"He is alive; your master isn't dead!" she exclaimed to the hitherto apathetic Mahmed.
The announcement had an electrical effect upon the Indian boy. Peter dead was nothing to him; Peter living was his master for whom he had undoubted affection and devotion.
He began chafing Mostyn's hands, while Olive, now deadly tired, doggedly continued her efforts.
Mostyn's heart was now beating. His nostrils were quivering. He was breathing faintly, but with steadily increasing strength. Though partially choked by the water he had involuntarily swallowed when carried down by the ship, he had been saved from suffocation by his lifebelt, which kept his head clear of the water after he had regained the surface.
Restoring the circulation was the next step. Fortunately both the water and air were warm, and the dangerous consequences of a prolonged immersion were mitigated. Had the disaster occurred in other than tropical waters, the comparatively low temperature would have been fatal.
At length Peter opened his eyes. He was quite at a loss to grasp the situation. The lamplight puzzled him. At first he was under the impression that he was in his bunk, and that either Watcher Partridge or Watcher Plover had roused him to take in a signal. Somehow that didn't seem correct. Awkwardly he fumbled for the edge of the bunk board. Instead, his fingers encountered the stern-grating. Then his attention was wonderingly attracted by one of the knees of the after thwart. It had been split, and the sight of it irritated him, although he didn't know why, exactly.
He was beginning to realize that he was in a boat. How he got there, and why he should be in it, was a perplexity. It might be the Old Man's motor-launch—but no! Something was wrong somewhere.
A dozen fantastic theories flashed across his mind, only to be dismissed so unsatisfactorily that the failure made him angry. One thing he was certain of. Miss Baird was with him, but what she was doing there was a baffling problem. He wanted to speak to her, but hesitated lest that certainty should turn out to be an unreality.
He was still cudgelling his brain when he fell into a fitful and uneasy sleep.
The short tropical dawn was breaking when Peter awoke. He was now fully conscious of the events leading up to the foundering of the West Barbican, but was still at a loss to account for his presence in the boat. Stranger still it was to find that he had not been labouring under a hallucination with regard to Olive Baird.