A gong clanged down in the engine-room, and almost instantly the motion of the screw was stopped. The momentum of the yacht was so great that she was shooting past the dory, when two more strokes of the engine-room gong set the screw to backing furiously. A single stroke stopped it again, and the yacht lay motionless.
“What’s up, and what do you fellows want?” demanded the young man, looking down into the dory from over the canvas side of the bridge.
“We are lost from an American fishing schooner,” replied Breeze, “and we are nearly starved, and we beg that you won’t go off and leave us.”
“Leave you!” exclaimed the warm-hearted young Englishman--for such he was--“leave you here on this beastly coast! Of course we won’t. Come right aboard, both of you. Mr. Marlin, be so good as to have the side-ladder lowered, and get those poor fellows on board.”
A minute later Breeze McCloud, once more rescued, in an almost miraculous manner, from a position of great peril, stood on the deck of the steel steam-yacht Saga, in which her owner was making a summer’s cruise in those far northern latitudes.
Breeze had hardly reached the deck, and was about to speak to this gentleman, who was approaching him, when the gong in the engine-room clanged, and the vessel began once more to move ahead.
Just then came a most distressed cry from the side-ladder, on the lower step of which Nimbus was still standing, holding the painter of the dory in his hand:
“Oh, de amble grease! de amble grease!”
“What does the fellow say?” asked the gentleman, in a perplexed tone, of Breeze.
“Oh, sir, won’t you have the yacht stopped again, before she swamps our dory? It’s full of ambergris,” cried Breeze, who had entirely forgotten the precious cargo of the boat he had just left.