"She was lifting her forefoot and kicking her way through like she knew what we wanted. We were walking away from the gunboat, and I was wondering why she didn't reach out for us with one of her long five-inch lads. But I see why pretty soon. In the clearing light a point of land shows up ahead of us, making out maybe a couple of miles to the windward of our course. We couldn't turn out, for here was the main shore and there was the gunboat. 'And a pity, too,' I says to Archie, 'with enough opium aboard to keep us many a year.' "Archie'd 'most forgot the bales. 'Cut 'em open,' I says to him, and he did, and out they come--six or eight pound tins they looked--dozens of 'em. And Archie, looking at the bright shiny tins, said, 'What a pity!' again, and we both said what a pity it was, too, for Johnnie Sing and his wife. 'But don't you worry about 'em,' I says; 'Nor you about your wife,' I says to Johnnie, who was looking heart-broken, with his arm around her. "All the time we were hopping on toward the point, and if 'twas anything but a steamer with guns was chasing us we'd 'a' squeezed by, and, once by, it was good night to the gunboat or anything like her in that breeze. It looked that way even as it was, till a shell goes skipping across the water ahead of us. In half a minute there came another one astern. There wasn't any sea on this time--inshore this and the water smooth, and the two shells had a fine chance to show how they could pile up little hills of water and then go skipping across the surface, making quarter circles to the right. I had hopes, a few hopes yet. For the wind was still there, and the _Hattie_ she had everything on her, and she was pirooting 'tween earth and sky like a picnic swing. And looking out in terror was Johnnie Sing's little wife, and I was saying to her: 'She's all right--she'll stay up, never fear.' "'Oh, she'll stay up,' says Archie, 'if one of them shells don't come aboard,' and we both eying a flash o' flame that just then came out the side of the gunboat. "'They're only fourteen-pounders,' I says. "'Is that all?' says Archie. 'Only fourteen pounds o' nitroglycerine, or cordite, or dynamite, or guncotton, or whatever 'tis they packs into 'em! Only fourteen pounds!--and fourteen ounces is enough to send the _Hattie_ to the clouds and eternal glory if ever it comes aboard,' and just then one came right under her forefoot and another under her counter. And I looks back to the gunboat. She's less than a mile away now, and I takes the glasses and has a peek, and I imagines I sees a tall, rangy lad standing beside a long, slim, steel-shiny, needle-lookin' gun, and I says to myself: 'Eddie boy, you miss us about twice more and Alec Corning'll be buying you more than one drink next time we meet,' for I knew the end was near. Ahead of me I see a passage making an island of the last half mile o' that point o' land, and it looked like water enough in the passage to let the _Hattie_ through.