everywhere on the adventure-path, I had now reached the stage
where my brain cried out, not merely for a drink, but for a drunk.
And had I not been so long used to alcohol, my brain would not
have so cried out. I should have sailed on past Bull Head, and in
the smoking white of Suisun Bay, and in the wine of wind that
filled my sail and poured through me, I should have forgotten my
weary brain and rested and refreshed it.

So I sailed in to shore, made all fast, and hurried up among the
arks. Charley Le Grant fell on my neck. His wife, Lizzie, folded
me to her capacious breast. Billy Murphy, and Joe Lloyd, and all
the survivors of the old guard, got around me and their arms
around me. Charley seized the can and started for Jorgensen's
saloon across the railroad tracks. That meant beer. I wanted
whisky, so I called after him to bring a flask.

Many times that flask journeyed across the railroad tracks and
back. More old friends of the old free and easy times dropped in,
fishermen, Greeks, and Russians, and French. They took turns in
treating, and treated all around in turn again. They came and
went, but I stayed on and drank with all. I guzzled. I swilled.
I ran the liquor down and joyed as the maggots mounted in my
brain.

And Clam came in, Nelson's partner before me, handsome as ever,
but more reckless, half insane, burning himself out with whisky.
He had just had a quarrel with his partner on the sloop Gazelle,
and knives had been drawn, and blows struck, and he was bent on
maddening the fever of the memory with more whisky. And while we
downed it, we remembered Nelson and that he had stretched out his