ide of the Straits, we
were so hopelessly outdistanced that Charley told me to slack off the
sheet, and we squared away for Benicia. The fishermen on Steamboat
Wharf showered us with ridicule when we returned and tied up. Charley
and I got out and walked away, feeling rather sheepish, for it is a
sore stroke to one's pride when he thinks he has a good boat and knows
how to sail it, and another man comes along and beats him.

Charley mooned over it for a couple of days; then word was brought to
us, as before, that on the next Sunday Demetrios Contos would repeat
his performance. Charley roused himself. He had our boat out of the
water, cleaned and repainted its bottom, made a trifling alteration
about the centre-board, overhauled the running gear, and sat up
nearly all of Saturday night sewing on a new and much larger sail. So
large did he make it, in fact, that additional ballast was imperative,
and we stowed away nearly five hundred extra pounds of old railroad
iron in the bottom of the boat.

Sunday came, and with it came Demetrios Contos, to break the law
defiantly in open day. Again we had the afternoon sea-breeze, and
again Demetrios cut loose some forty or more feet of his rotten net,
and got up sail and under way under our very noses. But he had
anticipated Charley's move, and his own sail peaked higher than ever,
while a whole extra cloth had been added to the after leech.

It was nip and tuck across to the Contra Costa Hills, neither of us
seeming to gain or to lose. But by the time we had made the return
tack to the Sonoma Hills, we could see that, while we footed it at
about equal speed, Demetrios had eaten into the wind the least bit
more than we. Yet Charley was sailing our boat as finely and
delicately as it was possible to sail it, and getting more out of it
than he ever had before.

Of course, he could have drawn his revolver and fired at Demetrios;
but we had long since found it contrary to our natures to shoot at a
fleeing man guilty of only a petty offence. Also a sort of tacit
agreement seemed to have been reached between the patrolmen and the
fishermen. If we did not shoot while they ran away, they, in turn, did
not fight if we once laid hands on them. Thus Demetrios Contos ran
away from us, and we did no more than try our best to overtake him;
and, in turn, if our boat proved faster than his, or was sailed
better, he would, we knew, make no resistance when we caught up with
him.

With our la