[Illustration: "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.