“You’re right!” answered his cousin. “And the fellow sitting down—I’m almost positive—is Andy. He must be hurt, or he wouldn’t keep sitting like that.”
“Maybe he got his leg hurt, jest like I did,” came mournfully from Ira Small.
At the end of an anxious half hour, the two pieces of wreckage were not over fifty yards apart. Jack and Fred could now see Randy and Andy quite distinctly, and called to them.
“Can’t you swim over?” cried Jack. “[We can’t come to you because Small is hurt.]”
[“WE CAN’T COME TO YOU BECAUSE SMALL IS HURT.”]
“I’m hurt too,” answered Andy. “I got my ankle twisted when I fell out of the motor boat.”
“I’ve got an idea,” called the young major, suddenly. “Maybe I can carry a line over to you, and then we can tie the pieces of wreckage together. We did that to another piece that bumped into us.”
Taking one of the ropes, Jack saw to it that one end was securely fastened to the edge of the wreckage upon which he stood. Then divesting himself of most of his clothing, he leaped into the ocean and began to swim with might and main for the other improvised raft, which was made up of part of a schooner’s stern.
As my old readers know, Jack had always been a good swimmer—in fact, all of the Rover boys could swim well—but he soon discovered that swimming in a river or a lake was an entirely different matter from making headway in the rolling Atlantic. One minute he felt that he was on the top of a high hill and the next that he was going down into a bottomless hollow.