e faster she went. Laying down on her side made no
difference to her. In fact we were not sure that she wouldn't do her
best sailing on her side. But it hadn't come to that yet. She was
standing up under sail fine. Most of them, we knew, would have washed
everything off their deck before that. And certainly there would have
been no standing down by the lee rail on too many of them with that
breeze abeam.

Going up New York harbor, where we had to tack, the Savannah steamer
could have gone by if she had to, but big steamers slow down some
going into a harbor, and we holding on to everything made up for the
extra distance sailed. The wind, of course, was nothing to what it was
outside, and that made some difference. Anyway, we kept the Johnnie
going and held the steamer up to the Battery, where, as she had to go
up North River, she gave us three toots. The people on the Battery
must have had a good look at us. I guess it was not every day they saw
a schooner of the Johnnie's size carrying on like that. Billie Hurd
had to pay his respects to them. "Look, you loafers, look, and see a
real vessel sailing in."

There was a sassy little East River towboat that wanted to give us a
tow, but our skipper said it would be losing time to take sail off and
wait for a line then. The tug captain said, "Oh, no; and you can't
dock her anyway in this harbor without a tug."

"Oh, I can dock her all right, I guess," said our skipper.

"Maybe you think you can, but wait till you try it, and have a nice
little bill for damages besides."

"Well, the vessel's good for the damages, too."

That towboat tailed us just the same, but we had the satisfaction of
fooling him. The skipper kept the Johnnie going till the right time
and then, when the tugboat people thought it was too late, he shot her
about on her heel and into the dock with her mainsail coming down on
the run and jibs dead.

A couple of East Side loafers standing on the wharf cap-log were
nearly swept away by the end of our bowsprit, we came on so fast. Four
or five of us leaped ashore, and with lines out and made fast in no
time, we had her docked without so much as cracking a single shingle
of the house across the head of the dock.

We sold our mackerel for nineteen cents apiece. Fifty-seven hundred
and odd dollars was our stock, and about a hundred and forty dollars
each man's share. We felt a little bit chesty after that. We were not
the first to market that year, but we w