Fishers -- Fiction; Fishing villages -- Fiction; Immigrants -- Fiction; San Francisco Bay Area (Calif.) -- Fiction; Short stories
There were six of us, in two boats, and to avoid suspicion we ran down
after dark and dropped anchor under a projecting bluff of land known as
Point Pinole. As the east paled with the first light of dawn we got
under way again, and hauled close on the land breeze as we slanted across
the bay toward Point Pedro. The morning mists curled and clung to the
water so that we could see nothing, but we busied ourselves driving the
chill from our bodies with hot coffee. Also we had to devote ourselves
to the miserable task of bailing, for in some incomprehensible way the
_Reindeer_ had sprung a generous leak. Half the night had been spent in
overhauling the ballast and exploring the seams, but the labor had been
without avail. The water still poured in, and perforce we doubled up in
the cockpit and tossed it out again.
After coffee, three of the men withdrew to the other boat, a Columbia
River salmon boat, leaving three of us in the _Reindeer_. Then the two
craft proceeded in company till the sun showed over the eastern sky-line.
Its fiery rays dispelled the clinging vapors, and there, before our eyes,
like a picture, lay the shrimp fleet, spread out in a great half-moon,
the tips of the crescent fully three miles apart, and each junk moored
fast to the buoy of a shrimp-net. But there was no stir, no sign of
life.
The situation dawned upon us. While waiting for slack water, in which to
lift their heavy nets from the bed of the bay, the Chinese had all gone
to sleep below. We were elated, and our plan of battle was swiftly
formed.
“Throw each of your two men on to a junk,” whispered Le Grant to me from
the salmon boat. “And you make fast to a third yourself. We’ll do the
same, and there’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t capture six
junks at the least.”
Then we separated. I put the _Reindeer_ about on the other tack, ran up
under the lee of a junk, shivered the mainsail into the wind and lost
headway, and forged past the stern of the junk so slowly and so near that
one of the patrolmen stepped lightly aboard. Then I kept off, filled the
mainsail, and bore away for a second junk.
Up to this time there had been no noise, but from the first junk captured
by the salmon boat an uproar now broke forth. There was shrill Oriental
yelling, a pistol shot, and more yelling.
“It’s all up. They’re warning the others,” said George, the remaining
patrolman, as he stood beside me in the cockpit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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