So the chest went aboard, and in the middle of the afternoon we hoisted
the _Reindeer's_ 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 _Lancashire Queen,_ 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.

A great wall of fog advanced across San Pablo Bay to meet us, and in a
few minutes the _Reindeer_ 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.

"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?"

Charley looked at his watch. "Six o'clock, and three hours more of
ebb," he remarked casually.

"But where do you say we are!" Neil insisted.

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