"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.

"My God, Tyler, can't you see what's taking place?" yelled Hat Tyler.

Tyler unque