I went out
in the steep cobbled street that runs down to the shore of Corazon Bay.
I lay all night on the shore and watched 'the waves come up and
crumble on the shingle. I remembered the verse Sadler used to chant
to me in the _Hebe Maitland_ days, when I was acting more gay
than he thought becoming to the uselessness of me. "Oh, sailor boy,"
he says.
"Oh, sailor, my sailor boy, bonny and blue,
You're rompin', you're roamin',
The long slantin' sorrows are waiting for you
In the gloamin', the gloamin'."
I remember, when it came morning, on the beach at Corazon, I got up,
and I says:
"Clyde's mucky old bags can stay there till I'm ready," I says.
"What's the use!"
I took a dislike to Clyde's money. I bought a passage to San
Francisco, and came there in the year '75.
There I put the profits of six years on the West Coast into shares
in a ship called the _Anaconda_, and shipped on her myself as
second mate.
I found Stevey Todd cooking in a restaurant in San Francisco. He'd
gone into gold mines, after getting loose from the _Jane Allen_.
He'd left his profits from the Hotel Helen Mar in the gold mines.
Every mine he'd invested in got discouraged, so he said, but I judge
the truth was more likely Stevey Todd was taken in by mining sharks.
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