em and heaves 'em into the dory, casts
off her painter, and they drifts off like men in a trance. One minute
they were sound asleep in their bunks and the next adrift and
half-dressed in a dory in the middle of the harbor with a gale of wind
roaring in their ears and a choppy sea wetting 'em down.

"In with her chain-anchor slack," I calls, "and then up with her jibs,"
which they did. "And now her fores'l--up with her fores'l." Then we
broke out her chain-anchor. I was to the wheel and knew the second the
anchor was clear of the bottom by the way she leaped under me. "Don't
stop to cat-head that anchor," I calls, "but cut her hawser." They cut
her hawser free, and with the big anchor-rope kinking through the
hawse-hole, away went the _Aurora_, picking up, as she went, the
chain-anchor with its eight or ten fathoms of chain still out and
tucking it under her bilge; and there that anchor stayed, jammed hard
against her bottom planking, while she rushed across the harbor.

"Now," I said, "let's see if we c'n work out of this blessed pocket
without somebody having to notify the insurance companies afterward."

All along the water-front the people by now were crowding to look at us.
All they saw was an American fishing schooner with a crazy American crew
trying to pick her way through a crowded harbor with her four lowers set
in a living gale.

We were across the harbor in no time. "Stand by now--stand by sheets," I
sung out. Steady as statues they waited for the word, and when they got
it--"Har-r-d a-lee-e!" Whf-f the steam came out of them, and the busiest
of all was Sam Leary, with the big turkey between his feet.

As she came around I was afraid her anchor would take bottom and her way
be checked. It did touch, but the _Aurora_ spun on her toes so quick
that before that anchor knew it was down she was off and flying free
again.

All this time I was looking around for Miller and at last I saw him in a
little power boat. He had the French gun-boat in mind that was sure, but
his craft was making heavy weather of it, and before he was half-way to
the gun-boat we were under her stern, on our shoot for the harbor
entrance, and from the gun-boat's deck they were peeping down on us,
grinning and yelling the same as everybody else, waiting to see us pile
up on the rocks somewhere.

But no rocks for the _Aurora_ that Christmas Day. She knew what we
wanted of her. There's a spindle beacon in Saint Pierre harbor,
white-paint