“Too bad.”
Penny was watching the tugboat which had been tied up only a short distance from the bridge.
“Jerry, let’s go down there,” she proposed. “I want to be certain that man is all right.”
The reporter hesitated, then consented. Leaving Louise with the cab driver, he and Penny descended the steep, muddy slope.
The boat had been made fast to a piling. Face downward on the long leather seat of the pilot-house, lay the rescued man. Working over him was the captain, a short, stocky man with grease-smeared hands and clothing saturated with coal dust.
“Anything we can do?” called Jerry from shore.
“Don’t know yet if he’ll need a doctor,” answered the tugboat captain, barely glancing up. “It was a nasty fall.”
Jerry leaped on deck, leaving Penny behind, for the space was too wide to be easily spanned.
Inside the cabin Captain Dubbins was expertly applying artificial resuscitation, but he paused as the man on the seat showed signs of reviving.
“Struck the water flat on his back,” he commented briefly. “Lucky I saw him fall or I never could have fished him out. Not on a night like this.”