drunk and resisting the officers.
His partner in that affair was lying in prison. Whisky Bob was gone.
Old Cole, Old Smoudge, and Bob Smith were gone. Another Smith, he of the
belted guns and the Annie, was drowned. French Frank, they said, was
lurking up river, afraid to come down because of something he had done.
Others were wearing the stripes in San Quentin or Folsom. Big Alec, the
King of the Greeks, whom I had known well in the old Benicia days, and
with whom I had drunk whole nights through, had killed two men and fled
to foreign parts. Fitzsimmons, with whom I had sailed on the Fish
Patrol, had been stabbed in the lung through the back and had died a
lingering death complicated with tuberculosis. And so it went, a very
lively and well-patronised road, and, from what I knew of all of them,
John Barleycorn was responsible, with the sole exception of Smith of the
Annie.

CHAPTER XVIII

My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead. I didn't like
the looks of it, nor the life. I didn't care for the drinking, nor the
vagrancy of it, and I wandered back to the Oakland Free Library and read
the books with greater understanding. Then, too, my mother said I had
sown my wild oats and it was time I settled down to a regular job. Also,
the family needed the money. So I got a job at the jute mills--a
ten-hour day at ten cents an hour. Despite my increase in strength and
general efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked in the
cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promise of a rise
to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. And here, so far as
John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period of innocence. I did not
know what it was to take a drink from month end to month end. Not yet
eighteen years old, healthy and with labour-hardened but unhurt muscles,
like any young animal I needed diversion, excitement, something beyond
the books and the mechanical toil.

I strayed into Young Men's Christian Associations. The life there was
healthful and athletic, but too juvenile. For me it was too late. I was
not boy, nor youth, despite my paucity of years. I had bucked big with
men. I knew mysterious and violent things. I was from the other side of
life so far as concerned the young men I encountered in the Y.M.C.A. I
spoke another language, possessed a sadder and more terrible wisdom.
(When I come to think it over, I realise now that I have never had a
bo