“Who is that?” came unexpectedly from the wreckage, and Jack was delighted to recognize the voice of his cousin Fred.
“It’s I—Jack!” gasped the young major, as he held fast to the wreckage. “Are you all right, Fred?”
“Got a bump on my left shoulder, but it didn’t amount to a great deal,” answered the youngest of the Rover boys. “Are you alone? Where are the others?”
“Yes, I’m alone; and I don’t know where the others are. Have you seen any of them?”
“I saw Gif and Spouter just as we went overboard. But then something struck me in the shoulder, and we became separated in the dark.”
“The others can’t be far off—unless they went down,” went on the young major. And then, not without considerable difficulty, he managed to pull himself up beside his cousin on the wreckage, which formed something of a raft fifteen or twenty feet long and about half as wide.
“If we only had a light,” said Fred, “maybe we could spot some of the others. Oh, Jack, what will we do if they’ve been drowned?” and the tone of his voice showed his misery.
“It’s terrible, Fred. I hate to think about it,” and Jack shuddered. He felt that if his light-hearted cousins and his chums were drowned, life would never be the same.
A quarter of an hour dragged by dismally. The boys could think of nothing they might do to aid the others, and so sat close together, holding fast to the wreckage so that, as it pitched and tossed from the top of one wave to the next, they would not be swept overboard. There were occasional sheets of rain, and the wind blew as strongly as ever, sending the flying spray in all directions.