And in one way I was sort of a child, then, but I didn’t begin to realize how much of a child till I heard a voice giving orders to make sail on the Aurora.  A coast steamer had just come in, and from her had come a crew of men to take the Aurora away, and this was the voice of the man who gave me the keg of rum that night in Saint Pierre.  And while I was looking at him another man came alongside from the coast steamer, and this was Miller himself.  If the Aurora had been within distance I would have jumped aboard; but she had her lower sails up then and was moving in pretty lively fashion out of the harbor.

I sat on a rock on the beach to think it over, and, “Alec Corning,” I said to myself at last—­“they cert’nly tried you with the right kind o’ bait—­and hooked you good.”

And I wondered how I could get square with Miller.  No use trying to stir up Washington.  There was an old skipper of mine, and they’d fined him three thousand dollars once for just a difference of opinion and he couldn’t pay it, and his vessel at that moment was being used for a light-ship, and all he’d been getting out of Washington were State Department letters for ten years.  And he had cert’nly as much political pull as I had, for I had none.

No, no State Department for mine, I says at last, and ships my crew up to John Rose to Folly Cove, telling them to help John with the herring, and to tell him, too, to save the herring for me, that I’d get ’em back to Gloucester some way, and myself takes passage next day on the mail packet to Saint Pierre.

It was after dark of Christmas Eve when I landed at Saint Pierre.  I went up to Argand’s Caffay, a place where all kinds of seafaring people used to go to get a drink and a bite to eat.  There were quite a few in there now—­French stokers from a steamer or two and half a dozen French man-of-war’s men from a French gun-boat that was lying in the harbor, I remember.

I didn’t see any American fishermen in Argand’s, but I knew that some of ’em would be drifting in before long.  And by and by a few did, but me saying nothing to any of them, only sitting over to a table in a corner with a little bit of supper, and thinking that it was going to be a blue kind of Christmas for me, and a blue Christmas at home, too, for by this time Gloucester must’ve got the news of the seizure of the Aurora, and somebody’d surely passed the word to the wife.

I was sitting there, in the corner, figuring things out and not bothering much about the people coming and going, when somebody sits down at my table, and no sooner down than I felt his boot pressing mine under the table.  I looked up, and it was Archie Gillis.

“A fine one you!” I breaks out—­“where’s Sam?”

“Gi’me a chance now, skipper,” says Gillis, and orders a little something, and when the waiter was gone:  “Sam’s not far away.  I left him up to Antone’s rolling dice for turkeys.  We came over, him and me, on a little French packet.  Sam guessed you’d come back to Saint Pierre, and if you did he knew you’d drop in here.  Sam’ll be here soon, he guessed you’d come here.  We’ve been tryin’ to find out about the Aurora.  She’s in the harbor, and they’re going to put out to-night.”