The punch-mixing, singing and story-telling went on and in the middle of it Tom O'Donnell came driving in. He was like a whiff of a no'the-easter out to sea. "Whoo!" he said. "Hulloh, Wesley-boy--and Patsie Oddie--and Tommie Ohlsen--and, by my soul, Tommie Clancy again. Lord, what a night to come beating down from Boston! What's that, Wesley?--did the Colleen outfoot the cutter down the Cape shore way? Indeed and she did, and could do it over again in the same breeze to half their logy old battleships. Into Boston I was Monday morning, and the fish out of her the same morning. Tuesday I took her across to Cape Cod, tuning her up, and into Provincetown that night. Next day it was blowing pretty hard. A fine day for a run across the Bay, I thinks, and waits for maybe a Boston vessel, one of the T Wharf fleet. For I'll go to Boston, I thinks, to put the Colleen on the railway to-day, because maybe in Gloucester I may have to wait--or may get no chance at all--with half a dozen or more that will be waiting to be scrubbed for the race. And who comes along then but Tom Lowrie. 'Waiting for me?' he asks, and I tells him I was hoping it would be the new Whalen vessel. 'Here's one that's as good as any Whalen vessel,' he says--'as good as anything out of Boston--or Gloucester,' he says. So across the Bay we had it out. And, gentlemen, I'm telling you the Colleen sailed--all the wind she wanted. She came along, and Lowrie--by the looks of things then--he's sailing yet. Well, I never did like that forem'st that was in the Colleen, and so, thinks I, here's a chance to test it--and why not, with the race coming on? So I jibed her over off Minot's just--and sure enough it cracked about ten feet below the mast-head." "You were satisfied then, Tom?"