"No; honest, now, Bob, I'm sure I was born too late. The twentieth
century's no place for me. If I'd had my way----"
"You'd have been born in the sixteenth," I broke in, laughing, "with
Drake and Hawkins and Raleigh and the rest of the sea-kings."
"You're right!" Paul affirmed. He rolled over upon his back on the
little after-deck, with a long sigh of dissatisfaction.
It was a little past midnight, and, with the wind nearly astern, we were
running down Lower San Francisco Bay to Bay Farm Island. Paul Fairfax
and I went to the same school, lived next door to each other, and
"chummed it" together. By saving money, by earning more, and by
each of us foregoing a bicycle on his birthday, we had collected
the purchase-price of the _Mist_, a beamy twenty-eight-footer,
sloop-rigged, with baby topsail and centerboard. Paul's father was a
yachtsman himself, and he had conducted the business for us, poking
around, overhauling, sticking his penknife into the timbers, and testing
the planks with the greatest care. In fact, it was on his schooner,
the _Whim_, that Paul and I had picked up what we knew about
boat-sailing, and now that the _Mist_ was ours, we were hard at
work adding to our knowledge.
The _Mist_, being broad of beam, was comfortable and roomy.
A man could stand upright in the cabin, and what with the stove,
cooking-utensils, and bunks, we were good for trips in her of a week at
a time. And we were just starting out on the first of such trips, and it
was because it was the first trip that we were sailing by night. Early
in the evening we had beaten out from Oakland, and we were now off the
mouth of Alameda Creek, a large salt-water estuary which fills and
empties San Leandro Bay.
"Men lived in those days," Paul said, so suddenly as to startle me from
my own thoughts. "In the days of the sea-kings, I mean," he explained.