So the chest went aboard, and in the middle of the afternoon we hoisted the _Reindeer's_ big mainsail and cast off. It was tantalizing fall weather. The sea-breeze, which had blown steadily all summer, was gone, and in its place were capricious winds and murky skies which made the time of arriving anywhere extremely problematical. We started on the first of the ebb, and as we slipped down the Carquinez Straits, I looked my last for some time upon Benicia and the bight at Turner's Shipyard, where we had besieged the _Lancashire Queen_, and had captured Big Alec, the King of the Greeks. And at the mouth of the Straits I looked with not a little interest upon the spot where a few days before I should have drowned but for the good that was in the nature of Demetrios Contos. A great wall of fog advanced across San Pablo Bay to meet us, and in a few minutes the _Reindeer_ was running blindly through the damp obscurity. Charley, who was steering, seemed to have an instinct for that kind of work. How he did it, he himself confessed that he did not know; but he had a way of calculating winds, currents, distance, time, drift, and sailing speed that was truly marvellous. "It looks as though it were lifting," Neil Partington said, a couple of hours after we had entered the fog. "Where do you say we are, Charley?" Charley looked at his watch. "Six o'clock, and three hours more of ebb," he remarked casually. "But where do you say we are?" Neil insisted. Charley pondered a moment, and then answered, "The tide has edged us over a bit out of our course, but if the fog lifts right now, as it is going to lift, you'll find we're not more than a thousand miles off McNear's Landing." "You might be a little more definite by a few miles, anyway," Neil grumbled, showing by his tone that he disagreed. "All right, then," Charley said, conclusively, "not less than a quarter of a mile, not more than a half." The wind freshened with a couple of little puffs, and the fog thinned perceptibly. "McNear's is right off there," Charley said, pointing directly into the fog on our weather beam. The three of us were peering intently in that direction, when the _Reindeer_ struck with a dull crash and came to a standstill. We ran forward, and found her bowsprit entangled in the tanned rigging of a short, chunky mast. She had collided, head on, with a Chinese junk lying at anchor. At the moment we arrived forward, five Chinese, like so many bees, came swarming out of the little 'tween-decks cabin, the sleep still in their eyes. Leading them came a big, muscular man, conspicuous for his pock-marked face and the yellow silk handkerchief swathed about his head. It was Yellow Handkerchief, the Chinaman whom we had arrested for illegal shrimp-fishing the year before, and who, at that time, had nearly sunk the _Reindeer_, as he had nearly sunk it now by violating the rules of navigation.