"What!" says Wallie. "Was she a steamer?"
"Sail 'n' steam both. Sail for the hot days to make a draft 'n' keep us cool 'n' comfortable, an' steam when there was air 'n' it was cold 'n' rainy. An' young Hennery makes fireproof coats 'n' boots an' hats outer the yasbestos linin' for the capt'n an' me an' the mate an' hisself, 'cause we're goin' to guard the deck agin the wicked general 'n' his army. All the others we puts below, so no danger'll come to them. An' when the bandits comes swimmin' alongside an' up over the rail from the backs o' their war-horses, we captures 'em an' take their weapons from 'em, an' then the capt'n says: 'Now we got 'em, what'll we do with 'em?'
"'O' course,' says Hennery, 'it would be perfeckly proper for the crool men o' the south to kill their prisoners, but as men of the north we must show a loftier example.' So spoke up our hero nobly.
"An', while we're ponderin' what to do, 'Har,' says Hennery agin, 'I have it! We will put them in the medicine-tank.'
"'But,' says our capt'n, 'they'll spile it—your father's two million two hundred 'n' odd thousand gallons o' Yunzano that we paid forty-two cents a gallon for.'
"'An',' says young Hennery Spinks to that——"
"Spiggs," says Wallie.
"Spiggs, I mean. 'Is this the time or the place,' says heroic young Hennery Spiggs then, 'to be considerin' of mere money—with the lives o' human bein's at stake? What though they be viler than dogs, they are still our fellow creatures. Cost what it may an' ruthless though the varlets be, save their lives I shall!' An' y' oughter seen him then, the fair scion of a noble sire, his pink hair flyin' in the southern wind, his pale eyes an' form in general expanded to twice their reg'lar dimensions by his righteous indignation, an' the beeyoocheous an' volupchous daughter o' the noble, wealthy don stickin' her head outer a hatchway to cast a nadorin' gaze upon him.
"An' into the tank o' Yunzano we flopped 'em, one by one as they come over the rail o' the Tropic Zone. I wouldn't want to state at this late date how many of 'em we saved from the burnin' lavver by throwin' 'em inter the tanks, but mebby three or four or five hundred souls all told. An', to keep the burnin' yashes off 'em, we makes a few yasbestos tarpaulins an' claps 'em down over the hatches o' the tank.
"All night long we patrolled the decks shovellin' the yashes off where they fell. An' when mornin' comes an' the 'ruptions is over we take the tarpaulins off the tank, an' there was every blessed one of 'em, fr'm the General Feeleepo Balbeezo down to the lowest private, 'spite of all we'd done for 'em, floatin' around drowned. Overcome with grief 'n' surprise we was o' course, but when we come to think it over—their endin' up that way, wi' the noble don 'n' his beeyoocheous daughter saved an' the revverlootion busted up—it sure did look like the hand o' Providence was hoverin' over us.