o don't smoke, drink, or swear, or do much of
anything else that is brase, and resentful, and stinging, because in
their feeble fibres there has never been the stir and prod of life to
well over its boundaries and be devilish and daring. One doesn't meet
these in saloons, nor rallying to lost causes, nor flaming on the
adventure-paths, nor loving as God's own mad lovers. They are too busy
keeping their feet dry, conserving their heart-beats, and making unlovely
life-successes of their spirit-mediocrity.

And so I draw the indictment home to John Barleycorn. It is just those,
the good fellows, the worth while, the fellows with the weakness of too
much strength, too much spirit, too much fire and flame of fine
devilishness, that he solicits and ruins. Of course, he ruins weaklings;
but with them, the worst we breed, I am not here concerned. My concern
is that it is so much of the best we breed whom John Barleycorn destroys.
And the reason why these best are destroyed is because John Barleycorn
stands on every highway and byway, accessible, law-protected, saluted by
the policeman on the beat, speaking to them, leading them by the hand to
the places where the good fellows and daring ones forgather and drink
deep. With John Barleycorn out of the way, these daring ones would still
be born, and they would do things instead of perishing.

Always I encountered the camaraderie of drink. I might be walking down
the track to the water-tank to lie in wait for a passing freight-train,
when I would chance upon a bunch of "alki-stiffs." An alki-stiff is a
tramp who drinks druggist's alcohol. Immediately, with greeting and
salutation, I am taken into the fellowship. The alcohol, shrewdly
blended with water, is handed to me, and soon I am caught up in the
revelry, with maggots crawling in my brain and John Barleycorn whispering
to me that life is big, and that we are all brave and fine--free spirits
sprawling like careless gods upon the turf and telling the two-by-four,
cut-and-dried, conventional world to go hang.

CHAPTER XIV

Back in Oakland from my wanderings, I returned to the water-front and
renewed my comradeship with Nelson, who was now on shore all the time and
living more madly than before. I, too, spent my time on shore with him,
only occasionally going for cruises of several days on the bay to help
out on short-handed scow-schooners.

The result was that I was no longer reinvigorated by periods of open-a