"What are you doing? What are you doing, man?" shrieked Hat. "Come, if you can't strike a light give them a shot out of that shotgun. The whole place is coming down round their ears in a minute."
"I give away the last cartridges I had yisterday to a boy that come asking for them."
"I suppose you'd give 'em the shirt off your back if they come asking for it," cried Hat. "I never saw such a man. Get up the patent fog horn."
"I ain't got the key to the box," said Jed in the sulky tones of a man who can't begin to comply with the demands upon him.
"Ain't got the key! This is a pretty time to come telling me that. Run forward and see if you can't kink up the chain in the hawse pipe somehow."
Jed Tyler affected not to hear this. There was a glorious crash coming, and for his part he meant to be an eyewitness. Followed a marvelous silence, during which with fateful celerity the Minnie Williams stalked the unsuspecting Higgins house. The seaward end of the wharf on which it stood had rotted away and fallen in, and nothing now remained but the line of spiles, which rose out of the water like a row of bad teeth from which the gums had fallen away. And on top of each spile roosted a huge sea gull of marvelous whiteness, fatted with the spoils of the harbor.
So quietly had the Minnie Williams stolen upon them that the spiles on which they slept stirred and swayed out before they took note of the invasion. At the touch they rose shrieking on the night air with a vast flapping of wings.
The ship passed between the long rows of spiling with nice judgment. Certainly in the circumstance she was doing the best she could by herself and her owners. At the left of her lay a little steamer tied up for the winter, the top of her stack swathed like a sore thumb; and only twenty feet to the right, under water, lurked, as Hat well knew, a cruel weed-grown stone abutment. To the fine angular stern of the Minnie Williams the Higgins place would be like nothing so much as a pillow stuffed with eiderdown.
That fated residence stood forlorn in the starshine. It was old, it was gray, it suffered from some sort of shingle mange, and blue and yellow tin tobacco signs were tacked on here and there. The crazy outside staircase was like an aspiration that had come to nothing.
No knight of old ever couched lance against the shield of his enemy with surer aim than that which distinguished the Minnie Williams when she set her main boom against the house of Higgins to overthrow it. And it availed it nothing that it was founded upon a rock.