ready to buy my ticket and ride down on the train to Oakland, when
Neil Partington arrived in Benicia. The Reindeer was needed
immediately for work far down on the Lower Bay, and Neil said he
intended to run straight for Oakland. As that was his home and as
I was to live with his family while going to school, he saw no
reason, he said, why I should not put my chest aboard and come
along.

So the chest went aboard, and in the middle of the afternoon we
hoisted the Reindeer's big mainsail and cast off. It was
tantalizing fall weather. The sea-breeze, which had blown steadily
all summer, was gone, and in its place were capricious winds and
murky skies which made the time of arriving anywhere extremely
problematical. We started on the first of the ebb, and as we
slipped down the Carquinez Straits, I looked my last for some time
upon Benicia and the bight at Turner's Shipyard, where we had
besieged the Lancashire Queen, and had captured Big Alec, the King
of the Greeks. And at the mouth of the Straits I looked with not a
little interest upon the spot where a few days before I should have
drowned but for the good that was in the nature of Demetrios
Contos.

A great wall of fog advanced across San Pablo Bay to meet us, and
in a few minutes the Reindeer was running blindly through the damp
obscurity. Charley, who was steering, seemed to have an instinct
for that kind of work. How he did it, he himself confessed that he
did not know; but he had a way of calculating winds, currents,
distance, time, drift, and sailing speed that was truly marvellous.

"It looks as though it were lifting," Neil Partington said, a