within an hour or so, he was able to bring to us a
Greek boy of seventeen or eighteen who knew thoroughly well the ins and
outs of oyster piracy.

At this point I may as well explain that we of the fish patrol were
free lances in a way. While Neil Partington, who was a patrolman proper,
received a regular salary, Charley and I, being merely deputies,
received only what we earned--that is to say, a certain percentage of
the fines imposed on convicted violators of the fish laws. Also, any
rewards that chanced our way were ours. We offered to share with
Partington whatever we should get from Mr. Taft, but the patrolman
would not hear of it. He was only too happy, he said, to do a good turn
for us, who had done so many for him.

We held a long council of war, and mapped out the following line of
action. Our faces were unfamiliar on the Lower Bay, but as the
_Reindeer_ was well known as a fish-patrol sloop, the Greek boy, whose
name was Nicholas, and I were to sail some innocent-looking craft down
to Asparagus Island and join the oyster pirates' fleet. Here,
according to Nicholas's description of the beds and the manner of
raiding, it was possible for us to catch the pirates in the act of
stealing oysters, and at the same time to get them in our power.
Charley was to be on the shore, with Mr. Taft's watchmen and a posse
of constables, to help us at the right time.

"I know just the boat," Neil said, at the conclusion of the
discussion, "a crazy old sloop that's lying over at Tiburon. You and
Nicholas can go over by the ferry, charter it for a song, and sail
direct for the beds."

"Good luck be with you, boys," he said at parting, two days later.
"Remember, they are dangerous men, so be careful."

Nicholas and I succeeded in chartering the sloop very cheaply; and
between laughs, while getting up sail, we agreed that she was even
crazier and older than she had been described. She was a big,
flat-bottomed, square-sterned craft, sloop-rigged, with a sprung mast,
slack rigging, dilapidated sails, and rotten running-gear, clumsy to
handle and uncertain in bringing about, and she smelled vilely of coal
tar, with which strange stuff she had been smeared from stem to stern
and from cabin-roof to centreboard. And to cap it all, _Coal Tar
Maggie_ was printed in great white letters the whole length of either
side.

It was an uneventful though laughable run from Tiburon to Asparagus
Island, where we arrived in the afternoon of t