“For where?”

“Well, it’s a fishin’ trip she’s cleared for, but she’s got more than offshore bait in her hold.”

Archie had been talking straight down at his plate.  Now he stood up, and from behind his napkin said:  “There’s the skipper o’ the Aurora—­tryin’ to collect his gang together.  Don’t look around.  But he’ll have hard work, ‘cause Sam and me spent most of th’ afternoon gettin’ ’em drunk—­specially Sam.  An’ Sam says don’t notice him when you see him come in, for the new Aurora gang don’t know yet that we was any of your crew.”  Gillis tossed his napkin down and strolled over to the bar.

By and by I heard a familiar voice at the door—­could ‘a’ heard it a block—­and pretty soon Sam himself comes rolling in.  He was carrying a monstrous turkey, and he spied Archie first thing.  And, “Hullo, Archie boy,” he shouts.  “Throw your binnacle lights on that, will you?  Thirty pounds he weighs—­like you see him—­and twenty-five he’ll weigh, or I’m no fancy poultry raiser, when he’s ready for the oven.”

Gillis poked his finger into the breast of the turkey.  “I wish we had him for to-morrow, Sammie.  He’d make a nice little lunch, that lad.”

“Well, we’ll have him, Archie, for to-morrow.  We’ll have him—­the biggest turkey ever sailed out of ol’ Sain’ Peer.  A whale, look at him.”

“Aye, some tonnage to him.  But y’ never won him here, Sammie?”

“Win him here? Here?  In Argand’s?  Ever know anybody win anything here?  No, sir.  I won him up to ol’ Antone’s.  Twenty-seven throws at twenty-five cents a throw.”

“Twenty-seven!  You could ‘a’ bought two of ’em for that.”

“Bought?  Of course I could ‘a’ bought; but who wants to buy a turkey Christmas time?  Why, any fat old shuffle-footed loafer can take a basket under his arm and go down t’ the market and pay down his money and come away with a turkey or anything else he wants.  ’Tain’t the getting him.  Archie—­it’s the winnin’ him from a lot of hot sports that think they c’n roll dice.  Twenty-seven throws I took and with every throw a free drink of good old cassy—­”

“Twenty-seven drinks o’ cassy!  A lot you knew about what you was rollin’ by then, Sammie.”

“’Tain’t what I knew, but what I did, that counted, Archie, and it takes more than twenty-seven glasses o’ cassy to put my rail under. You oughter know that, Archie.  I knew what I was doin’—­don’t worry.  An’ that twenty-seventh rollin’!  I shook ’em up—­spittin’ to wind’ard for luck—­and lets ’em run.  And out they comes a-bowlin’.  Seventeen!  Cert’nly a fine run-off that, I says, and drops ’em in again, limbers my wrist a couple o’ times, and then—­two fives and a six—­thirty-three!  I gathers ’em in again, takes off my cardigan jacket, lays my cigar on the rail, jibes my elbows to each side—­’Action,’ I says.  ‘Action.’  Yer could hear ’em breathin’ a cable length all around me.