Judson’s eyes turned and looked into his. “I—I—can’t—swim!” he gasped. Donald nodded. “Don’t get nervous, Jud!” he cried, reassuringly. “I’ll fix you up in a minute if you’ll do as I tell you. Grab that box with both hands and kick your feet out like a frog.”
“Can’t.... Too—heavy—boots!” gasped the other.
“Wait! I’ll slip them off!” And Donald, free of his own, ducked under and hauled the skipper’s heavy leather boots off his legs. Blowing and puffing, he came up. “Now you’re all right,” he said. “Do as I tell you and I’ll get you over to a larger piece of wreckage.”
The skipper nodded and commenced striking out with his feet. Donald, treading water beside him, scanned the sea for wreckage. At last he spied what looked like the main-mast about a hundred feet away. “I see the mast over there,” he said. “You keep paddling, Jud, and I’ll swim over and bring back a line and tow you!” In a few minutes he was back with the gaff-topsail sheet, and hitching this through a ring in the wheel-box cover, he cautioned Judson to hang on. Swimming over to the mast with the line in his teeth, he gained the spar and managed to haul the skipper up to it.
Sitting astride the long pole, Donald caught Nickerson by the shoulders and dragged him over it. Judson was heavy, and he seemed to have no strength in his arms, and McKenzie was pretty well played out by the time he got the skipper on the spar and with his legs astride of it. “Take a breather for a spell, Skipper,” he said. “Just lie quiet. I’ll see that you don’t roll off.” For ten minutes Nickerson lay prone—sick with the salt water he had swallowed—but after a while, the color returned to his face and he looked up.
“I’m all right naow, Don,” he said. “Who was that sweep that hit us? Don’t appear to have stopped ... or launched a boat.”
McKenzie replied with bitterness in his voice, “A dirty Greek. I got her name—Livadia of Piraeus.”
Nickerson nodded. “That’s near Athens,” he observed. “A clumsy, lubberly Greek. He cut his stick for fear of the consequences, but he won’t get away with it. We’ll make him sweat, by Godfrey! Livadia of Piraeus! Humph!”
Pieces of the West Wind floated past them in the smooth sea, and the skipper began identifying them. “There’s a bit of the cabin house. There’s a bait-knife still stuck in the cleat, see? There’s the chain cable box, and there’s a slew o’ pen boards. Some of the boys’ blankets over yonder—Godfrey! my head’s buzzin’ and achin’. Th’ main-mast or the gaff gave me a devil of a wipe when it came down an’ knocked me overboard!”