“Yes! Yes! I see him!” cried Tom excitedly, as he looked over the side. “The life-jacket is floating him but he looks half drowned. He can’t strike out to save himself.”
“The fall must have stunned him,” cried Mr. Chadwick; “it’s a good thing he had that life-jacket on!”
Jack began climbing over the side, holding on to the rope that now dangled from the floating air craft.
“What are you going to do?” demanded Tom, who up to this moment had imagined that Jack meant to catch Dick by the grapnel.
“I’m going down after Dick,” was the quiet response as the boy shot down the rope toward the sea beneath. “Keep an eye on that rope, Tom, and haul up when I tell you!”
“Ach! dey vill both be killed!” cried the professor frenziedly. “Dis iss madtness!”
But Jack Chadwick was not a boy who did things without having first figured them out. As he slid down the rope he knew just what he meant to do when he touched the water.
In the meantime Dick’s body, buoyed up by the life-belt he had so luckily neglected to remove, was floating on the surface. About an hundred feet off, the whale and the sword-fish were battling furiously.
In mid-air the Wondership hung suspended, her white-faced, frightened passengers peering over the side, while between the air-buoyed craft and the sea Jack Chadwick’s body swung on the thin rope like a pendulum.