“Sure enough,” said Teddy. “I wonder who he is.”
14“I’ve seen that fellow somewhere,” affirmed Lester, “but for the life of me I can’t tell where. But that can wait till another time. What we want to do now is to get to work. He can’t have swallowed much water in the little time he was under. Get him down on his back with his head low. Tear his shirt open at the throat. Work his arms slowly up and down. Here, Bill, you take one arm and Teddy the other. You’ll have to do it without much help from Fred and me, for we’ll have all we can do to get this boat to shore. The wind’s getting stronger every minute and we simply must reach land before dark.”
He resumed the tiller, while Fred again took the sheet, and they swung the boat around to its original course.
“I’d like to save the motor boat if we could,” remarked Lester, as they swung around. “It looks as though it had cost a heap of money. But just now it’s a question of life rather than money, and we’ll have to let it go.”
“It does seem a pity,” agreed Fred, as he glanced at the boat tossing about helplessly, now wallowing in the trough and again rising to the crest of a wave. “But perhaps it may keep afloat till the storm is over. We’ll cruise around and look for it to-morrow or next day.”
Bill and Teddy were working vigorously, applying all their knowledge of “first aid” to their unconscious 15 passenger. For several minutes their work seemed to be without result, but at last they heaved sighs of relief as they saw a beating at the temples and a fluttering of the eyelids. A moment later the stranger opened his eyes and looked vaguely around him. He tried to speak, but no words came.
“Don’t talk just now,” Teddy admonished him. “You’ve been in a tight pinch, but you’re all right. Just relax and go to sleep if you want to. We’re on the job and we’ll take care of you.”
The eyes closed again, and the boys, seeing that the danger was past, stopped their “pump-handle work,” as Teddy called it, and set about making the stranger’s position more comfortable. They made a rough bed for him with some blankets that they dragged from the tiny cabin and put a coat beneath his head for a pillow.
“The longer he stays asleep, the better it will be for him,” commented Bill.
“It’s lucky for him it isn’t his last sleep,” said Teddy. “It would have been that, if it hadn’t been for that brother of mine,” he added with a touch of pride.