“Hurry, fellows.”  I yells to them, “Miller’s gone to head us off.”

As we drops onto the Aurora’s deck a head pops out of the fo’c’s’le companion-way.  He looked like he’d just come out of a fine sleep.  “You,” I yelled, “allay you—­rauss—­beat it,” and rushed him to the dory we’d just come aboard in.  He looks up at me in the most puzzled way.  Two more heads popped up out of the companion-way.  “And allay you two,” yells Sam and Archie, and grabs ’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-painted slats on a white-painted rock sticking out of the water, and there was a French packet lying to the other side.  We had to go between.  I knew they were betting a hundred to one we’d hit one or the other.