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.
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