"Hurray!" shouted Jerry, giving his chum a sounding smack on the wet back. "Man the lifeboats! I chucked a rope in the bow of the boat."
Mr. Fulton stood on the bank to mark the line, while the boys pushed the boat out to where Phil had come up, some twenty feet from shore. Jerry slipped over the side, one end of the rope in his hand. He did not remain long below.
Clambering in at the stern, he shouted: "Hoist away—she's hooked!"
And there was the motor, clogged with mud, to be sure, but undamaged. Mr. Fulton stepped into the boat and they rowed quickly back to the "dock." While the two boys put on their clothes over their wet underwear, he hurried back to the workshop to see how things were going. A few minutes later they followed with the motor.
They felt, after this fortunate end of the adventure, that Mr. Fulton ought once more to be his own cheery self, but a look of gloom seemed to have settled down over his face, and his face looked haggard except when he was talking to one of the boys. Jerry finally decided to try to cheer him up.
"Luck was sure breaking our way this morning, wasn't it?" he exclaimed cheerfully as the man came up to where Jerry sat, removing the mud from their prize.
"Fine—fine," agreed Mr. Fulton, but without spirit.
"What's the trouble?" demanded Jerry, sympathetically. "Anything else gone wrong?"
"No—Oh, no."
"You look like the ghost of Mike Clancy's goat. Remember how you always used to be telling Tod and me to grin hardest when we were getting licked worst?"