ack.
And they would not let him have it in peace, and so, to escape
mistreatment, we jumped aboard the first vessel we saw in the stream and
put out the harbor. You yourself doubtless, saw us." He nodded. "Your
whole crew saw us. The whole harbor saw us. There was no concealment." I
stopped for the French captain and the governor to get that. Miller was
looking at me goo-goo-eyed, but both the officials nodded and said:
"That is true."

"And when we found ourselves safe out to sea, we had our dinner, our
Christmas dinner--in the peace we had sought. And surely these
gentlemen"--I bowed my best to the gun-boat captain and the
magistrate--"do not consider that a crime--to ask to be allowed to eat
our Christmas dinner in peace."

Miller was fair up in the air by then--"You pi-rates--pi-rates."

I leaps to my feet. "Pirates--to me? To these men? Simple honest
fishermen who know only toil? Who toils harder than they? Pirates--to
them! Why, if they were anything but the simplest and honestest set of
men, they would have taken that vessel out of my hands and sold
her--sold her in the States--and what could you or I or anybody have
done about it? But did they--or I? No, sir. As soon as we had finished
our Christmas dinner we brought her back."

"But the wine?" shrieks Miller.

"What wine?"

"The wine--the wine--her cargo of wine."

"Wine? Cargo of wine--what's he talking about?" I looks at my crowd,
and they all says: "Wine? Cargo of wine?--he's crazy."

I turns impatiently to the governor and French captain. "Gentlemen, this
is a serious accusation, but easily settled. If there was wine in that
vessel, surely her papers will say something of it. It will be on her
manifest, that is certain."

Now these two, the governor and the French naval officer, were honest
men. "That is so," they said. "He is quite right--quite right," and
looked at Miller, and Miller, with his eyes like door-knobs, looks at
me. And I gives him a wink with my wind'ard eye and he near blew up.

But he begins to see a thing or two, so he goes off with the French
officials, but before we had finished smoking our after-breakfast
pipeful he comes back--alone now--and says: "What do you propose?" And I
said: "Within a thousand miles of here is a friend of mine with a lot of
wine--as good a lot as the _Aurora_ had in her hold yesterday--maybe a
couple of dozen quarts shy--you know, a Christmas dinner, and so on--and
only last night my friend was figu