"Just then one came right under her forefoot and another under her counter. And I looks back to the gunboat."
"The Hattie rushes straight for the passage, and I thought maybe she'd make it, when whing! whing! whing! you'd think somebody was trying to cut his initials in the water around her. One after the other, like somebody having fun with her, and then wr-r-t! I felt her shiver, and then she seemed to shake herself, and then straight into the air her bowsprit seemed to rise and point to the morning sky, and from out of her waist came flame and smoke. Straight on and up the bowsprit went, and down! and plump! her after-part went! and flying junks of one thing and another filled the air, and some smoke, and then in the sea around the small parts that'd blown up began to fall. But I wasn't watching them. I was watching the for'ard half of her as it went pitching up, the bowsprit making a quarter circle in the air, and then plunk! down and under. The great little Hattie was gone. By that time I was in the water reaching out for the quarter-boat.
"'Too bad,' says Archie, 'too bad!' when I was safe in her. 'Too bad!' he says, and stops rowing. 'Pull, you sentimental loafer; pull for the beach!' I yells at him.
"And he did, and we all did—all but Johnnie's wife—and landed, and ran up and hid in the brush up top of the cliff, and lay on our stomachs watching the gunboat come stealing in and put off a steam-barge and grab our quarter-boat with all the opium in it. And we could hear Ed Gurney whoop when he held a tin of it aloft. 'Man, tons of it, tons of it!' Archie swore he could hear Ed yelling, and we guessed that would square him for those few wide shots. And then they headed back and went aboard the gunboat, and pretty soon she steamed off.
'Vessel and opium both gone—I wonder how Durks is feeling now,' says Archie; 'and we with his—but how much is it altogether, Alec?' And that reminded me, and I says to Archie, 'Where'd you leave your two hundred dollars?' and he stops and swears. He'd left it under his mattress in the cabin of the Hattie. And I'd left my five hundred hanging up in my coat in the cabin of the Hattie, and there she was in ten fathom of water. I broke the news to Archie.
"Archie said he'd be damned. Then: 'How'll we get out of here? For we gotta go east after this, Alec.'
"And Johnnie Sing, listening, takes the five hundred I'd given him and hands it to me. I don't want to take it, and he says, 'Plenty more—see,' and with his jackknife begins opening the wadding of his coat, and out come bills and bills and bills. All his property, twenty-odd thousand dollars, was sewed up there in big bills. And when 'twas all out he offers it to us, telling us to help ourselves. And Archie and me said no, the five hundred would do us to pay our way back to Gloucester here, and meals on the way, o' course. And Johnnie, by our advice, he comes east, too, with his little wife, and stepped off in New York; and that's where we left him.
"A fine little team, Johnnie and his wife. And the Hattie? If there's any of you never seen her, then you ought to when she was alive. A great little vessel, the Hattie Rennish!"