"Yes, I pur-chased her ver-ry cheap," goes on Miller, and then a great racket, and down the dock on the run comes Sam with his big turkey, which was all cooked, I could see, fine and brown--and Archie behind Sam and the four _Lucy Foster_ men behind Archie and behind them again a bunch of Argand's waiters and the gendarmes with the red trousers and swords. There was a dory tied up to the end of the dock; I don't know who owned it, but there it was. "Come on, jump in." I yells, and all hands piled in, and we shoved off; all in one motion almost, and by the time Argand's crowd got to the stringpiece we were a vessel length away, and pulling like homeward bound. "Lay to it." I kept saying to them. "Aye, lay to it, and we'll eat that turkey for Christmas yet," yells Sam. "Lay to it, and we'll have more than the turkey." I says. "What's that we'll have, Alec?" hollers Sam. "Pull to the Aurora and see." I hollers back. It was blowing so hard we could hardly hear each other, and what with the chop we were driving the dory through we might well have been in swimming. We made the _Aurora_, and, looking back as I leaped over her rail, I could see Miller running back up the dock. "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."