"Help! we're wrecked! Come ashore and take us off!" came the call.
"Hang the luck!" remarked George, "what else is going to detain us? Seems to me we've just done nothing but hold out a helping hand ever since we started on this blooming trip."
"But you know the rules of the road, and the law of the cruiser—'do as you'd be done by,'" said Jack, who had changed his course and was heading straight for the shore, where the two men stood up to their knees in water beside their partly submerged motor boat.
"We hit something, and punched a hole in the boat," one of them explained, as Jack and his chums came up.
"And if you'd only give us a lift a few miles we'd be very grateful, and would gladly pay for what it was worth," the other, who looked like a lawyer, hastened to say.
"That's all right, gentlemen," Jack remarked, hospitably. "Climb aboard the big boat. We're only going a short distance, however, to a little place where Van Arsdale Spence is now living."
The two pilgrims who had been wrecked looked at each other in surprise.
"Why," said the shorter one, who seemed to be a man of some authority, perhaps a marshal, or even a sheriff of the county, "that's queer, but we're bound for that same place ourselves, strangers!"