Rescued.
“Boat ahoy!”
The two boys might have been asleep for hours only, or insensible for days, they never knew for certain which, and nobody else could inform them; but that shout ringing in their ears awoke them, with a thrill of agony that it might be merely a dream of their disordered imagination.
One look, however, satisfied them to the contrary, when they painfully raised themselves into a sitting posture in the bottom of the boat—which they could hardly do by reason of their weakness—holding on to the gunwales on either side as they dragged up their attenuated bodies, and directing their sunken eyes, which rolled with incipient delirium, to the point from whence the hail came.
They could have screamed for joy, but their voices failed them, and their emotion found relief in tears and stifling sobs.
A large ship lay to about a hundred yards off; and a boat, which had evidently just been lowered from its side, was being pulled rapidly towards them.
As soon as the boat came alongside, the men in her, who appeared to be foreigners, looked at the boys with the deepest pity, and spoke to each other rapidly in some guttural language, which Jonathan had a hazy idea was German, as if expressing sympathy with their emaciated condition.
One of them whom they took to be an officer, from the gold band on his cap and the tone of authority in his voice, stepped into their boat, and appeared to have the intention of lifting them out of it into the other; but all at once he seemed to notice the name of the Eric Strauss, and stopped short, with an expression of surprised astonishment on his face.
“Wunderbar!” he exclaimed, pointing out the name to his companions, who also looked eagerly at it; and then, while he remained with the boys in the cutter, the painter of the latter was attached to the other boat, which towed it alongside the ship; and, after that David and Jonathan remembered no more, as they both fainted as they were being tenderly hoisted on board.
Jonathan was the first to come to himself.