.

Then Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek arrived, sober, indignant, outraged
in that their fellow pirates had raised their plant. French Frank, aided
by John Barleycorn, orated hypocritically about virtue and honesty, and,
despite his fifty years, got Whisky Bob out on the sand and proceeded to
lick him. When Nicky the Greek jumped in with a short-handled shovel to
Whisky Bob's assistance, short work was made of him by Hans. And of
course, 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 the sand. Once, when
it looked as if Nelson were getting the worst of it, French Frank and
John Barleycorn sprang unfairly into the fight. Scotty protested and
reached for French Frank, who whirled upon him and fell on top of him in
a pummelling clinch after a sprawl of twenty feet across the sand. In
the course of separating these two, half a dozen fights started amongst
the