when the bleeding remnants of Bob and Nicky were sent packing in
their skiff, the event must needs be celebrated in further
carousal.

By this time, our visitors being numerous, we were a large crowd
compounded of many nationalities and diverse temperaments, all
aroused by John Barleycorn, all restraints cast off. Old quarrels
revived, ancient hates flared up. Fight was in the air. And
whenever a longshoreman remembered something against a scow-
schooner sailor, or vice versa, or an oyster pirate remembered or
was remembered, a fist shot out and another fight was on. And
every fight was made up in more rounds of drinks, wherein the
combatants, aided and abetted by the rest of us, embraced each
other and pledged undying friendship.

And, of all times, Soup Kennedy selected this time to come and
retrieve an old shirt of his, left aboard the Reindeer from the
trip he sailed with Clam. He had espoused Clam's side of the
quarrel with Nelson. Also, he had been drinking in the St. Louis
House, so that it was John Barleycorn who led him to the sandspit
in quest of his old shirt. Few words started the fray. He locked
with Nelson in the cockpit of the Reindeer, and in the mix-up
barely escaped being brained by an iron bar wielded by irate
French Frank--irate because a two-handed man had attacked a one-
handed man. (If the Reindeer still floats, the dent of the iron
bar remains in the hard-wood rail of her cockpit.)

But Nelson pulled his bandaged hand, bullet-perforated, out of its
sling, and, held by us, wept and roared his Berserker belief that
he could lick Soup Kennedy one-handed. And we let them loose on