A fearful sound smote upon their ears. Something had shouldered the
house. The stovepipe in the kitchen fell down, there followed the sound
as of some scaly creature dragging its body across the linoleum. Then
there came a fall of plaster, and the kitchen stove itself appeared
stealthily through the bedroom wall.
"My conscience!" said Elmer Higgins at the height of his mystification.
But we anticipate. It will be well at this point to look in on the
affairs of Hat Tyler for a moment. When it became apparent that the
_Minnie Williams_ would not leave the ways until softer weather had
loosened up the launching grease the crowd drifted away from her. The
cook banked his fires and the crew went ashore for a carouse.
Then it was that Hat had it out with Tyler. Jed said himself afterward
that it was a regular old-fashioned session, but further than that he
would not commit himself, beyond saying that of course Hat was
sensitive--awful sensitive--and just as thin-skinned as she could be,
and it was only natural she should get up on her high horse when once
she had him alone. It was not till near midnight that, red of eye and
with her hair stringing down any old how, she put her head out of the
companionway and looked vengefully at the Higgins place across the way.
"If looks could kill," Tyler said, thrusting his jaw out with hers,
"there wouldn't be a grease spot left of that shack, would there, Hat?"
Hat made no answer. She had felt an indefinable sensation at the soles
of her feet.
"We're away, Tyler, we're away!" she gasped.
It was even so. Swift as a swallow on the wing and noiseless as a thief
in the night the _Minnie Williams_ left the smoking ways, with that deep
and graceful bow always so thrilling to beholders when there are
beholders; the first and most beautiful motion of the ship.
"You christian her, Hat!" cried Tyler. "I'll drop the hook."
Hat broke the bottle over her stern works at the very moment that a roar
of chain going out at the hawse pipe forward set the sleeping gulls
flapping seaward. The _Minnie Williams_ floated there lightly as a
feather drifted from the wings of sleep, soundless save for the chain
rattling out of her lockers. She had chosen that whimsical hour of the
night to take her first bath, and who should say the lady nay?
Now by insensible degrees the near shore receded and the far shore drew
near. Still slack chain rattled out of the hawse pipe.
Hat strode forward.
"For the Lord's sake, ain't you going to snub this ship!" she cried in a
voice hoarse with fury.
Jed Tyler thrust a ghastly dewy face out of the windlass room.
"I can't do it, Hat!" he gasped.
"You can't! Don't tell me you can't! Everything's been done that's been
tried. You drop that hook or I'll know the reason why!"
"The friction band's broke square in two."
"Oh, damn it all, if I must say so--there!" said Hat bitterly, for she
was not captain in name only. "If there's any such thing as break it's
break at a time like this. Let go that port anchor."
"Both wildcats will turn idle the way things are here."
"You do as I say! The weight of the chain may check her in some."
Tyler dropped his other hook.
"How much chain have we got on that starboard anchor? Do you know?"
"About one hundred and seventy-five fathoms."
Hat went aft again and gave a calculating glance. When the chain had
been paid out to the bitter end the ship would bring up perforce if the
anchor had caught on, for the bitter end had a round turn taken about
the foot of the foremast, and was shackled to the keelson with a monster
shackle. But--what was the width of the harbor at this point?
"Give her port helm, you ninny," said Hat, wrapping herself in her arms.
She shivered, partly because the night was chill and partly from nervous
excitement. There was no time to be lost.
"Can't. The rudder's bolted in the amidships position," said Jed in
shaking accents.
This had been done to make sure that that giant tail-piece should meet
the water squarely, as otherwise the thrust of the ship might snap the
rudder post like a pipe-stem.
"Well, I guess the horse is out of the stable, then, that's what I
guess," Hat said hoarsely. "She's launched herself now with a
vengeance."
They fell silent. With the indifference to danger of a sleepwalker the
_Minnie Williams_ marched across the starlit harbor.
Presently Hat brought down a heavy hand on her spouse's lean shoulder.
"You see what she's going to do, don't you?" she cried. "She's going to
mix it with the Higgins place, that's what she's going to do! Give them
a blue light. They're awake. I see a light burning in that south
window."
Tyler fetched a blue light; but his matches were wet with the sweat of
his efforts in the windlass room. He could not strike fire.
"What are you doing? What are you doing, man?" shrieked Hat. "Come, if
you can't strike a light give them a shot out of that shotgun. The whole
place is coming down round their ears in a minute."
"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 unquestionably could. He had set a cold corn-cob pipe between his
teeth; he answered nothing, but his fascinated saucer eyes were fixed on
the precise spot where as it seemed the boom was destined to be planted.
This was at a place about six feet below the square of soapstone with a
hole in it, through which the stovepipe passed. He was not disappointed.
The boom in fact exerted its whole pressure against the body of the
stove itself, with the result which we have seen. The stove made its way
across the kitchen and appeared in the bedroom at the moment when Elmer
had made up his lips to blow the flame.
Nor was this all. The inexorable stern of the _Minnie Williams_ followed
after, raising the roof of the Higgins place with the skillful care of
an epicure taking the cover off his favorite dish. The roof yielded with
only a gentle rippling motion, and the ship's lifeboat, which hung from
davits aft, scraped the remains of supper off the supper table with her
keel.
Zinie Shadd, returning late from a lodge meeting which had wound up with
a little supper in the banquet hall, felt a queer stir through his
members to see the Higgins place alter its usually placid countenance,
falter, turn half round, and get down on its knees with an apparently
disastrous collapse of its four walls and of everything within them. The
short wide windows narrowed and lengthened with an effect of bodily
agony as the ribs of the place were snapped off short all round the
eaves.
"God help them poor creatures inside!" he was moved to utter out of the
goodness of his heart. "She went in jest as easy," he recounted later to
one of his cronies. "It warn't no more exertion for her than 't would be
to you to stick your finger through a cream puff."
"How come it they 'scaped with a whole skin?"
"I don't see for the life of me. Elmer says himself it's just another
case of where it's _for_ a man to live, and if it ain't for him to he
won't, and if it's for him to be will, and that's about all there is to
it."
Elmer's exact phrase has been that he guessed nothing coming from the
sea side would ever cheat the gallows.
Pearl Higgins told a friend of hers that the one thing that came into
her mind as she lay there was that the place had been torpedoed.
"I knew what it was just as well as I wanted to," she said. She had
known all along that if any place would get it it would be the Higgins
place, on account of its exposed position, right in line with anything
that showed up at the mouth of the harbor. Of course if she had stopped
to think she would have known that a torpedo didn't come through a house
at the snail's pace the stove was moving at when it looked through at
her.
"But my land, at a time like that what is a body to think?" she
inquired. Of course as soon as she could get her wits together she could
see that it was her own stove, and nothing to be afraid of in itself if
only she knew what was animating it.
There was the rub. The truth is, the performance of the stove, at that
hour of the night, too, was so wholly out of the ordinary that she and
Elmer had not so much as stirred out of their tracks for the fraction of
a second it took the thing to come clear into the room. Pearl said later
that she thought she was seeing things.
"Scared? I was petrified! I couldn't stir hand or foot," she told her
friend. "You talk about your flabbergasted women! I never had such a
feeling come over me before."
Of course neither of them had the faintest notion of what was at the
back of it, and that made it all the worse. Pearl lay there under the
clothes as limp as a rag, and the main boom of the _Minnie Williams_,
which as we know was the thing behind it all, urged the stove forward
until it was in square contact with the foot of the bed.
Now if there was one thing on which Pearl Higgins prided herself it was
her bed. It was a mountainous, whale-backed, feather-bedded four-poster,
built in the days of San Domingo mahogany, and quite capable of
supporting the weight of a baby elephant without a quiver. Equipped with
the legs of a colossus it had a frame to match. Tradition had it that a
governor of the state had once lain in it. If there was one thing sure,
therefore, it was that the bed would not collapse. But then again the
_Minnie Williams_ was a lady not to be denied. She must come on; she
could not help it for her heart, for the bitter end of the chain cable
was not yet, and she still had way on her.
The bed, the stove and the boom met, they fitted together as if they had
been made for one another from the beginning, they engaged each other
like vertebra in a spine, they stiffened. There came a fearful rending
of laths; the mopboard buckled; two vases of alabaster fell from the
parlor mantel, and almost at the same moment the red plush clock with
the stone cuckoo-bird over the dial and the music box "where its gizzard
should have been," as Elmer always said, fell likewise. Pearl said
afterward she knew that had gone because it started playing there on the
floor at a great rate. And the next thing she knew she was in the parlor
herself; and such a mess! She didn't know as she ever wanted to lay eyes
on it again after that night's works.
Elmer, uncertain what part to play, walked along with the bed, still
carrying the hand lamp in his hand, to light the _Minnie Williams_
along, and dodging falling walls and plaster. He said when questioned by
Zinie Shadd that he hadn't felt any particular alarm, on account of the
deliberate way she had come poking in there, with a kind of a
root-hog-or-die look about her; and he said he never for a minute
doubted his ability and Pearl's to make good their escape if the worst
came to the worst.
It really wasn't until the parlor went, as he explained to the Tall
Stove Club, that he took it into his head to look over his shoulder; and
it was then that he saw the lifeboat sweeping on victoriously across the
kitchen, or what had been the kitchen. And on top of that he saw Hat
Tyler looking down as cool as a cucumber, and her husband standing
beside her.
"She had come on deck jest as she was," he stated at that time with a
quiet chuckle, "and I never see anything like so much interest showing
in a human countenance before."
Hat Tyler might well show interest; for after the house came the
land--and the land, well she knew it, was made of sterner stuff. A
shriek from Pearl told Elmer that his wife had found her tongue, as he
phrased it. The fact is she had caught sight of Hat Tyler standing over
her like an avenging fury.
But precisely at this moment the chain cable, which had all this time
lain lethargic on the floor of the harbor, roused itself link by link,
tautened, took a grip on the hook and snubbed the ship. None too soon,
it had run out to the bitter end.
Pearl Higgins' bed halted, the stove halted, and Elmer set down his
lamp. The boom receded. With the same swanlike ease she had used in
effecting an entrance, the _Minnie Williams_ floated out into the stream
again.
And in the very instant of that heaven-sent reversal Hat Tyler cried in
trumpet tones, "Travel yourself, and see how you like it!"
A shriek of demoniac laughter came on the heels of that. There were none
present to laugh with Hat, but that laugh of hers rang in Pearl Higgins'
ears like the last trump. She got herself over the side of the bed in
short order. Too late, alas! Hat Tyler's had been a Parthian shot. The
ship was out of the house altogether by then, and the roof had settled
back over its joists at a rakish angle. The whole after part of the
house was mashed into a neat concavity which would have made a perfect
mold for the _Minnie Williams'_ stern, and the _Minnie Williams_ was in
the stream again, with not a scratch about her.
"Ain't that something?" Elmer Higgins said, standing at the edge of this
declivity. "Ain't that something huge?"
"Stand there and gawk! I would if I was you!" cried his wife. "Oh, will
I ever get that laugh out of my ears if I live to be a hundred? Did ever
you hear anything so hateful? I think you're a pretty small part of a
man myself! The least you could have done was to have lit into her when
you had the chance.
"But no, not you! What do you do but stand there and never so much as
open your mouth!"
"I was so kind of took aback," Elmer advanced, "what with one thing and
another, I couldn't seem to lay my hands on jest the words I wanted. And
she standing there jest as she was too. Ain't she immense? Where you
going to look to for a solider woman than Hat?"
"It's just like her for all the world, pushing herself in where she's
not wanted," sobbed Pearl miserably. "The gall of her! And she just
itching to get this house out of the way too! I suppose you'll be just
contrary-minded enough now to say that she didn't do it on purpose?"
"No," said Elmer, solemn as a judge. "She forelaid for it all right, all
right. I been saying right along she warn't a woman to sit quiet under a
blow, and I told you as much at the time, mamma, if you'll recollect. I
said, 'When Hat hits back I look out from under.'"
He picked a lump of plaster out of his ear and lifted high the lamp.
"But my grief, my grief, when all is said and done, ain't she a
dabster!" he whispered with a tinge of admiration. "And warn't
it--warn't it nice calculation?"