"All right, Jimmy," echoed the skipper, calmly; "I glimpsed him before you did, I reckon. Steady yourself now, and try not to make a foozle of it, old man. There you are. Jimmy; get him!"
And Jimmy did the same, catching the coat of the man in the water with his boathook, and holding on tenaciously. Jack, meanwhile, turned his engine backward, so that the momentum of the boat was promptly checked.
The man had been clinging to the rapidly sinking wreckage. In another half minute, no doubt, he would have been left without any support; and as he did not seem able to swim a stroke, his end must have speedily come.
Jimmy drew in with the haft of the boat-hook, until he could stretch down and seize upon the collar of the man's coat. As the Irish lad was brawny and nerved just then to mighty deeds, he managed to hoist the fellow into the little motor boat.
The unlucky man was white, and pretty nearly drowned. He had just had enough sense to cling desperately to the wreck of his boat, and then allow Jimmy to do the rescue act.
"Did you get hurt when that tug struck your boat?" asked Jack, for that was what he feared.
The man was blinking at him, for his eyes had taken in more or less of the brackish water of the river; but he shook his head in the negative. This relieved Jack more than a little. Like Josh, he had been hoping that in the very beginning of their new cruise a wet blanket might not be cast over the spirits of the party by their witnessing the drowning of a poor chap.
"Here comes the tug down after us," remarked Jimmy. "I suppose the omadhauns 'll be expressing their regrets for the accident. Sure, it was criminal carelessness, if ever there was a case. And ye'll be silly, sor, if so be ye don't make 'em pay for the boat they smashed."
By degrees the man seemed to come out of the half stupor into which his sudden immersion in the waters of the river had thrown him.
"They just got to," he grumbled, shaking his head; "for 'twas a borrowed boat, an' I can't pay for a new one."