great shoulders for the last long sleep in this very town of
Benicia; and we wept over the memory of him, and remembered only
the good things of him, and sent out the flask to be filled and
drank again.

They wanted me to stay over, but through the open door I could see
the brave wind on the water, and my ears were filled with the roar
of it. And while I forgot that I had plunged into the books
nineteen hours a day for three solid months, Charley Le Grant
shifted my outfit into a big Columbia River salmon boat. He added
charcoal and a fisherman's brazier, a coffee pot and frying pan,
and the coffee and the meat, and a black bass fresh from the water
that day.

They had to help me down the rickety wharf and into the salmon
boat. Likewise they stretched my boom and sprit until the sail
set like a board. Some feared to set the sprit; but I insisted,
and Charley had no doubts. He knew me of old, and knew that I
could sail as long as I could see. They cast off my painter. I
put the tiller up, filled away before it, and with dizzy eyes
checked and steadied the boat on her course and waved farewell.

The tide had turned, and the fierce ebb, running in the teeth of a
fiercer wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea. Suisun Bay was
white with wrath and sea-lump. But a salmon boat can sail, and I
knew how to sail a salmon boat. So I drove her into it, and
through it, and across, and maundered aloud and chanted my disdain
for all the books and schools. Cresting seas filled me a foot or
so with water, but I laughed at it sloshing about my feet, and
chanted my disdain for the wind and the water. I hailed myself a