Sam and Nicky hailed. An answer came, “Jim, here, was knocked overside when he tried to scramble onto our ship. Help us get him to shore. His head hit the coral, we think! They sank the rowboat.”
They pulled close and with some difficulty the inert colored man was lifted over the gunwale and dropped into the tender’s bottom. Then Mr. Coleson, with a smarting flesh wound in his arm, and Ortiga, who was too busy expressing an unfavorable opinion of his renegade brother to examine his hurts, seemed to have escaped with a scratched hand.
They began to row toward the island but Nicky made a suggestion.
“Let’s pull for the wrecked Senorita,” he urged. “There’s most likely to be a medicine kit on board her, and food as well.”
It took quite a while to get back down the shore line to the point almost opposite the Shark River where the Senorita had grounded; but when they got there Nicky’s prophecy proved to be correct and Senor Ortiga, when the surgical and medicinal appliances were brought, made an examination of Jim, and then dressed a rather bad scalp wound, bringing its edges together with surgical thread after washing it with antiseptics.
Jim came to himself before the bandaging was completed. Though weak and a little bit uncertain in speech, he was in no way permanently injured in his brain. Rest would restore his usual vigor and help nature to heal his hurt.
Weary and discouraged, because there was nothing to be done toward the recovery of their lost treasure, the chums, after a midnight meal, threw themselves onto bunks in the engine room, preferring these to more comfortable wall berths with the two white men who had done them so mean a turn.
Sam elected to stay with his own companions, and Jim was put in the forecastle to be alone while he rested.
“I certainly am grateful to you for saving us, just now,” said Mr. Coleson as they separated for the night.
“After the way he acted, he ought to be,” Nicky confided to his comrades, when they were alone.