In the meanwhile we had been making headway at a good pace for a boat so overloaded, and we had shipped but little water in the process.
Several times we shipped a little water, and my breeches and the tails of my coat were all soaking wet before we had gone a hundred yards.
The asphalt is dug from the edges of the lake, loaded on carts, hauled to the port and from there shipped to nearly every country on the globe.
It was not until I had got the water under (for the water in the dingey had been shipped; the boat was perfectly sound) that I had leisure to look at the people in the launch again.
At the end of this period, however, the gale had freshened into a hurricane, and our after--sail split into ribbons, bringing us so much in the trough of the water that we shipped several prodigious seas, one immediately after the other.
The plan was apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed dead banker.