He made, therefore, direct for the shore, and in a few minutes he was standing on a strip of sand, with the retiring tide plashing gratefully on his ear, while his eyes were fixed on the tapering spars of ‘The Bashful Maid,’ and the light glimmering in her foretop. He stepped back a few paces to lay his arms and some of his garments behind a rock, a little above high-water mark. There was small chance he would ever find them again, but he belonged to a profession of which the science is essentially precautionary, and the habit of foresight was a second nature to Slap-Jack. In a few more seconds he was up to his knees, his middle, his breast-bone, in the cooling waters, till a receding wave lifted him off his feet, and he struck out boldly for the brigantine. How delightful to his heated skin was the contact of the pure, fresh, buoyant element! Notwithstanding his fatigue, his hurry, his anxiety, he could have shouted aloud in joy and triumph, as he felt himself wafted on those long, regular, and powerful strokes nearer and nearer to his object. It was the exultation of human strength and skill and daring, dominant over nature, unassisted by mechanical art. Yet was there one frightful drawback, a contingency which had been present to his mind from the very beginning, even while he was beating laboriously through the jungle, but which he had never permitted himself to realise, and on which it would now be maddening to dwell: Port Welcome was infested with sharks! He forced himself to ignore the danger, and swam gallantly on, till the wash and ripple of the tide upon the shore was far behind him, and he heard only his own deep measured breathing, and the monotonous plash of those springing, regulated strokes that drove him steadily out to sea. He was already tired, and had turned on his back more than once for relief, ere the hull of the brigantine rose black and steep out of the water half a cable’s length ahead. He counted that after fifty more strokes he would summon breath to hail the watch on deck. He had scarce completed them ere a chill went curdling through his veins from head to heel, and if ever Slap-Jack lost heart it was then. The water surged beneath him, and lifted his whole body, like a wave, though the surrounding surface was smooth as a mill-pond. One desperate kick, that shot him two fathoms at a stroke, and his passing foot grazed some slimy, scaly substance, while from the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse the moment after of the back-fin of a shark. Then he hailed in good earnest, swimming his wickedest the while, and ere the voracious sea-scourge, or its consort, could turn over for a leisurely snap at him, Slap-Jack was safe in the bight of a rope, and the anchor-watch, not a little astonished, were hauling their exhausted shipmate over the side.