his waist then, and we could hear him:

"Oh, I love old Ocean's smile,
I love old Ocean's frowning--
I love old Ocean all the while,
My prayer's for death by drowning."

That was too much for Mr. Duncan, and, watching his chance, he dove
between the house and rail, to the weather rigging, where the skipper
grabbed him and made him fast beside himself. The old man took a look
down the slant of the deck and took a fresh hold of the rigging.

"Captain Blake, isn't she down pretty low?"

"Maybe--maybe--Mr. Duncan, but she'll go lower yet before the sail
comes off her. This is the day Sam Hollis was going to make me take in
sail."

Less than a minute after that we made our rush for the line. Hollis
tried to crowd us outside the stake-boat, which was rolling head to
wind and sea, worse than a lightship in a surf gale--tried to crowd us
out just as an awful squall swooped down. It was the Johnnie or the
Withrow then. We took it full and they didn't, and there is all there
was to it. But for a minute it was either vessel's race. At the
critical time Sam Hollis didn't have the nerve, and the skipper and
Clancy did.

They looked at each other--the skipper and Clancy--and Clancy soaked
her. Held to it cruelly--recklessly. It was too much to ask of a
vessel. Down she went--buried. It was heaven or hell, as they say, for
a while. I know I climbed on to her weather run, and it was from there
I saw Withrow ducking her head to it--hove to, in fact, for the blast
to pass.

The Johnnie weathered it. Able--able. Up she rose, a horse, and across
the line we shot like a bullet, and so close to the judge's boat that
we could have jumped aboard.

We all but hit the Henry Clay Parker, Billie Simms's vessel, on the
other side of the line, and it was on her that old Peter of Crow's
Nest, leaping into the air and cracking his heels together, called out
as we drove by:

"The Johnnie Duncan wins--the able Johnnie Duncan--sailin' across the
line on her side and her crew sittin' out on the keel."

XXXIV

MINNIE ARKELL ONCE MORE

We were hardly across the line when there was a broom at our truck--a
new broom that I know I, for one, never saw before. And yet I suppose
every vessel that sailed in the race that day had a new broom hid away
somewhere below--to be handy if needed.

But it was the Johnnie Duncan, sailing up the harbor, that carried
hers to the truck. And it was Mr. Duncan who stood aft of h