I recollect it was a little cafe in Corazon, where Craney and I sat that evening. It was thick with smoke and crowded with round tables, at which mixed breeds of people, mostly square-shouldered little men, were discussing the time of day and the merits of wine—which hadn't any—in a way of excitement that you'd think they were crying out against oppression. Each table had a tallow candle on it, burning dim in the smoke.
I says, “Oh!”
Then Craney went on talking, but I don't know what it was about. Then I says, “It don't suit me in Corazon,” and I got up. 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. He'd made up his mind property wasn't his stronghold and gone back to cooking, and never took any more interest in property after that, nor had any to take interest in. But he told me Sadler was in business and getting rich, and in partnership with a Chinaman, and living in a town called “Saleratus,” sixty miles down the coast, which none of these statements seemed likely at the time. Stevey Todd didn't know why the town was named Saleratus. He thought maybe Sadler had named it, or maybe gone there on account of the name, foreseeing interesting rhymes with “potatoes” and “tomatoes.” But I didn't look Sadler up at that time.