somewhere close at hand a thirty-foot steel stem was storming along at twenty miles an hour! The bitterest thought of all was that there were folks asleep in dry, upholstered cabins who would never learn that they had massacred a boat before breakfast. So Harvey rang the bell.
“Yes, they slow daown one turn o’ their blame propeller,” said Dan, applying himself to Manuel’s conch, “fer to keep inside the law, an’ that’s consolin’ when we’re all at the bottom. Hark to her! She’s a humper!”
“ Aooo-whoo-whupp! ” went the siren. “ Wingle-tingle-tink ,” went the bell. “ Graaa‑ouch! ” went the conch, while sea and sky were all mired up in milky fog. Then Harvey felt that he was near a moving body, and found himself looking up and up at the wet edge of a cliff-like bow, leaping, it seemed, directly over the schooner. A jaunty little feather of water curled in front of it, and as it lifted it showed a long ladder of Roman numerals- XV , XVI , XVII , XVIII , and so forth—on a salmon-coloured gleaming side. It tilted forward and downward with a heart-stilling “ Ssssooo ”; the ladder disappeared; a line of brass-rimmed portholes flashed past; a jet of steam puffed in Harvey’s helplessly uplifted hands; a spout of hot water roared along the rail of the We’re Here , and the little schooner staggered and shook in a rush of screw-torn water, as a liner’s stern vanished in the fog. Harvey got ready to faint or be sick, or both, when he heard a crack like a trunk thrown on a sidewalk, and, all small in his ear, a faraway telephone voice drawling: “Heave to! You’ve sunk us!”
“Is it us?” he gasped.
“No! Boat out yonder. Ring! We’re goin’ to look,” said Dan, running out a dory.
In half a minute all except Harvey, Penn, and the cook were overside and away. Presently a schooner’s stump-foremast, snapped clean across, drifted past the bows. Then an empty green dory came by, knocking on