how can you get off this ship?' he says.

"'Easy enough,' I says. 'Nobody here cares whether I stay aboard or get
away, and nobody's watching me too close. You ask the executive
officer's permission to go down aboard your quarter-boat, swinging from
the boom there, by way of seeing it's all right, and you get into it and
look it over, and the last thing you do before leaving it you unfasten
the painter and let her go adrift. And in the morning, when you see the
_Hattie_, Johnnie Sing and his wife will be aboard--- on her deck in
plain sight. And then you come and get 'em. But you'll have to come and
get 'em yourself--and give me five hundred dollars now on account--good
money, mind.' And he does--good money.

"And while he's going down over the boom ladder to one side I'm climbing
down a side ladder on the other, and soon standing on the last rung,
just above the water-line, and waiting. And pretty soon I see the shadow
of our quarter-boat drifting past her stern, and as I do I slips
overboard and strikes out for her, quiet and mostly under water, because
I had my clothes on.

"I get aboard the quarter-boat and I let her drift till maybe I am a
quarter of a mile away, and then I out oars and heads her in for where I
can see the _Hattie's_ riding light. I comes alongside. Archie's shape
looms up over the rail. 'Hi-i!' he yells, 'keep off!' 'It's all right,
Archie,' I says, and he reaches down and takes the painter. 'What's
doing?' he says.

"'Where's Johnnie Sing and his wife?'

"'She's asleep in the cabin and he's awake watching her. What you going
to do?'

"'You tell Johnnie here's his five hundred passage money back, will you,
Archie? And then we'll make ready to skip out of here.'

"'Skip out? Not enough wind,' says Archie.

"'Not now,' I says, 'but there will be.'

"'I hope so,' says Archie, and calls Johnnie and tells him, and I gives
him his money which he didn't want to take but had to and we slip her
chain cable but left her riding light on a buoy in case the gunboat
watch were having an eye on her. 'And now,' I says, 'to that lighter
where those bales of hemp are.'

"'Hadn't we better put straight for the open sound and head to sea,'
says Archie, 'while it's dark? What do we want with a lot o' hemp?'
growls Archie.

"'We'll go after the hemp, all the same, Archie,' I says.

"It took us three hours from our anchorage to make the lighter, where
the hemp was, and that made it midnight. We let the s