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 rest of us.These fights were finished,one way or the other,or we separated them with drinks,while all the time Nelson and Soup Kennedy fought on.Occasionally we returned to them and gave advice,such as,when they lay exhausted in the sand,unable to strike a blow,"Throw sand in his eyes."And they threw sand in each other's eyes,recuperated,and fought on to successive exhaustions.
And now,of all this that is squalid,and ridiculous,and bestial,try to think what it meant to me,a youth not yet sixteen,burning with the spirit of adventure,fancy-filled with tales of buccaneers and sea-rovers,sacks of cities and conflicts of armed men,and imagination-maddened by the stuff I had drunk.It was life raw and naked,wild and free--the only life of that sort which my birth in time and space permitted me to attain.And more than that.It carried a promise.It was the beginning.From the sandspit the way led out through the Golden Gate to the vastness of adventure of all the world,where battles would be fought,not for old shirts and over stolen salmon boats,but for high purposes and romantic ends.
And because I told Scotty what I thought of his letting an old man like French Frank get away with him,we,too,brawled and added to the festivity of the sandspit.And Scotty threw up his job as crew,and departed in the night with a pair of blankets belonging to me.During the night,while the oyster pirates lay stupefied in their bunks,the schooner and the Reindeer floated on the high water and swung about to their anchors.The salmon boat,still filled with rocks and water,rested on the bottom.
In the morning,early,I heard wild cries from the Reindeer,and tumbled out in the chill grey to see a spectacle that made the water-front laugh for days.The beautiful salmon boat lay on the hard sand,squashed flat as a pancake,while on it were perched French Frank's schooner and the Reindeer.Unfortunately two of the Reindeer's planks had been crushed in by the stout oak stem of the salmon boat.The rising tide had flowed through the hole,and just awakened Nelson by getting into his bunk with him.I lent a hand,and we pumped the Reindeer out and repaired the damage.
Then Nelson cooked breakfast,and while we ate we considered the situation.He was broke.So was I.The fifty dollars reward would never be paid for that pitiful mess of splinters on the sand beneath us.He had a wounded hand and no crew.I had a burned main sail and no crew.
"What d'ye say,you and me?"Nelson queried."I'll go you,"was my answer.And thus I became partners with "Young Scratch"Nelson,the wildest,maddest of them all.We borrowed the money for an outfit of grub from Johnny Heinhold,filled our water-barrels,and sailed away that day for the oyster-beds.
