swooped down upon
me.</p>
<p>But no Yellow Handkerchief appeared. He had given me up
and gone back to Point Pedro. Nevertheless, I was in a
deplorable, not to say dangerous, condition. I could not
stand upon my feet, much less walk. My clammy, muddy
garments clung to me like sheets of ice. I thought I should
never get them off. So numb and lifeless were my fingers,
and so weak was I, that it seemed to take an hour to get off my
shoes. I had not the strength to break the porpoise-hide
laces, and the knots defied me. I repeatedly beat my hands
upon the rocks to get some sort of life into them.
Sometimes I felt sure I was going to die.</p>
<p>But in the end,—after several centuries, it seemed to
me,—I got off the last of my clothes. The water was
now close at hand, and I crawled painfully into it and washed the
mud from my naked body. Still, I could not get on my feet
and walk and I was afraid to lie still. Nothing remained
but to crawl weakly, like a snail, and at the cost of constant
pain, up and down the sand. I kept this up as long as
possible, but as the east paled with the coming of dawn I began
to succumb. The sky grew rosy-red, and the golden rim of
the sun, showing above the horizon, found me lying helpless and
motionless among the clam-shells.</p>
<p>As in a dream, I saw the familiar mainsail of the
<i>Reindeer</i> as she slipped out of San Rafael Creek on a light
puff of morning air. This dream was very much broken.
There are intervals I can never recollect on looking back over
it. Three things, however, I distinctly remember: the first
sight of the <i>Reindeer’s</i> mainsail; her lying at
anchor a few hundred feet away and a small boat leaving her side;
and the cabin stove roaring red-hot, myself swathed all over with
blankets, except on the chest and shoulders, which Charley was
pounding and mauling unmercifully, and my mouth and throat
burning with the coffee which Neil Partington was pouring down a
trifle too hot.</p>
<p>But burn or no burn, I tell you it felt good. By the
time we arrived in Oakland I was as limber and strong as
ever,—though Charlie and Neil Partington were afraid I was
going to have pneumonia, and Mrs. Partington, for my first six
months of school, kept an anxious eye upon me to discover the
first symptoms of consumption.</p>
<p>Time flies. It seems but yesterday that I was a lad of
sixteen on the fish patrol. Yet I know that I arrived this
very morning from China, with a quick passage to my credit, and
master of the barkentine <i>Harvester</i>. And I know that
to-morrow morning I shall run over to Oakland to see Neil
Partington and his wife and family, and later on up to Benicia to
see Charley Le Grant and talk over old times. No; I shall
not go to Benicia, now that I think about it. I expect to
be a highly interested party to a wedding, shortly to take
place. Her name is Alice Partington, and, since Charley has
promised to be best man, he will have to come down to Oakland
instead.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF THE FISH PATROL***</p>
<pre>
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