Before long all the crew were ashore. The last man to make the voyage in the breeches buoy was Captain Tom Pratt. He thanked the boys warmly, and he and his wife could not say too much in praise of their bravery and that of the life saving crew.
Hank Handcraft had, by this time, recovered, and had recognized the boys with a wild cry of surprise in which alarm mingled. He begged them piteously not to be hard on him. He had escaped from the western penitentiary in which he had been confined and had made his way east, he said, and then shipped on the Vesper in hopes of beginning a new life in the West Indies.
“We won’t cause you any trouble as long as you behave yourself,” Rob promised him. “But I can’t answer for the captain of the Vesper,” he said, as Tom Pratt approached with thunder in his eye.
“You miserable varmint! You yaller dog!” he exclaimed. “I’ve a notion to throw you back inter the sea, if it wasn’t that even the waves would throw you back again. This feller, boys,” he exclaimed, turning to the life savers, “threw my wife aside and tried to save himself on the life line them brave boys helped us rig up.”
A low, angry growl came from the life savers, and Pratt’s crew advanced threateningly upon Hank. The wretched creature threw himself on his knees and whimpered like a baby as he saw these danger signals.
“Bah! Leave him alone,” said Captain Pratt disgustedly, turning to his wife. “I wouldn’t soil my hands on the critter.”
The boys’ motor-scooter—which caused great wonderment to the life savers and the rescued crew, as may be imagined—did good work in taking the shipwrecked men ashore. A big crowd met them on their first trip, and the cheers that went up for the Boy Scouts were deafening. They reached the ears of Jack Curtiss and his crowd, and of Stonington Hunt. The former broker was as vindictively malicious as the others when he heard that his enemies, as he designated them, had again distinguished themselves.
“I’ll be even with them yet,” he grated out.
“Sneaking into the limelight again,” sniffed Jack, as he and his chums joined the crowd on the water front.
Hank Handcraft was the last to be brought over, but none in the crowd recognized him with his heavy beard and pale, woe-begone face. With a growled-out, grudging word of thanks, he parted from the Boy Scouts and made his way up the village street. But he was not to go altogether unrecognized. Jack Curtiss and Bill Bender, after an incredulous glance, were convinced they had made no mistake in their man, and followed him up.