killed two men and fled to foreign parts. Fitzsimmons, with whom
I had sailed on the Fish Patrol, had been stabbed in the lung
through the back and had died a lingering death complicated with
tuberculosis. And so it went, a very lively and well-patronised
road, and, from what I knew of all of them, John Barleycorn was
responsible, with the sole exception of Smith of the Annie.



CHAPTER XVIII


My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead. I
didn't like the looks of it, nor the life. I didn't care for the
drinking, nor the vagrancy of it, and I wandered back to the
Oakland Free Library and read the books with greater
understanding. Then, too, my mother said I had sown my wild oats
and it was time I settled down to a regular job. Also, the family
needed the money. So I got a job at the jute mills--a ten-hour
day at ten cents an hour. Despite my increase in strength and
general efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked in
the cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promise
of a rise to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. And
here, so far as John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period of
innocence. I did not know what it was to take a drink from month
end to month end. Not yet eighteen years old, healthy and with
labour-hardened but unhurt muscles, like any young animal I needed
diversion, excitement, something beyond the books and the
mechanical toil.