“Anglais, sans doute!” was his reply. “Je le crois par leur air.”
This made Jacques prick up his ears.
“Comment?” said he; and, without waiting to hear anything else he, too, jumped down into the boat. “Anglais? Mon Dieu!”
Jacques was a man of common-sense; so, instead of contenting himself with staring at the apparently lifeless boys, as Antoine did, he bent down to see whether they yet breathed.
“Bête! Quant aux enfants, ils ne sont pas plus morts que
toi ou moi!” he sang out indignantly. “You fool! The boys are no more dead than you or me.”
But Jacques was a kind-hearted man as well as one possessed of common-sense.
So, under his directions, he and Antoine between them transshipped the apparently lifeless but still animate forms of Bob and Dick from the wrecked cutter into the fo’c’s’le of the lugger, where a charcoal, fire was smouldering in a small stove on which simmered a saucepan containing something savoury, judging by its smell.
Here Jacques proceeded to rub the bodies of the boys alternately with a piece of flannel dipped in spirit, which he first held in front of the stove to warm; Maître Antoine, meanwhile, attending to the navigation of the lugger and guarding lest she should run upon the Casquettes, or get led astray out of her course by Alderney Race, a current of these regions which, like the Saint Malo stream, is not to be played with when the wind’s on shore!