[pg 64]
And when they got us out they locked the doors and barred the windows.
While I was pulling on my red jacks again, out under the lamp, on the corner of the street, up comes Sam and Archie. "Say, Alec," begins Sam, "but you cert'nly laid 'em out with your sea boot."
I thought Sam and Archie would be pretty well smashed up, but there wasn't a mark on 'em except a couple of lumps behind their ears.
"Not us," explained Sam. "Nothin' happened to us except bein' stepped on a few dozen times. But did y' land the rest o' the Aurora's crew, Alec?"
"I don't know. I swung for 'em, Sam."
"You got 'em all right, and that'll put it out o' their heads to bother with the Aurora to-night, though"—he cocked up an ear to the whistle of a rising breeze—"it begins to feel like they wouldn't 'a' gone out anyway—it's breezing up so."
"Where's she layin'?"
"Off the end o' the big dock. An' if it keeps on breezin' they won't be goin' out in the mornin' either. A bad time anyway to put out on a cruise—Christmas Day. But what d'y' say, Alec, if we take a look around the place?"
We'd got a pretty good start for Christmas Eve, and around Saint Pierre we went, Sam and Archie [pg 65] and four men of the Lucy Foster's crew who'd been in the mix-up. They were ready to tear things up, but there wasn't much to tear up, because everybody heard us coming, and whenever we'd get to a place, we'd find the doors locked and the windows barred. The only place not locked that night was the little cathedral, and by and by, when we found there was no place else to go, we all went in there.