“That’s so,” agreed the Captain, smiling shrewdly. “It’s an awful embarrassing thing, this being a hero, Miss Polly. I’ve had to go through it several times, more or less, whenever I happened to haul some landlubber out of deep water, and I can sympathize with you.”
“Just the same, Captain, you’ll never know how glad I was to see that life-boat round the Point. The tide was setting me at my wits’ end, and I never would have got the Tidy Jane back by myself.”
“She’s powerful skittish once she gets the smell of the open sea,” the Captain remarked.
“Yes, and they helped me get the salt water out of Crullers too,” added Polly. “I’ll bet a cooky she won’t like salt for a year, after that one good taste of it.”
Crullers laughed feebly. But the other girls could not make light of the affair. It had seemed altogether too serious and tragic, when they had watched those two frail, white-winged little boats drifting straight in the face of danger, and then Crullers’ frantic leap into the sea, and the coming of the life-boat around the Point. It all savored too much of real tragedy, Kate and Ruth said, and it ought to teach them a good lesson.
The life savers had picked up Crullers’ boat midway down the channel, and had towed the Tidy Jane in under bare poles. Polly and Crullers had been taken up to the Station, Crullers, dripping and half unconscious, carried in the arms of the Captain, while Polly walked along the narrow boardwalk behind them, and the rest of crew followed, five men altogether. At the Station, Crullers had a personal experience with “first aid” methods, for she had not kept her mouth closed when she had gone under, and as the Captain said she had “shipped a sea.”
The other girls returned to Lost Island in their boats, as soon as possible, and prepared Aunty Welcome; then walked back on the shore road to meet the Captain when he came along carrying Crullers wrapped up like a papoose in a real, United States Life Saving Corps blanket.
That night Mrs. Carey had come over to the island cottage to make sure that Crullers was doing well. Aunty Welcome had dosed her with hot ginger tea, which as Polly said was punishment enough in itself with a July thermometer climbing toward the nineties. She had also had a warm mustard bath, and lay wrapped in a blanket on a couch in the living-room. The Captain sat on a camp stool, and whittled away at a new pintle bolt for Crullers’ rudder. He said nothing all the time the girls told of the day’s adventures to Mrs. Carey, not even when Polly said she was glad the life boat had come after them, but he nodded his head slowly.
“Aren’t you going to scold us any?” asked Polly, finally. “We should have started for home sooner, and maybe we didn’t manage the yachts just right. It was a queer wind that came with the tide. It blew from the southwest—”
“West by sou’west,” corrected the Captain gravely.