WELL, I catched my breath and most fainted.  Shut up on a wreck with such a gang as that!  But it warn't no time to be sentimentering.  We'd _got_ to find that boat now—had to have it for ourselves.  So we went a-quaking and shaking down the stabboard side, and slow work it was, too—seemed a week before we got to the stern.  No sign of a boat.  Jim said he didn't believe he could go any further—so scared he hadn't hardly any strength left, he said.  But I said, come on, if we get left on this wreck we are in a fix, sure.  So on we prowled again.  We struck for the stern of the texas, and found it, and then scrabbled along forwards on the skylight, hanging on from shutter to shutter, for the edge of the skylight was in the water.  When we got pretty close to the cross-hall door there was the skiff, sure enough!  I could just barely see her.  I felt ever so thankful.  In another second I would a been aboard of her, but just then the door opened.  One of the men stuck his head out only about a couple of foot from me, and I thought I was gone; but he jerked it in again, and says:

"Heave that blame lantern out o' sight, Bill!"

He flung a bag of something into the boat, and then got in himself and set down.  It was Packard.  Then Bill _he_ come out and got in.  Packard says, in a low voice:

"All ready—shove off!"

I couldn't hardly hang on to the shutters, I was so weak.  But Bill says:

"Hold on—'d you go through him?"

"No.  Didn't you?"

"No.  So he's got his share o' the cash yet."

"Well, then, come along; no use to take truck and leave money."

"Say, won't he suspicion what we're up to?"

"Maybe he won't.  But we got to have it anyway. Come along."

So they got out and went in.

The door slammed to because it was on the careened side; and in a half second I was in the boat, and Jim come tumbling after me.  I out with my knife and cut the rope, and away we went!

We didn't touch an oar, and we didn't speak nor whisper, nor hardly even breathe.  We went gliding swift along, dead silent, past the tip of the paddle-box, and past the stern; then in a second or two more we was a hundred yards below the wreck, and the darkness soaked her up, every last sign of her, and we was safe, and knowed it.