jocular advice. They even offered extravagant bets to one another
that I would surely catch Demetrios, and two of them, styling
themselves the committee of judges, gravely asked permission to
come along with me to see how I did it.

But I was in no hurry. I waited to give Charley all the time I
could, and I pretended dissatisfaction with the stretch of the sail
and slightly shifted the small tackle by which the huge sprit
forces up the peak. It was not until I was sure that Charley had
reached Dan Maloney's and was on the little mare's back, that I
cast off from the wharf and gave the big sail to the wind. A stout
puff filled it and suddenly pressed the lee gunwale down till a
couple of buckets of water came inboard. A little thing like this
will happen to the best small-boat sailors, and yet, though I
instantly let go the sheet and righted, I was cheered
sarcastically, as though I had been guilty of a very awkward
blunder.

When Demetrios saw only one person in the fish patrol boat, and
that one a boy, he proceeded to play with me. Making a short tack
out, with me not thirty feet behind, he returned, with his sheet a
little free, to Steamboat Wharf. And there he made short tacks,
and turned and twisted and ducked around, to the great delight of
his sympathetic audience. I was right behind him all the time, and
I dared to do whatever he did, even when he squared away before the
wind and jibed his big sail over--a most dangerous trick with such
a sail in such a wind.

He depended upon the brisk sea breeze and the strong ebb-tide,
which together kicked up a nasty sea, to bring me to grief. But I