“You didn’t get the Porpoise,” the Centipede said exultantly, as though his escape materially diminished our success.
Charley laughed. “But we saw him just the same, a-snorting for shore like a puffing pig.”
It was a mild and shivering band of pirates that we marched up the beach to the oyster house. In answer to Charley’s knock, the door was flung open, and a pleasant wave of warm air rushed out upon us.
“You can dry your clothes here, lads, and get some hot coffee,” Charley announced, as they filed in.
And there, sitting ruefully by the fire, with a steaming mug in his hand, was the Porpoise. With one accord Nicholas and I looked at Charley. He laughed gleefully.
“That comes of imagination,” he said. “When you see a thing, you’ve got to see it all around, or what’s the good of seeing it at all? I saw the beach, so I left a couple of constables behind to keep an eye on it. That’s all.”
THE SIEGE OF THE “LANCASHIRE QUEEN”
Possibly our most exasperating experience on the fish patrol was when Charley Le Grant and I laid a two weeks’ siege to a big four-masted English ship. Before we had finished with the affair, it became a pretty mathematical problem, and it was by the merest chance that we came into possession of the instrument that brought it to a successful termination.
After our raid on the oyster pirates we had returned to Oakland, where two more weeks passed before Neil Partington’s wife was out of danger and on the highroad to recovery. So it was after an absence of a month, all told, that we turned the Reindeer’s nose toward Benicia. When the cat’s away the mice will play, and in these four weeks the fishermen had become very bold in violating the law. When we passed Point Pedro we noticed many signs of activity among the shrimp-catchers, and, well into San Pablo Bay, we observed a widely scattered fleet of Upper Bay fishing-boats hastily pulling in their nets and getting up sail.
This was suspicious enough to warrant investigation, and the first and only boat we succeeded in boarding proved to have an illegal net. The law permitted no smaller mesh for catching shad than one that measured seven and one-half inches inside the knots, while the mesh of this particular net measured only three inches. It was a flagrant breach of the rules, and the two fishermen were forthwith put under arrest. Neil Partington took one of them with him to help manage the Reindeer, while Charley and I went on ahead with the other in the captured boat.